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.

Joan...

CONSTANT READER, I have been pleasuring myself again..

After a few weeks of doing the "pick it up, look at the back, put it down again" trick, last night I succumbed and bought a four dvd box set of Joan Crawford films.. HUMORESQUE (1946), POSSESSED (1947), THE DAMNED DON'T CRY (1950) and GRAND HOTEL (1932).

The bugger is I have GRAND HOTEL already... but what's eBay for eh? Of the four films THE DAMNED DON'T CRY was the only one I hadn't seen before so last night it was finally viewed. Typical hard-boiled Warner Brothers fare full of crooked guys and seen-it-all broads, noir-ish lighting and tough dialogue "Don't talk to me about self-respect. Self-respect is what you tell yourself you got when you got nothing else."

Joan excels in a role which gave her a chance to combine her two best Warners roles: MILDRED PIERCE (1945) (sacrificing mother who wants more out of life) and HUMORESQUE (glamorous society woman). Indeed the film she made before DAMNED... was FLAMINGO ROAD which also tells of a woman working her way up the social ladder. Roles like this mirrored her own rise to stardom from very humble beginnings.

Born Lucille LaSueur, her parents separated before she was born and had two step-fathers by the time she was 16. After the humbling experience of working in the college cafeteria to pay her way on campus, dance-mad Lucille won a talent competition and found work as a chorus girl. A few years later she joined the exodus to Hollywood and soon found work as an extra and in small parts at the most successful of film studios Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer who soon launched a film magazine competition to rename her. After the initial choice 'Joan Arden' was found to belong to a bit player, the runner-up name of Joan Crawford was chosen. Three years later, dancing again proved a success when she played the Charleston-mad Diana in OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS and became an instant success. 

The transition to talkies was effortless and she soon became one of the biggest stars of the 1930s. By the end of the decade however she, along with Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, were labelled box office poison and she was dropped by MGM. She was signed up by the no-frills, grittier Warner Brothers studio and triumphed in her first role there in 1945 MILDRED PIERCE which won her a Best Actress Academy Award.

Before MOMMIE DEAREST and the drag acts was the woman. Once a star, always a star.