From Fear to Absurdity - The Strange Turnaround of Joan Crawford

It was a strange turnaround for Joan Crawford in 1952 and 1953.  The two back to back films she made(interrupted only by her appearance in a television production of the Revlon Mirror Theatre) are as different from one another as black and white and technicolor.

In 1952's "Sudden Fear", Crawford plays Myra Hudson,  a successful playwrite from a wealthy San Francisco family.   It is a believable, taut noir thriller with Crawford playing her age as a woman who has established herself as a successful playwrite in spite of the fact that she could have coasted through life on her family's wealth.  Directed by David Miller and filmed in black and white, it makes stunning use the streets of San Francisco, and of light and shadow to create some of the most memorable sequences in noirdom.  It was Jack Palance's third film, and as Lester Blaine the aspiring actor with a decidedly lurid off stage life, he is all charm and menace as he stalks, woos, and weds the wealthy famous writer who denied him his big break on Broadway.  Crawford is perfect as Myra Hudson, showing a vulnerability and a range that garnered her a Best Actress Oscar nomination in 1952.  Glora Grahame, blonde and ruthless, shows up as Lester's mistress, Irene Neves, and the two hatch their diabolical plot.

Lester starts to creep Myra out.

This film succeeds on all levels, and Crawford delivered a great performance.  It brought about a resurgance of her career that led, unfortunately, to...

"Torch Song" was filmed in blazing technicolor.  Crawford as Jenny Stewart performs "Two Faced Woman", and in a pique of temperment rips her wig off after the curtain comes down.

1953's "Torch Song" seemed like a good idea at the time.  Joan Crawford had just scored a critical and commercial success in 1952's oustanding "Sudden Fear" at RKO, and somebody over at MGM thought it might be fun to bring Joan back to the studio where it all started.  Crawford had been at MGM from 1925 to 1942.  "Torch Song" had been offered to Lana Turner, who turned against it.  The project was there for the taking, and Crawford was available and, well, the rest is camp history.

Crawford wills herself into playing Jenny Stewart, a Broadway star with a heart like a frozen bucket of nails.  She terrorizes everybody except for her maid and her fans.  She is unfailingly kind to her maid/secretary, played by Maidie Norman (later to be done in by Bette Davis in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"), and goes out of her way to memorize the names of a fawning herd of young acolytes who wait for her outside the stage door.  Everybody else she pretty much treats like crap, including her alcoholic playboy guy pal played by Gig Young, who, from all accounts was pretty much typecast.

Maidie Norman, the actress who played Joan Crawford's maid in "Torch Song", Ginger Roger's maid in "Forever Female", Dick Powell's maid in "Susan Slept Here".....um, about that name.....

It is only Jenny's blind replacement pianist Ty Graham, played by Michael Wilding (who was married to Elizabeth Taylor at the time) who ultimately breaks through and simultaneously wins and melts Jenny's icy heart.  This happens after Jenny tells him to "get yourself a seeing eye girl."  Ouch.

Crawford was too old for the part.  Her legs looked great, and she made the most of them, but her dancing was hardly at its peak.  She made a valliant attempt to sing her own vocals, but it was wisely decided to give the dubbing gig to India Adams.  Its a silly script, and if that weren't enough toward the end of the film out of nowhere comes the musical number "Two Faced Woman".  Written originally for Cyd Charisse in "The Band Wagon" and junked, it was for some reason resurrected for Crawford in "Torch Song".  It is performed in black - or more accurately, orange face. "Torch Song" was one of the last films ever to use a number in black face.  It is a jaw droppingly strange musical number, totally out of context and a little frightening. 


"Torch Song" was essentially a "B" film - glossy and slick though it was.  Pretty much everything in it was created for something else.  India Adams had already dubbed the vocal for Charisse, and they still had the recordings, so what the heck... the opening instrumental number was lifted from Fred Astaire's "Royal Wedding".  Adams as Jenny did introduce two beautiful standards in the film  "Tenderly", and "You Won't Forget Me".

"Torch Song", however,  was a commercial and critical failure.  But it continues to give joy to those with a taste for the absurd.  Its a shame a great noir classic like "Sudden Fear" was followed up with a technicolor cartoon like "Torch Song", but show business is a cruel and fickle mistress.

I've written some snarky things about Crawford in these posts, and had some fun at her expense.  Truth is, she has had a lot of bad PR in recent decades, and she is not here to defend herself.  She was the most enduring movie star in the history of cinema.  Nobody had a longer career.  She delivered some beautifully wrought performances - "Mildred Pierce", "Sudden Fear", "Humoresque".  She was also actually quite good in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane". 

By all accounts, she was a total professional in her work, and respectful to the crew and cooperative on the set. She was the most loyal of friends and capable of great kindness.  After her death director George Cukor revealed that Crawford always kept a hospital room and her own physician at the ready in case anybody on the crew of one of her films needed medical care.  She did this anonymously, at her personal expense, and never discussed it publicly.

Four Particularly Great Things about "Queen Bee" - Five if you count both eyebrows.

Released in 1955, Queen Bee is a southern potboiler supreme.  Joan Crawford plays Eva Phillips, a southern socialite who swoops around the Phillips family manse in knockout Jean Louis gowns psychologically terrorizing her spineless relatives until her dysfunctional family implodes.  Good times in Dixie!

Eva Phillips commands the room in Jean Louis couture while her wimpy cousin and ex boyfriend look on.

The first great thing about this film is the bee hive itself. Art Director Ross Bellah and set designer Louis Diage give us an airy, high ceilinged family mansion, richly and smartly appointed, with plenty of tall windows and french doors to let in the southern light.  Director Ranald McDougal and Cinematopgrapher Charles Lang (who was Oscar nominated for the film that year) photograph the house in pristine black and white with a loving care that borders on architectural fetishism.  In the first scene, Eva's cousin Jennifer Stewart (played by Lucy Marlow) arrives for an ill advised extended visit, and after being let in by the butler stands in the foyer and lets the house steal the scene.   A crystal chandelier softly chimes in the southern breeze.  A graceful stair case rises from the center of the room, splits off and curves up to the left and to the right, like some sort of winged angel providing two routes to heaven.

A great pad in which to make out.

The next great thing is the lady herself - the former Lucille Fay LeSuer.  Released in 1955, "Queen Bee" was smack dab in the middle of a decade that started with "The Damned Don't Cry" and "Harriet Craig" (which features another staircase that functions as co-star) and ends in "The Best of Everything".  It is my favorite Joan Crawford decade EVER.  Crawford was 45 in 1950.  As we all like to tell ourselves, 40 is the new 30, etc.  (I often wonder if that makes 10 the new zygote?)  But in Hollywood in 1955, fifty was not the new forty.  The average life expectancy for a female in the United States in 1950 was 71 (for a male it was a mere 68).  The life expectancy for an average female movie star's career was about thirty.  Crawford was not average.  Crawford, thank goodness, refused to stop, giving us a series of star turns that have become classics.  Her looks had hardened, but there are moments in this period that the camera catches her looking almost beautiful - certain closeups that capture just the right combination of light, angle and expression that give us the remnants of the softer, prettier Mildred Pierce Crawford.  Then, in the next moment she stands in a doorway poised to attack a scene, and she looks very scary indeed.  Her eyebrows are practically screaming their own dialogue, and seem to be leading her around.  But her face has an interesting shape shifting quality during this period.

Crawford and her eyebrows, circa "Johnny Guitar".

Item number three -  Fay Wray, of the original "King Kong" fame,  makes a cameo at the beginning of the film, playing Sue McKinnon, the ubiquitous bonkers southern relative, who is still presentable and coherent enough to appear outside of the family attic. In the mid 1950's Wray's husband, screenwriter Robert Riskin ("Mr. Deeds Goes to Town") succumbed to a terminal illness and left her in need of funds, and after a nine year absence she went back to work in the movies.  In a 1974 interview, Fay Wray said "Joan Crawford hired me for 'Queen Bee' because she like to work with older actresses.  She claimed they made her look younger."  According to IMDB, Crawford was born in 1905, and Wray in 1907.  Fay Wray remained active in film and television into the early 1960's, and died in 2004, surviving Crawford by nearly thirty years.

Fay Wray was terrorizd by both King Kong and Joan Crawford.

The fourth great thing about "Queen Bee" is the slap.  There are many great slaps in the movies, but this one I have to say took me by surprise!  I was expecting yet another bullying comment from Eva Phillips, not a shot to the chops for poor Jennifer. The slap speaks for itself.

<iframe width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5i-0Ew5rslc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

So, to wrap it all up - this is one helluva good ride, with Barry Sullivan playing a drunkard ineffectual patriarch named Avey "Beauty" Phillips (the name "Beauty", see is a nickname because he has this scar, see, caused by a car crash, see...), Betsy Palmer as Carol Phillips, and John Ireland as Judson Prentiss. 

A dog gets shot, there is a hangin' in the horse barn, and the whole mess is wrapped up with a flaming car crash. Enjoy!