By Johnny Ray Huston

FRANK PERRY'S résumé as a director has been overshadowed by one mean mother of a movie. When Columbia Pictures released Mommie Dearest in 1981, the company's publicity campaign stripped off its solemn straitjacket after an uproarious opening weekend: "Tina, bring me the axe!" one ad proclaimed. If the film's subject matter foretold its camp destiny, Faye Dunaway's fearsomely rigid and ludicrously serious portrayal of Joan Crawford – who, whatever her parenting flaws, possessed a ribald sense of humor – cemented it in pancake makeup. Mommie's monstrous reversal of the mother-daughter melodrama codes in Crawford films deserves reappraisal. The movie's cult status wouldn't rise by the year if it didn't contain scenarios that leave an instant imprint on one's mind. Take the famous scene in which Joan challenges pint-size daughter Christina (Mara Hobel, where art thou?) to a few freestyle bouts of the swimming variety, emerging victorious to declare, "I'm bigger than you, I'm stronger than you, and I will always beat you!"

She wasn't kidding: the beatdowns, as disturbing as they're funny, continue to draw loud crowds at midnight screenings, as Peaches Christ can attest. And Mommie Dearest wasn't Perry's first dip with a self-deceiving youth-springs-eternal character into a symbol of shallow Americana. His finest work, 1968's The Swimmer, tracks Ned Merill (Burt Lancaster) on a daylong odyssey across the hissing summer lawns and chlorinated pools of a Connecticut hamlet. The very loopiness of Merrill's scheme hints at his mental state, although Perry, gradually revealing this antihero's derangement, is no more sympathetic to the suburban haves and have-nots who judge him. Ahead of its time, The Swimmer's grotesquerie is far more disturbing than the Spacey ironies and ice storms that have followed in its wet footsteps. (In a vain studio attempt to make the film less alienating, Sydney Pollack was hired to shoot a romantic sequence with an actress and Films and Filming reader played by Janice Rule, who went on to express her angst by painting empty pools in 3 Women).

Whenever Merrill lopes outside of society, Perry focus-pulls his protagonist out of the "precious moments" idyll and back into a nightmare; Lancaster's larger-than-life lead performance, a Perry trademark, defines the film. Writing about Visconti's The Leopard, Pauline Kael raved about Lancaster's "distinctively physical" presence; though she probably wasn't enthusiastic about The Swimmer, it counts as the nakedest (in all senses) showcase of the great actor's courage for courting ridicule. He wears the same pair of swim trunks from start to finish because the real striptease is an ugly psychological one that renders his handsomeness pathetic, his masculinity mad. High on his own virility and trapped in the fast La Lanne, Merrill doesn't see that gravity is exerting a force no number of chest presses can counteract. He starts out hoping to conquer the "Lucinda River" (a reference to his never-seen wife) but winds up trying and failing to seduce forever-old Joan Rivers instead.

The other Joan's spruce-splitting war cry of "Tina!" in Mommie Dearest loudly echoes that of Park Avenue aspirant Jonathan Balser (Richard Benjamin) in Perry's 1970 Diary of a Mad Housewife, though his whiny tone is demanding rather than commanding. Benjamin's many unsexy requests for a "roll in the hay" with wife Tina (Carrie Snodgress) prove there's indeed an art to caricature – a lesson Dunaway drove home with some wire hangers and an axe a decade later. Isolated within the same Park Avenue environs that Lancaster's swimmer is exiled from, Diary's unhappy heroine leaps from one spotless sterile high-rise mess into another: the bed of a vampiric writer (a pre-Dracula remake Frank Langella, nattily attired) whom she meets at a faux-Warhol party where the Alice Cooper Band substitutes for the Velvet Underground.

Literary adaptation is a Perry specialty, thanks to his wife and frequent screenwriter, Eleanor. One of Diary's social climbers refers to Le Côte Basque, the meeting place infamously satirized by Truman Capote, three of whose short stories the director filmed for television. The Swimmer expands on a John Cheever tale, and 1972's Play It as It Lays (coproduced by Domminick Dunne!) takes on the futile task of breathing life into the skeleton-dry prose of Joan Didion's existentially doubting yet oh-so-self-important novel, managing some signpost visions of Los Angeles disconnect in the process. Throughout the '60s and '70s, the director was either mocked (by Manny Farber, and by Kael, who, reviewing Play It as It Lays, admits she "whooped" at Didion's book) or ignored in favor of the era's raging bulls and blockbuster kids. But 1975's Rancho Deluxe proves he had a lighter touch than Altman for the revisionist western – and that one should never underestimate the insight of Slim Pickens.

If one travels through the wires that connect Perry's movies, an auteurist vision – however wildly erratic – becomes clear. A Park Avenue apartment doubles as a lunatic asylum in Diary, and a Hollywood mansion performs a similar duty in Mommie Dearest, while Perry's career began and ended with direct ventures into medical buildings. He received a Best Director Oscar nomination for his 1962 debut feature, David and Lisa, a cloying proto-indie look at mentally disturbed teens that features Dali-like clock symbolism. (From the get-go Perry encouraged outsize emoting: Farber used the tantrums of gone-tomorrow Keir Dullea – so stoic in 2001 but chalk-faced and shrill here – as a case study in one of his essays about the decline of film acting.) Perry's final movie, 1992's On the Bridge, is a documentary about his battle with cancer, which he knew would be fatal. Decked out in a pair of shades Robert Evans might covet, the director stares down the exact subject – death – his most infamous dramatic characters try to avoid.

'Outside of the Inside: Films by Frank Perry' runs Fridays through July 30 (Fri/2: Diary of a Mad Housewife, 7 p.m., and David and Lisa, 8:45 p.m.), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Screening Room, 701 Mission, S.F. $4-$7. (415) 978-2787.