DVD/150: SADIE McKEE (Clarence Brown, 1934)

MGM knew what Joan Crawford's fans wanted and SADIE McKEE is the quintessential 1930s Crawford vehicle.

Her persona changed from the silent era's Bright Young Thing to Depression Heroine, a working-class girl who achieves the man of her dreams and glamorous Adrian-designed gowns.

Sadie McKee is the daughter of a cook for a wealthy family, growing up with the family's son Michael  She overhears him denouncing her boyfriend Tommy who has been fired suspected of theft and, after denouncing him and his guests, Sadie impulsively elopes with Tommy to Manhattan.

Through cabaret performer Opal they find a room but the next day Sadie is left alone when Tommy takes a last-minute singing job touring with their sexy neighbour Dolly.

Sadie becomes a dancer where Opal works, and there meets the affectionate but alcholic millionaire Jack Brennan and his lawyer... Michael.

To spite Michael, Sadie unhappily marries Brennan...

Shelf or charity shop?  SADIE McKEE is a keeper.  Directed by one of her favourites Clarence Brown, Joan acts with a steely determination as if, despite the plot contrivences, you WILL believe the storyline.  Needless to say, Adrian's costumes are glorious. Crawford's then-lover Franchot Tone knows his place and Edward Arnold makes the most of the sozzled Brennan. The supporting cast is peppered with cracking performances: Jean Dixon as big-hearted but cynical Opal, Esther Ralston as the singer Dolly, Leo G Carroll as Brennan's disapproving butler, Zelda Sears as the salty boarding-house owner, Akim Tamiroff as the excitable cabaret manager and Candy Candido as a manic double-bass player!  It was a delight to spot - in one scene with no dialogue but plenty of sour facial expressions - Ethel Griffies, best remembered as the sceptical ornithologist in Hitchcock's THE BIRDS.  Sadly Gene Raymond's performance as Tommy hasn't dated well, acting with the eye-wobbling woodeness of a ventriloquist dummy.  Oh and if you like are the song ALL I DO IS DREAM OF YOU this is the film it was composed for and it is repeated endlessly!

DVD/150: THE DAMNED DON'T CRY (Vincent Sherman, 1950)

Five years after her Best Actress Oscar for MILDRED PIERCE, Joan Crawford was still a star at Warners but THE DAMNED DON'T CRY showed her vehicles needing an MOT.

Vincent Sherman directed his first of three Crawford films (while they had an affair) giving her fans a Best Of... compilation.

MILDRED PIERCE's careworn wife?  Ethel is unhappily married to a skinflint. When his anger over her buying a new bike leads to their son's death, Ethel leaves...

She makes extra cash as a dress manufacturer's model by entertaining out-of-town buyers.  Soon Ethel is a cynical broad who knows the score.

Promoting her accountant boyfriend to her shady friends, Ethel meets a gangster boss; she is soon his mistress and posing as fake oil heiress Lorna for him.

HUMOURESQUE's Glamourous Joan?  She finds herself trapped when a younger gangster attempts to take over both her and her lover's empire...

Shelf or charity shop?  *Just* lurking in the plastic DVD storage box because of Joan's hard-boiled broad rattling out lines like "Don't talk to me about self-respect. That's something you tell yourself you got when you got nothing else" while giving us one of the most unsympathetic characters she ever played.  The film has all the Warner Brothers Film Noir-ish elements but it's far-fetched plot and b-movie cast lose one's interest by the end when Joan gets slapped around by David Brian's deadly dull gangster boss.  A saving grace is Selena Royle's knowing society woman-down-on-her-heels who shows 'Lorna' how to fake her heiress persona.

DVD/150: HUMORESQUE (Jean Negulesco, 1946)

After her Oscar-winning triumph in MILDRED PEARCE, Joan Crawford then delivered another iconic performance in HUMORESQUE, easily holding her own opposite intense John Garfield.

Previously filmed by Frank Borzage in 1920, this time screenwriter Clifford Odets borrowed from the premise of his own play GOLDEN BOY.

Paul Boray, a New York grocer's son, is a talented classical violinist, although success eludes him, but he is pushed on by his devoted mother.

Paul and his pianist friend Sid attend a swanky party; he plays his violin but is antagonistic at the patronising attitude of the hostess Helen Wright, an arts patron who is bored with her retinue of adoring men and her loveless marriage.

Helen is attracted to Paul however and secures him a manager and finally, his success.  Of course they become lovers - much to his mother's displeasure.

But love doesn't bring them happiness, just a lonely Wagnerian ending...

Shelf or charity shop?  For God's sake... it's Joan in a sequinned Adrian gown getting drunk to the Liebestod!  I have always had issues with HUMORESQUE however, Jean Negulseco's direction plods along, taking it's sudsy time to bring Crawford into the film while over-indulging the boorish performance from Oscar Levant as the pianist friend. The amount of screentime afforded Ruth Nelson's sanctimonious and provincial mother is irkesome too - the idea is problematic that the hero should not stray from hearth and home, his emotionally-dead mother and dreary childhood sweetheart; the final image of Paul walking back to the family store one presumes is meant to be heartwarming but it strikes me as singularly awful.  John Garfield gives a steely performance as Paul but needless to say the film comes alive with the arrival of Joan Crawford as the glacial Helen, and she, cinematographer Ernest Haller and composer Franz Waxman deliver two glorious scenes without dialogue - Helen drifting into an ecstatic reverie in the concert hall at Paul's violin playing, totally unaware of the cold stares from his family, and the famous scene as Crawford, alone and intoxicated, becomes one with Wagner, the wind and the sea...

DVD/150: MILDRED PIERCE (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

Where Melodrama meets Film Noir you'll find Mildred Pierce!

Shots ring out on a rainswept night, a tuxedo'd man dies saying "Mildred".  Later Mildred, swathed in fur, considers leaping from a pier but instead lures a former business partner to the scene of the crime, putting him in the frame. 

Mildred recounts to the police the past four years that has led her from a housewife to the owner of a restaurant chain and, in flashbacks, we see how she sacrificed and bettered herself for the love of her spoilt, snobbish daughter Veda.

Michael Curtiz had not wanted Joan Crawford but she was so determined to play it that she agreed to screen-test for it, her first film under contract with Warner Brothers.

Cleverly playing on her 1930s MGM persona - the shop or factory girl who makes good - Joan is truly magnificent, rightly winning the Best Actress Academy Award.

Shelf or charity shop?  On a dark shadowy shelf as befits the Academy Award-nominated Film Noir cinematography of Ernest Haller, MILDRED PIERCE is a glorious film that delivers the hard-edged Warner Brothers style with Curtiz' firm direction, Max Steiner's over-the-top score, the marvellous supporting cast of wolfish Jack Carson, smooth Zachary Scott, nasty Ann Blyth and wise-cracking Eve Arden (the latter both earning their Academy Award nominations) and of course, Joan at her most iconic.

Dvd/150: POSSESSED (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947)

Two years after winning an Academy Award for MILDRED PIERCE, Joan Crawford's career was still on a high when she starred in POSSESSED, one of her most challenging roles as a woman whose obsession love sends her deep into neurotic darkness.

POSSESSED was directed by Curtis Bernhardt whose Film Noir style is noticeable from the start as a woman wanders in a daze in the early morning streets of LA, stopping strangers asking if they are 'David'...

Confined to a hospital, through flashbacks we learn that Louise was a live-in nurse to the spiteful invalid wife of businessman Dean Graham; she is obsessively in love with his neighbour David Sutton but he rejects her.  When Mrs Graham is found drowned, Louise draws closer to Mr Graham much to the suspicion of his daughter Carol.

But when David returns unexpectedly into their lives, Louise's mind starts to become slowly deranged...

Shelf or charity shop?  One for the shelf as it's a solid Warner Brothers melodrama made more involving by the Film Noir cinematography and Crawford's committed performance as a woman pushed over the edge by dangerous love.  But one wonders if Van Heflin really could inspire such obsession in anybody?

Dvd/150: SUDDEN FEAR (David Miller, 1952)

To celebrate the BFI Joan Crawford season, I watched the thriller which gained her a third Best Actress Oscar nomination, SUDDEN FEAR. 

Playwright Myra Hudson demands Lester Blaine be fired from the lead in her new play; travelling home by train to San Francisco she discovers Blaine is on it too.  Despite their past, Myra is drawn to him and after a whirlwind romance they marry.

Lester discovers Myra will change her will in three days time to give him a small income after her death, so he plots with ex-lover Irene to kill Myra before then.  But Myra accidentally left her Dictaphone on and it recorded them - and Myra hears it the next day...

With time running out, Myra concocts a plan to stop them... but will she succeed?

Crawford is magnificent with hissable support from Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame.  David Miller's direction builds the tension excellently.

Shelf or charity shop? Definitely shelf... apart from a plot contrivance which stretches credibility to breaking point, I always find SUDDEN FEAR delivers Film Noir tension excellently... who knew a tin wind-up dog toy could be so thrilling!!!