James Broughton’s first film (1948).

“Broughton’s mother-complex comes out in subtle ways in this experimental short homage to mothers who want everything to be lovely and proper. People and objects here are interchangeable, representing their eternal nature, and his father (who died early) is only a stern but friendly and lively face in a picture frame. His mother picked him out of scores of suitors you see, all bearing gifts but arriving empty handed. The rest of the short consists of grown adults posing as children, playing various strange games, some sexually suggestive and curious, with mother(s) standing sternly willing them to be lovely ladies and gentlemen. Because, you see, eternal and interchangeable hats and rituals are important…” — Zev Toledano, TheLastExit.net

“Accepting the potentialities of the medium to manipulate both time and space, Broughton brings past and present head-on as he regards with adult feelings his childhood family and friends. Grown-ups romp like children, and by their magnified infantilism playfully underscore such basic traits as sadism, sensuality, arid egocentricity. —Melbourne International Film Festival

“Mother’s Day opens with a typically startling image, a send-up of the Pieta with a hapless man being cradled by a statue, one of a multiplicity of strange “mothers” in the film. Broughton’s playful attitude toward maturity and adulthood is evident immediately — this anti-tribute to Mother envisions Father as mostly a face in a frame, staring dourly; and the children as childlike adults, mindlessly playing hopscotch, shooting squirt guns, and fascinated by a spinning mandolin. The film uses titles in a mocking manner redolent of silent movies: ‘Mother was the loveliest woman in the world. And Mother wanted everything to be lovely.’  Mother’s Day has jarring undertones in its bizarre images of ruined buildings and inscrutable characters, but Broughton would take its motif of the child-man (and child-woman) and expand it to rhapsodic effect in his later work.” — Gary Morris, in Bright Lights Film Journal.