Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932)

In 1938, F. Scott Fitzgerald was tasked by MGM to write a screenplay for Joan Crawford. The film, Infidelity, never got made (although you can read the screenplay here). But Fitzgerald screened Chained (Clarence Brown, 1934) in order to gain a deeper understanding of Crawford on the screen and jotted down these notes:

"Why do her lips have to be glistening wet?... Don't like her smiling to herself--or such hammy gestures that most actresses get away with....Cynical accepting smile has gotten a little tired....She cannot fake her bluff, or pretend to.... Her smile brighter in outdoor situation than in drawing rooms...Outdoor girl better....Hearty laughter rather good....A sad smile not bad, but the serious expression best....Absolutely necessary that she feel her lines. Must be serious from first. So much better when she is serious. Must have direct, consuming purpose in mind at all points of the story--never anything vague or blurred. Must be driven."

Ever perceptive, Fitzgerald is anticipating the hard-as-nails Crawford of the post-WWII years, the Crawford MGM would not allow to blossom, especially in the wake of the lukewarm critical and box office reception of Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932). Apart from maybe The Women (George Cukor, 1939), Rain was the only time in the 1930s that Crawford approached the kind of character Fitzgerald called for in his notes. Audiences of the time did not want to witness Crawford as the trashy, fiery Sadie Thompson and so for the rest of the decade, she evinced a coquettishness that cloaked her more independent instincts. But give or take the 1947 Possessed, it's her greatest performance. 

When taking those notes, Fitzgerald may as well have been watching Grand Hotel, a far less inventive film than Rain. As the plainspoken stenographess Flaemmchen, Crawford coos and giggles and flirts, frustrating the de facto Fitzgeralds in her fan base who know she's capable of embodying a self-actualized character. Then again, she doesn't fare any worse than the other stars on display here. The purpose of so many MGM properties of this ilk is to place John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery into the film as one would set a diamond into a ring rather than string a pearl into a necklace. So the narrative has a lumpy frontality to it with forward motion halted by sloppy matches, jarring inserts, and an interminable scene in which Lionel Barrymore returns to his room drunk, shot in one lazy take. I do, however, still admire a moment when Crawford's cutesy demeanor contrasts with her blithely ordering absinthe (blech!).

Much more fascinating, and elegant, is the newsreel of the Hollywood premiere of Grand Hotel at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Dozens of stars step up to sign their names in a oversized hotel register (does this register still exist?!?!). Crawford is there with a "nice sunburn." So are Mayer and his friend "Eddie" Goulding. And I'm in awe of the mahvelous accent of New York gal Lilyan Tashman who would be dead in two years of cancer at the age of 37.

Fittingly, Grand Hotel is the only film to date to have taken the Best Picture statue without being nominated in any other category. And this in a year going up against titles directed by Frank Borzage, John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch (two of his were nominated), King Vidor, and Josef von Sternberg. And yet the thing still has a hold on moviegoers. Leonard Maltin gives it four stars, the only Crawford film to receive that honor. Do you think this is Crawford's only four-star film?

Grade: C+ (docked a notch for overshadowing Rain)

From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953)

Yet another aggressively okay Oscar pic, its sole sticking point a mildly episodic structure that makes the climactic bombing of Pearl Harbor seem like an afterthought. Good performances all around. Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed (who took the Best Supporting Actress statue) seem miscast until you seem them in action. Columbia president Harry Cohn initially insisted on Joan Crawford for Kerr's role. But according to J.E. Smyth's BFI monograph on the film, she lost the part because she insisted on choosing the cinematographer (although I've always heard that she insisted instead on Sheila O'Brien, her personal costumer designer at the time). Zinnemann didn't want Crawford because "with all due respect, if you looked at Joan Crawford, you wouldn't find it impossible to believe she sleeps with everybody," whereas he wanted to preserve some ambiguity on the matter. I also learned from Smyth that Sinatra was called  a "New Deal crooner" by right-wing papers. And...that's about all I can say about this perfectly nice but eminently forgettable flicker.

Other Hollywood films which deserved the statue much more: my gawd Angel Face, Torch Song, Sweethearts on Parade, Seminole, Take Me to Town, Meet Me at the Fair, All I Desire, Calamity Jane, The Bigamist, Give a Girl a Break, One Girl's Confession, Kiss Me Kate, The Naked Spur, The Moon is Blue, The Band Wagon, The Sun Shines Bright, not to mention such ineligible masterworks as Duck Amuck, Eaux d'artifice, etc.

Grade: B

Three Hearts for Julia (Richard Thorpe, 1943)

I watched Three Hearts for Julia only because IMDb claims that Joan Crawford was offered the lead role but turned it down. Not sure if that's true even though Crawford starred in Above Suspicion (my vote for her most underrated film) also directed by Thorpe and released the same year. But it makes sense since Melvyn Douglas has the lead role. The female lead (Ann Sothern) would have proven too back seat for Crawford.

The mostly negative IMDb reviews note the poverty of laughs in this screwball comedy. But even though screwball comedies feature more violence (as a result from having to live by the dictates of monogamous heterosexual romance, say) than yuks, this one is especially odd since the dictates of wartime propaganda abrade against the comedy. It would make a great double feature with Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947) in which Crawford oscillates between two men. Here, Sothern juggles three men and the atmosphere feels on its way to Daisy Kenyon's enervated milieu populated with characters pulling themselves in myriad directions only to arrive at a nerve-wracked nowhere.

Douglas plays a war correspondent who returns home to find that his wife, Sothern, a violinist in an all-woman orchestra, has filed for divorce due to his lengthy absences. She tries to be best friends with him and even enlists his help in choosing between two suitors after her favor. Sothern's blasé path toward monogamy gives off a distinctive Lubitschian fragrance. But to continue along that path would have given the MPPDA pre-Code jitters. Douglas wants and eventually gets her back via the help of conductor and Czech refugee Anton Ottoway (Felix Bressart).

The inevitable reunion pivots more on (wartime) musical logic rather than comedic exigencies, exemplifying Jane Feuer's notion, from her seminal book The Hollywood Musical, that the musical marshals the forces of American entertainment to bring a film to its resolution. Ottoway longs to do a solid for Uncle Sam. So he plans a USO concert of Americana instead of the Borodin, Wagner, and Rimsky-Korsakov of previous scenes (during which the women preposterously halt rehearsals with makeup applications and child rearing) and through various machinations, uses the event to bring the two principals together. The concert is a medley of warhorses like "Kingdom Coming" and "Home on the Range." Sothern has been playing somewhat listlessly until she sees Douglas in the wings at which point she launches into a near-lusty solo of "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad." But their reformation is made through the music - they never embrace! And given that WWII is raging, it's more important to form a community on the heels of the formation of a heterosexual couple. So as the orchestra moves into "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," the audience of military men sing along suddenly. Ottoway turns to them(/us) and the sing along blends imperceptibly into "America the Beautiful" for the last shot before the closing credits. If it feels uneasy, just wait 'til Daisy Kenyon.

Look fast for Marie Windsor in the orchestra.

 

 

Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952)

I have always downgraded Sudden Fear in favor of Joan Crawford's masterpieces of the decade - Female on the Beach and Johnny Guitar, for sure, but also campier fare like Torch Song and Harriet Craig and Queen Bee and even the more restrained (on her end) Autumn Leaves. It was her greatest decade so there's tough competition. And I still value these films more since camp intensity functions like oxygen for me. But at the very least, Sudden Fear is as taut a thriller as the 1950s ever coughed up.

Miller's film is alive to sound which contributes to much of its tautness. He creates tension with an unnerving calm and then shatters the peace with a sonic shock. A fine reflexive example comes early in the film when Jack Palance starts to court Crawford during a quiet card game on a train. Palance wants to cut the cards so Crawford hands him the deck and says "cut" at which point Miller cuts (get it?) to a shot of the train loudly blasting through the night.

 The film is choked with such moments which jolt you (and Crawford) out of your complacency. Sound even saves Crawford's life at the story's fulcrum but I won't spoil it. A remarkable scene!

Other noteworthy items:

Some naughty scenes testing the limits of the Code where Palance watches Crawford disrobe and put on a bathing suit and a later moment when Crawford is clearly throwing up in the toilet but you don't see or her any of it.

A terrifying windup toy dog.

The appearance of Bruce Bennett (aka Mr. Mildred Pierce).

This amazing car in the train.

And this incredible shot from the credits.

Records and not records in Trog and Keep it on the Floor

Joan Crawford's last film and the epitome of her Grand Guignol, woman-past-a-certain-age era, Trog (Freddie Francis, 1970) is no less watchable than many of the MGM horrors that placed her in the box office top ten in the 1930s - The Gorgeous Hussy or, hell, even the bafflingly overrated Grand Hotel. The scene I remember most is when classical music calms Trog but rock 'n' roll sends him into a rage. And the record spun is a not-all-that-noisy freakbeat instrumental. I wonder what would have happened had Crawford requested The Stooges' recently released Fun House.

I'll be presenting a paper on Leave It on the Floor (Sheldon Larry, 2011), a sort of dramatization of Paris is Burning with happier endings, later in the year. So I'll just note the presence of spontaneous outbursts of song (including a Sweet allusion in the opening ball sequence) and Lady Red Couture from Hey Qween!, my guiltiest pleasure of 2015.

 

So you're curious about Joan Crawford's General Electric Theater work...

Well, don't be. All three are risible attempts to generate Twilight Zone-style suspense and godawful twist endings by having characters act in ways antithetical to their nature. In "The Road to Edinburgh" (1954), Joan gives a ride to a drifter who fixed her flat tire. He confesses to her that he has just been released from prison after 17 years for murder. But he behaves like a complete psycho, becoming belligerent and obsessing on her appearance. Naturally, Joan tries everything to get away, especially when she learns that the police are on the lookout for an escaped prisoner. She does 80 to attract the police but when she's pulled over, they inform her that the man in her car couldn't be the escaped prisoner since he's just been caught! The poor innocent guy just needed a ride. He even gives her the money to pay for her speeding ticket leaving a tearful Joan to admit in voiceover, "I've never been so ashamed in my life." So he acted like a psycho...why?

In "Strange Witness" (1958), Joan and her wiry boyfriend Tom Tryon (future horror novelist and partner of gay porn icon Casey Donovan) bump off her husband (John McIntire). But the husband's blind friend stops by for a visit before the couple has time to hide the body. They manage to maneuver him around the corpse before eventually shooing him away. But later, he calls her from a police station to inform her that, oh hai, he had an operation and can see! So he pretended that he's still blind...why?

In "And One Was Loyal" (1959), Joan is an abused wife who cannot speak. A poisonous snake is planted in her husband's bed. Thinking Joan is trying to kill him, he charges at her, falls off a balcony, and dies at which point Joan can suddenly speak again. But who planted the snake? Was it Joan? Or was it the art-loving visitor who fancies her? Or how about the Malaysian house boy? Much the best of the three but the least dramatic, one hopes Newton Minow had this in mind when he deemed television a vast wasteland in 1961. 

Found: Greatest Pic Ever

Here it is:

Also screen grabs from two crappy musicals:

                               Moonlight in Hawaii (Charles Lamont, 1941)

                                Moonlight in Vermont (Edward Lilley, 1943)

Female on the Beach (Joseph Pevney, 1955)

Last month saw the redonkulously belated DVD release of Joan Crawford's greatest film, Female on the Beach (Joseph Pevney, 1955), a title which (correct me if I'm wrong) was never released on VHS and has been floating around in copies taped off AMC (I taped my first of many copies off 1980s cable...WOR perhaps?). As far as I know, you can buy it only as part of TCM's Women in Danger: 1950s Thrillers box set along with three other films I've never seen. But, oh Tina, is it ever worth it!

I've already waxed geeky about Female on the Beach here so I'll just say that the DVD looks absolutely gorgeous! So much detail finally lets itself known. I've seen the film about, oh, 75 times and I've never noticed that Queenie Sorenson (Natalie Schafer aka Gilligan Island's Mrs. Howell) has a doggie in her handbag. Look!

The disc has no subtitles/close captioning which is always a shame (does Joan really say "The great god of the senses sparkling on the beach"?). But it contains some nifty bonus features such as behind-the-scenes photos and wardrobe and makeup stills. The latter point to the possibility of deleted scenes. Notice how this test is for a scene in which Joan's character, Lynn Markham, "meets Gomez."

But she doesn't meet Gomez in this scene or in any other. In fact, Gomez appears only in a photograph on beach stud Drummond "Drummy" Hall's (Jeff Chandler, out of drag) boat. Perhaps there's a meeting scene in Universal's vaults? Go get it, TCM!

And here would be a good place to put out a call for any information on the screenwriter, Robert Hill. Not sure if he or co-writer Richard Alan Simmons was responsible for Female on the Beach's eternal zingers ("How do you like your coffee?" "Alone."). But I find Hill's career fascinating. He had some sort of partnership with producer Albert Zugsmith and went on to script even trashier flicks such as Sex Kittens Go to College, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill, and Confessions of an Opium Eater, the best drug film ever made. But his IMDb entry stops at 1967. What happened to him?