Her natural ambition was to become a dancer, and her first paying jobs were as a chorine in traveling revues in the early 1920s. She eventually wound up as a chorus girl on Broadway, but wanted something more. She approached Loews Theater publicist Nils Granlund asking for additional work. It was Granlund who got her a screen test with MGM.
By 1925, Crawford was a bit player, body double for Norma Shearer, and featured dancer in unbilled roles. Quickly growing frustrated with the lack of opportunities, Crawford took her first swing at the very thing that makes her an enduring icon: aggressive self-promotion and finessing a star persona. Well, her first star persona, anyway. She would change with the times going from sexually available flapper in 1928’s Our Dancing Daughters to shop girl’s delight in the Depression era to suffering glamorously in 1940s and so it goes until her eventual ignoble descent into grand dame horror schlock.
Crawford’s towering ambition makes her uniquely American in a way. She demands and essentially creates her own success through sheer force of willpower. After all, lots of starlets who had initial success in the silent years flamed out with the advent of sound, but not Crawford. She admitted to recording, playing back, and practicing her speaking voice to smooth out the working class accent for an elegant diction.
In a career that spanned from the silent years to the dawning of the New Hollywood period, Crawford worked with some of the best stars and directors in each period. From her earliest starring roles alongside Lon Chaney and Clark Gable to being directed by George Cukor and Steven Spielberg, she had a part in establishing acting for the movie camera and refining the practice. Ever the studio player, she managed to survive being labeled box office poison and mount a comeback that essentially kept her leading lady status until her voluntary retirement from the public eye in the early 1970s.
Yet the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the words “Joan Crawford” are probably Mommie Dearest and the sight of Faye Dunaway in a near Kabuki mask of cold cream screaming, “No wire hangers – EVER!” This is a cheapening of her cinematic legacy, essentially giving the story over to a monument to camp and entombing the star and her body of work to an asterisk next to an enduring caricature. Whether or not the events detailed in Mommie Dearest actually happened I cannot say and I would not dream of trying to make a claim either way. For every corroborating story from a peer about the trauma and abuse unleashed on the two oldest adopted children there is another that refutes the claims and paints Christina Crawford as an ungrateful brat who purposefully damaged her adoptive mother’s legacy. We will never know the truth of that matter.
But the films and acting style of Crawford still endure and are worth a visit. These ten films spread across two DVD box sets are as good an entry point as any. But films not included like Johnny Guitar, Autumn Leaves, Sudden Fear, Rain, and Harriet Craig are also worth visiting at some point. While she may not be the main attraction in them, films like Grand Hotel (she’s very good in a large ensemble) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Bette Davis wipes everyone else away, really) are practically mandatory viewing experiences. So what ten films am I about to explore? Keep reading to find out.
We begin with Hollywood’s Golden Year (1939) and the lone ensemble film, The Women. A star-studded adaptation of the Clare Boothe Luce play released in a year filled with now beloved classics (The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Ninotchka, Midnight, Stagecoach, just to name a few), The Women easily holds its own within the canon. Acerbic, chic, witty, cosmopolitan, and filled with some of the best, brightest actresses of this generation, The Women is a classic.
It is in the ways that The Women juggles not only its massive cast of characters but various forms of comedy that mark it as something special. Any given scene will mix verbal wit with a pratfall delivered by the likes of Norma Shearer, Paulette Goddard, Rosalind Russell, or Crawford. And these cinematic institutions give it their all under the guiding hand of George Cukor, one of the best directors of actors in his generation. The sheer amount of notable and memorable performances he coaxes out in one film is head-spinning.
As this film was made in the 30s, Crawford is in her shop girl mode, but this one has gold digging ambitions and the lack of scruples to use her sexuality to secure it. While she is ostensibly the antagonist of the piece, Crawford’s Crystal nearly becomes pitiable by the end. The emotional violence these dames commit against the social climbing lesser takes on a meta-textural quality.
In real life, Norma Shearer, the star and grand dame of the lot, got first choice of the best, most prestigious roles. This was a fact that continually upset Crawford who wanted more chances to prove and test her abilities as an actress. Here, that dynamic is harnessed as Shearer plays the wife left for the mistress (Crawford), and their cat fights filled with subtle digs and eviscerating reads are given an extra edge with this background knowledge. Essentially, Crawford’s ambitions needs to be humbled and Shearer needs to drop the good girl act and learn to fight.
Swirling around these two are gossipy Sylvia (Rosalind Russell, going big and broad but maintaining a core truth), wide-eyed Peggy (Joan Fontaine, before partnering with Alfred Hitchcock and properly learning to act), and clever Miriam (Paulette Goddard, sly and tough). Russell steals scenes with her mile-a-minute bitchy repartee and flailing her long limbs, especially in a breakdown at a Reno ranch that leads to an altercation with Goddard. These gossips hurl their chatter like a never ending tennis match, just volleying off each other in passive aggressive sentiments and dagger-like insults.
We only pause long enough for a Technicolor fashion show segment with couture designed by Adrian that lets his freak flag fly. It starts off with your typical outdoorsy, everyday wear and gets increasingly unhinged as the nightclub outfits and metropolitan high society designs feature elaborate hats, ornate baubles, and moody colors. Does this sequence belong in the film, though? I have always found it an odd detour and think it would have been better without it. Your mileage may vary.
It distracts from the jungle logic of these penthouse big cats. But it all steers itself right and remembers that we came to this film for the ladies unleashing witticisms against and about each other. There is a pleasure in watching people behaving badly, and The Women knows it. Everything culminates with Crawford getting kicked out, Shearer returning to her lofty perch in the pecking order, and one hell of a kiss off line. Dropping the piss elegant elocution lessons, Crawford’s natural Texas twang comes out and she smirks, “There's a name for you ladies, but it isn't used in high society... outside of a kennel.” Crawford may have been knocked down, but her triumphant smile lets us know that Crystal will land on her feet. All cats do.
Shearer may run off to the unseen welcoming arms of her husband, returned from his discretion and seeking forgiveness, but it is the scrappier ladies who charm me the most. Russell’s backstabbing gossip, Goddard’s tough-talking dame, and Crawford’s concentrated bitchiness. These are the women that I return to this movie for over and over again.
Throughout the early 1940s, Crawford did solid work at MGM. Ever the trooper, she did the assignments that they gave her and rarely complained. A Bette Davis or Olivia de Havilland suing the studio boss or camping in their office to advocate for parts that they wanted she was not. But Crawford was shrewd enough to realize that the likes of Greer Garson meant that she would never get the chance at the prestige roles/films she lusted after. (Losing Madame Curie to Garson was a sore spot for Crawford.)
By the time her diminishing prospects culminated in Above Suspicion, the final film she made at MGM before finally leaving, an embarrassing spy thriller with Fred MacMurray. By 1943, Crawford and MGM mutually agreed to terminate her contract, and she left the studio she called home for 18 years. Eventually, she managed to sign with Warner Brothers and made a quick cameo in 1944’s Hollywood Canteen, a morale booster featuring all of the big stars at the studio.
But Crawford was careful in picking her first film at her new studio. In fact, she was largely away from the screen between 1943 and 1945. Then came the adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel, Mildred Pierce. She was not the first choice for the part. Director Michael Curtiz wanted Barbara Stanwyck and demanded that Crawford take a screen test. He viewed her as a has been who lacked the skills for the part. In a demonstration of her belief that she was right for the part and a remarkable lack of ego, Crawford submitted to the screen test.
The film does James M. Cain’s novel one better by dropping some of its weirder diversions (Veda becoming a coloratura soprano, a few of the no good men, a remarriage) and honing in on the working class struggles and the mother/daughter story. In fact, Michael Curtiz combines the women’s picture melodrama with Warner Bros.’s tough noirs to make something truly unique. What Curtiz was even smarter to retain from the novel is Cain’s sense of detail and interior complexity. We very much grow to understand and empathize with Mildred.
The initial gambit – opening with the murder of professional loaf Monte (Zachary Scott) – positions the film as another of the studio’s tough crime films with Crawford as the femme fatale. Except when we meet her she is on the verge of tears, walking like a somnambulist towards the peer and contemplating suicide. Is this the typical female role in a film noir? Hardly. As much as I love that genre, it does tend to boil women down into sexually carnivorous mystique or repressed competency. So, who is this woman and why is she in such a fugue state?
That is the actual tale that Mildred Pierce is interested in telling. We witness the entire film as a confessional from Mildred as she talks to the police about the dead body in her house and how it got there. What we witness is the kind of American fable (hard work leading to reward) and shrewd acumen that would be celebrated if the lead was a male, yet Mildred is also a victim of the casual sexism and predatory men orbiting her. Not only sexually, but the men who see her as a prime financial opportunity without the social cache to protect herself.
What is driving this iron-willed drive to succeed and provide? Her monstrous daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth). A true bad seed, Veda has the appetites and haughty ideals of a person born far above her station in life, and she will manipulate and use anyone she pleases and refuses to settle for anything less. Blyth’s doll-like face masks the bottomless pit of gluttony and desire lurking underneath. Mildred tortures herself to ensure that Veda’s every want and whim is catered to and cared for no matter how much it depletes her own soul and morality. Eve Arden’s sardonic sidekick Ida has the mark on Veda: “Personally, Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.”
By the time that Mildred and Veda have their face off we almost demand that Crawford deliver one of her grandiose cinematic slaps. When it comes, it feels like a rush of relief. Mildred is finally seeing what we have long assessed but she was too willfully blind to recognize about this nasty little brat. Veda deserves a reckoning of sorts but we will have to wait until the final act for it to come around.
Still, Mildred Pierce is just as a great as a parable of the quotidian and the glitterati. Monte’s glamorous loaf is all smoke and mirrors, a trust-fund kid living off of a depleting family name and shrinking resources. He preys on Mildred’s newfound financial success and acts as a vampire to her not only financially but romantically. It makes sense that eventually he and Veda would get together romantically. It is a matched made in hell as the pretentious spawn and the patriarchal class come together to try and steal the spoils of Mildred’s hard fought success. It is the working class versus the bourgeoisie, and those that would aspire to their affluent uselessness.
Crawford grabbed this chance at reinvention by the horns and came out on top, not only as a star but as an actress. It was from here that Crawford launched into a series of highly entertaining melodramas that cemented her legend. We will talk about several of them shortly. She has said about both this role and the Oscar she won for it: “I loved being called a star, and even more being a star. But it was nice with Mildred Pierce to finally be certified as an actress.”
In hindsight, it makes sense that this was the part that finally got Crawford that longed for Oscar and respectability. Typically, I am team Gene Tierney and her chilly villainous part in the vibrantly colored noir, Leave Her to Heaven, when it comes to the nominees that year, but every time I watch Mildred Pierce I cannot argue against it. Each closeup of Crawford is a monument to the art of screen acting here from one of the players who helped build the framework throughout her career.
Before her character’s masochistic alcoholism infiltrates the narrative, Humoresque follows a lower working class Paul Boray (Robert Blake as a child, Garfield as an adult) learning the violin and becoming a potentially great and famous classical musician. Eventually, he winds up meeting neurotic society grand dame Helen (Crawford), becomes her boy toy, and must chose between either his gilded cage or his art. Orbiting these two is Oscar Levant’s Sid, Paul’s best friend and piano man, who seems to exist in a different movie from the two leads.
Garfield and Crawford are a compare and contrast in acting styles. Garfield was an early adopter of the Method technique, and he tries to anchor the film in a sense of lived-in experience and realism. There is only great love in this man’s life, and it is his art and dreams of a major career. His strains for realism counterbalance Crawford’s movie star choices, and make them a dynamic screen pairing. Shame it never happened again during their tenure at the same studio.
But we come to Humoresque for Crawford, after all she dominates the home video art and the advertising from its original release. The film smartly makes us wait and pays off our patience with a POW! of an entrance. Surrounded by male admirers, she pulls out a cigarette and picks from a variety of lit matches that enter the frame to light it. That is an introduction worthy of a true movie star and tells us so much about this woman in quick succession.
Her doomed proprietress spends much of her screen time chain-smoking, drinking, and staring back from her privileged perk with an air of resignation. This is an unwell woman, perhaps one in the thralls of a major depressive episode. Much of the film offers Crawford the chance to emote in closeup, and her lifelong love affair with the camera, a voracious appetite that could never be satiated, is palpable. During one performance as she watches her beloved’s playing, she practically gives a handjob to her program while her face is simmering with barely contained carnal need.
Yet all of this velvety masochism is merely a prelude to the climatic death march into the sea. Rejected and heartbroken, Crawford’s insular and cool performance finally comes undone, but not without a certain strain of camp at the same time. In full glamour makeup and wearing a sparkly gown, she walks into the sea, crystalline tears upon her face as Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde blasts as the soundtrack. At once silly and weepy while being awe-inspiring for the sheer chutzpah it takes to not only film this but sell it, Humoresque reveals itself as a major jewel in Crawford and Garfield’s filmographies.
Sure, it is a little too long at slightly over two hours and jammed to the rafters with classical pieces (about 25 in all), this kind of overindulgent cinema is nearly narcotic in its power. Ridiculous, absorbing, wonderfully acted, and powered by an astoundingly gorgeous soundtrack, Humoresque remains worth the effort. Yes, even if you only want to watch it for Crawford’s suicidal slow walk. Maybe even especially for that. When PopMatters compiled a list of noteworthy female film performances in 2009, this was the role that they highlighted for Crawford and not the more conventional likes of Mildred Pierce is a testament to her work here. (Worth noting: Bette Davis once said that there were two parts that Crawford got that she wanted to play, this and A Woman’s Face. I’m not sure she would have worked in the former but definitely could have excelled in the latter.)
Crawford plays a nurse who marries the wealthy widower (Raymond Massey) while dealing with a toxic situationship (Van Heflin) from her past. Through it all, Crawford’s Louise is struggling with a tenuous connection to reality, a deep emotional neediness, and all-consuming passions. This woman is unwell before Heflin’s David drives her right off the edge with his capriciousness, wayward affections, and uncaring drunkenness. These two are a match made in Hell.
Sure, there are times when Crawford goes for the easy visual trick (rubbing her temple, bugging her eyes out) to symbolize the mental imbalance tormenting her, but then there are the unique choices she makes throughout. These choices counterbalance then quickly dominate the cheap shorthand. After spending time in a mental institution to study behaviors, Crawford emerges with an animal-like terror. Her eyes are wide but there is a vacancy, an inward glance as though everything else were mere projection and hallucination.
While Crawford flagellates herself into emotional desperation and hysterical contortions, Heflin acts as one of her best leading men. At times, Crawford could run roughshod over her co-stars, but Heflin was a great actor above all and seems to challenge Crawford in their scenes together to match his work. He is the homme fatale here, and is aloof to her, more tolerating of her adoration and constant attention than giving and warm. Once he starts dating Crawford’s stepdaughter (Geraldine Brooks), who has nursed a crush on him since puberty, we see just how heartless this cad can be.
The film is flawed whenever we have to sit through the wraparound hospital scenes (much of it ham-fisted dialogue delivered with shrugs and obvious insincerity by the actors), and often dips into campy hysterics more than it probably should. But so what? There is the central performance from Crawford at her peak, a performance which probably should have won her the Oscar over whatever Loretta Young was doing in The Farmer’s Daughter. (As previously stated, I am of the camp that Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven might have deserved it more in 1945.) Her sanity throughout the film is suspect, but once David leaves her for the younger, prettier step-daughter you know all hell is about to bust loose. And it does. And whenever we are dealing with her descent into madness, Possessed engulfs us in its own way.
She begins the film as a poor housewife with a boorish husband and a son she’s devoted to. It isn’t long until an argument about a bicycle she bought for the kid leads to an auto accident and the kid dead in the street. She leaves the no-good husband and becomes a siren for various saps in a criminal enterprise. She starts off at the bottom rung and hops from man to man until she becomes the main squeeze for Mr. Big (Steve Cochran). This being a noir, and a Crawford vehicle, it all comes tumbling down, but not before Crawford gets a chance for redemption and to drop the steely act. She is a good girl underneath it all, don’t you know?
That any of this hokum and cliched material works is entirely on the padded shoulders of its star, who makes the material zip and gives it more artistry than it is worth. By this point, Crawford could do these “poor girl makes good” roles in her sleep, but she was never one to slum. Whatever else she might have been, she was a consummate artist on the screen. Maybe not a chameleonic actress, but certainly one who exemplified movie star acting and performing for the camera in the best possible ways.
The Damned Don’t Cry insists that Crawford suffers, often intensely and in gauzy closeup, but it also demands that the audience still like her in the end, and that she gets to wear glamorous clothing. Much like its star, it knows why you came to watch it and what its virtues are every step of the way. It is not one of Crawford’s stronger vehicles, especially after the trio of beloved classics we just discussed and latter works like her final Oscar nominated performance in Sudden Fear, but it does what it does well enough. Sometimes watching Crawford prostrate herself before the camera while the Max Steiner score swells is a good enough way to spend 103 minutes.
First up, Sadie McKee, something of an archetypal 1930s Crawford vehicle in which she starts off as a kitchen maid, suffering glamorously in elegant gowns despite her poverty, and dealing with a series of doomed love affairs with inadequate men. Through it all, Crawford rises the social and economic ladder by romancing increasingly well-connected and wealthy men. As this is barely makes the cutoff before the Hays Code, this is racier, saucier, grittier, and more blunt than some of her later roles in the decade like The Shining Hour, Mannequin, Love on the Run, and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney.
She never could quite make that hardness behind her eyes go away so she is a bit strained in the earliest scenes where she’s hopeful and naive, but quickly settles into the role after she becomes nightclub dancer fighting off patrons constantly pawing at her. She eventually marries one of the rich drunks (Edward Arnold) and helps sober him up before eventually divorcing him because she’s still in love with the poor bastard (Gene Raymond) who left in the first reels. Naturally, that love affair is also doomed and we are left with the tease of Sadie falling for the rich playboy (Franchot Tone) whose family she used to work for.
The whole thing is heavily melodramatic, lots of dewy eyes and swelling strings, but it moves at a brisk clip and is generally entertaining. It was so emblematic of her shop girl roles that footage from this film would appear in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? when her character needed to watch her younger self in a film. But she does command the screen in her own idiosyncratic way. Never better than a scene late in the film where she anticipates seeing her old lover at a musical performance only to realize that he’s been replaced by someone new and his whereabouts are unknown. Those eyes of hers and that slightly overdrawn mouth communicate more than words ever could.
1940’s Strange Cargo is a deeply strange film with one truly tremendous scene from Crawford. It is worth watching at least once simply for its contradictions – at once a prison escape and survivalist drama before it goes full-tilt religious allegory. The Catholic Legion of Decency famously complained that it was, “a naturalistic concept of religion contrary to the teachings of Christ, irreverent use of Scripture, and lustful complications.” That only means that, flaws and all, there is something interesting here if the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned it.
It is a scene on the boat where she listens to Ian Hunter’s Christ-like figure drone on about salvation and her soul that her dewy, beautiful face drops into the hardened granite of her latter years. Her voice has the gritty, sour edge of a woman who has lived hard up until this point and wants the piety dropped. It is perhaps her most honest scene and work in the entire film.
She holds her own against the likes of Clark Gable, one of her best co-stars because his manliness and bravado matches her own, and Peter Lorre, whose European strangeness finds a kindred spirit in her self-mythologizing Americana. But the very elements conspire and battle with the star throughout Strange Cargo, the properly Biblical foe for so exacting a persona. Even when she doesn’t quite sell the reformation of her angry hooker, Crawford still does well under Frank Borzage’s direction.
This is not prime Borzage because the clunky script demands that it loudly proclaim instead of allowing him to frame, show, or symbolize. The fact that Crawford allows some degree of de-glamming here is a minor miracle. Hers was an addiction to glamour and artifice, to remaking and remodeling not only her biographical details but her very facial structure and screen persona. Borzage nearly strips her bare before the camera and Crawford stares back with a bitter edge that recalls the cinema of Ingmar Bergman more than it does the height of MGM’s luxurious and gauzy style.
Crawford was a movie star who radiated a sense of authority, she was more overtly masculine than most of her male co-stars. Hers was an indomitable will and personality that was not going to back off for anyone or anything. And there was always the barely concealed rage. She was often a frothing, rabid uncaged animal that was ready to pounce on the first object to come into its line of vision. And it seems so obvious that much of this was a mask for a neediness and vulnerability. She was bound and determined to be loved, adored and to succeed, at any and all costs. As her career progressed into the 1940s and her girlishness started to harden, these qualities would burst through with increasingly violent means.
The first half of A Woman’s Face is, by a wide margin, the more successful film. The second half feels like a totally separate film with the flimsiest of connective tissue between them. In the first half, Crawford plays a woman who has allowed her disfigurement to turn her self-worth into a wilting flower. And it is this sense of wilting and rotting in her that causes her to take that anger out on the world. Because of the gaping emotional wounds inside of her psyche, she has become a blackmailer and a criminal. Her slanted hat or a cascade of ebony hair to hide her scar proves to be her armor.
In the second half, Melvyn Douglas plays the plastic surgeon who fixes her face, restoring her beauty and wondering what he has unleashed. Now that her face has been cured, so has all of the rot and rabid animal ferocity within her character as well? She awakens from her makeover deciding that she is now a good person and wants a fresh start as a governess. The problem here is not that her character wants to remake her life, that’s a given, it is that the anger is no longer there. It is during this section that Cukor loses some of his stranglehold on Crawford’s performance and she indulges in her worst mannerisms and lazy shorthand.
In small doses, like when Conrad Veidt, playing his character like a poisonous snake slowly toying with Crawford before going in for the kill, tries to get her to murder the child she’s in charge of, she unleashes. But there is never a moment when we are satisfactorily told or allowed to enter into her emotional terrain. She has finally been granted a chance to look normal, and how does this new physical appearance affect her psychologically? Does she recognize herself?
But it is still mostly successful as an examination of one of Cukor’s favorite themes: the exterior and interior coming into direct conflict. The first half is a must-see, and one wishes that they had followed through with that film’s promise. The second half is just a well-made melodramatic Crawford star vehicle. And extra praise should be given to Cukor for wringing such a nuanced and melancholic performance out of Crawford, truly this is one of her best. One that ranks right up with her holy trinity (Mildred Pierce, Possessed, Humoresque) and the likes of Rain.
We meet Lane Bellamy (Crawford) while dancing in your generic Arabian princess garb, and Crawford could not look more uncomfortable and stiffer. Her gyrations seem timid and embarrassed compared to the loose-limbed flapper she was in Our Dancing Daughters. It is but the first of many cinematic indignities both the character and star are subjected towards.
Throughout, Crawford seems alternately too old for the part and too glamorous to believably play so poor. But that steely drag queen center of her remains, so her various long games and schemes for revenge play off wonderfully. And the film allows her to square off with multiple men proving her toughness and strength again and again. My personal favorite is a showdown with Sydney Greenstreet villain where she tells a story about an elephant getting shot and asks him if he knows how difficult it is to dispose of a dead elephant. It is camp of the highest order!
Nearly as camp as the last shot of Crawford walking in the women’s prison in black pumps with her hair immaculately quaffed, her makeup flawless, and her tasteful jewelry. Flamingo Road is of a piece with Crawford’s films of this era in that sense that they wind up featuring a scene of her in a chic outfit, draped in a fur coat pulling a gun from her handbag on some heavy and hardening her face into a warrior’s death mask. This time, her tussle with Greenstreet in the final moments has Crawford struggle for physical control whereas she typically bugs her eyes out, tightens her jaw, and fires away.
It wouldn’t be long before Crawford’s career descended into hysterical camp spectacles that found her as an older woman often playing it too young and sexy, and that germinates here. The part was originally conceived for Ann Sheridan, but she refused to play it, so it wound up as a Crawford vehicle. It does not feel out of place with the long arc of her career, but by this point, it feels more like something from her days at MGM than her post-Oscar resurgence. Think of it as a Sadie McKee but in the pulpy unspecified American south. An enjoyable bit of trash made in the same high-class style of many of her contemporaneous Warner Bros. films.
Perhaps nothing better synthesizes the Crawford myth down to its basics than the opening sequence here. She barks at an awkward costar (director Charles Walters) who keeps tripping over her legs and flatly states that changing the choreography would ruin the lines of her body and a chance to flash her famous legs. Then she meets adoring fans while exiting the theater, and a completely different persona emerges: considerate, kind, and free with her time and attention. She routinely lavished her fans with attention, never turning down an autograph or signed photo request, and lapped up their adoration while battling with her directors and co-stars in demanding ways that bordered on self-delusional.
It is all right there in the opening minutes – the alpha and the omega of her mystique. The proverbial two wolves inside of a person battling for control. Her past as a chorine makes itself known in the ways that she can still elegantly sway or hold her body, but her lip syncing needs some work. The campy excess of her latter performances is all over Torch Song, and she needed a Nicholas Ray or Robert Aldrich to give form and function to her rage and aggressive lovemaking to the camera.
The (in)famous “Two-Faced Woman” either has to be seen to be believed or completely avoided at all costs. I remain unsure which one even after viewing the film. Crawford appears in blackface (no clue as to why) with her signature red lipstick and bejeweled eyebrows, then rips off her black wig to reveal her vibrantly red hair. But it is not just Crawford who appears in full racial insensitivity mode, but the entire gaggle of chorus boys and girls who stiltedly move through the number right along with her.
The only supporting player who matches Crawford’s scenery-chewing energy is Marjorie Rambeau as her alcoholic, freeloading mother. Nominated for Best Supporting Actress, Rambeau gives a more muted (but still camp) performance that gives Crawford something to act off of since the veteran doesn’t blink in the face of the star’s indomitable will. If only the likes of Gig Young or Wilding were given anything remotely interesting to do. As it is, Torch Song is a campy romp through the star’s ever-hardening and deluding persona right before the descent into reputation tarnishing works like Berserk! and Trog, the disappearance from public life, and the eventual Mommie Dearest of it all that perpetually hovers over her legend to this day.
Years ago I was more Team Bette than Team Joan, but I have come to recognize and appreciate both of their talents. One is not better than the other, they are simply two different in temperament and style to really be compared. They are both worth watching, appreciating, and admiring for their skills. Disentangle yourself from the legend of Joan Crawford and sit with the actual work and performances of her. You may just find something you love in the process.
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