~ posted by Frank
Joan Crawford (1904? – 1977) is undoubtedly one of the greatest leading ladies of the 20th century on film. She’s often remembered as a movie star with huge shoulder pads and a troubled private life (thanks to the scathing biopic/camp classic Mommie Dearest) that tarnished her reputation as an accomplished actress. Here are some worthy films to check out to see a career that spanned six decades.
Crawford is the epitome of the flapper in the silent film Our Dancing Daughters (1928). Crawford is Diana, and she likes to have a good time, but is ultimately a good girl – unlike her selfish friend Ann (Anita Page), who ends up with the man that Diana is in love with. That is, until Ann winds up dead…
Two of Crawford’s films in the 1930s find her at the peak of Hollywood glamour. In Grand Hotel (1932), she’s a stenographer caught in a triangle with a jewel thief (John Barrymore) and a businessman (Wallace Beery) in Berlin’s Grand Hotel, where “nothing ever happens.” In 1939’s The Women, she’s Crystal – a scheming shop girl whose affair with the (never seen) husband of Mary (Norma Shearer) sets the stage for some of the sharpest and most delicious one-liners on film.
In the 1940s, she was famously written off as box office poison by MGM and had to submit to a screen test for a role in Warner Brothers’ Mildred Pierce (1945). This melodrama-film noir won Crawford her only Oscar for her portrayal of a working mother who sacrificed everything for her ungrateful daughter (Ann Blyth). Mildred Pierce relaunched her career and she did some of her best work this decade, including Humoresque (1946), where she plays an alcoholic, unstable socialite whose interest in an accomplished violinist (John Garfield) becomes destructive for all involved.
The quality of Crawford’s work in the 1950s was inconsistent, though there are some gems to be seen. In 1952 she earned an Oscar nomination for Sudden Fear for her portrayal of Myra, a playwright who finds out that her lousy husband, a second-rate actor (Jack Palance) and his floozy girlfriend (Gloria Grahame) are plotting to kill her. This suspenseful, well-crafted noir is often overlooked, but one that I recommend for Crawford fans. For something a bit more surreal, give Johnny Guitar (1954) a try, where you’ll find Crawford as Vienna, a saloon owner falsely accused of murder who goes head to head with a lynch mob headed by Emma (Mercedes McCambridge). Men are second fiddle to the women in this gender-bending western that some regard as a critique of McCarthyism.
Like many stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age, the 1960s found Crawford working in genre films. 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane finds Crawford as a fading movie star who is tormented by her sister, a former child star creepily portrayed by Bette Davis (Crawford’s real life arch enemy). By the end of the decade, she did some work on television, including an episode of the horror show Night Gallery. By the 1971, she ended her career, rather ignominiously, in Trog as an anthropologist who discovers a half-man half-ape. Despite an inauspicious ending, Joan Crawford will go down in history as one of Hollywood’s greatest stars.
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