Joan Crawford won an Academy Award for her bravura portrayal of the titular heroine in Mildred Pierce. The original James M. Cain novel concerned a tawdry waitress who slept her way to financial security so as to provide a rosy future for her beloved daughter, only to be rewarded by having her true love stolen away by that same daughter. Ranald ...
Based on the Clare Booth Luce play of the same name, this MGM comedy is justly famous for its all-female cast and deft direction by George Cukor. The plot centers on a group of gossipy high-society women who spend their days at the beauty salon and haunting fashion shows. The sweet, happily wedded Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) finds her marriage in ...
With true William Castle-style flamboyance the advertisements for I Saw What You Did intrigued non-etymologically inclined audiences by warning them that this suspenseful thriller was about uxoricide. He then had some of the theaters where the film was shown equipped with seat belts so frightened audience members wouldn't flee the theater in a ...
Joan Crawford stars as wealthy San Francisco heiress Myra Hudson, a successful playwright who meets Lester Blaine (Jack Palance) while casting her new play in New York. They meet again on the train ride back, fall in love and marry. Unknown to Myra, Lester is seeing mistress Irene Neves (Gloria Grahame), whom he still loves and has married only ...
Based on Vicki Baum's novel and produced by Irving Thalberg, this film is about the lavish Grand Hotel in Berlin, a place where "nothing ever happens." That statement proves to be false, however, as the story follows an intertwining cast of characters over the course of one tumultuous day. Greta Garbo is Grusinskaya, a ballerina whose jewels are ...
One of the strangest westerns on record, Johnny Guitar has less in common with Zane Grey than it does with Sigmund Freud and Krafft-Ebbing. The title character, played by Sterling Hayden, is a guitar-strumming drifter who was once the lover of Arizona saloon-owner Vienna (Joan Crawford). Though her establishment doesn't make a dime, Vienna doesn't ...
"Strange" is right: this mystical MGM melodrama has to be the oddest of the studio's Clark Gable-Joan Crawford vehicles. When eight prisoners escape from a New Guinea penal colony, they are picked up by a sloop commandeered by another escapee named Verne (Gable) and his trollop girl friend Julie (Joan Crawford). Among the fugitives is Cambreau ...
The pleasures of the flesh confront the discipline of the Lord's teachings in this screen adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's story Miss Sadie Thompson. Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford) is a sassy streetwalker who lands in Pago Pago in the South Pacific after an epidemic grounds the ship on which she's booked passage. Sadie's shapely legs, free ...
Fannie Hurst's novel Humoresque is the lachrymose tale of a famed Jewish-American violinist who forgets all about his friends and family in his rise to fame. Screenwriters Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold refashioned this timeworn material into a first-class, big-budget soap opera, completely dominated by the high-octane talents of Joan Crawford ...
A remake of the Swedish film of the same name (see entry 55092), MGM's A Woman's Face was reshaped into one of Joan Crawford's best vehicles. Told in flashback from the vantage point of a murder trial, the story concerns a female criminal whose face is disfigured by a hideous scar. The plastic-surgery removal of this disfigurement has profound ...
Based on The Bride from Trieste by Ferenc Molnar, The Bride Wore Red stars Joan Crawford as the eponymous heroine. A singer in a seedy Budapest dive, Anni (Crawford) is mistaken for a socialite thanks to a practical joke perpetrated by the cynical Count Armalia (George Zucco). Though a bit confused about her new favored status, Anni happily ...
We first meet Joan Crawford, star of the moody flashbackfest Possessed, wandering aimlessly through the city streets, moaning "David....David." She goes to pieces in public and is rushed to the mental ward, where a team of psychiatrists try to find out who she is and where she's been. Who she is is a practical nurse, hired by Raymond Massey to ...
Virtually everybody except President Roosevelt was in the lavish MGM backstage musical Dancing Lady. Joan Crawford stars as Janie Barlow, an impoverished dancer reduced to working in a seedy Manhattan burlesque house. While on a slumming party with his society friend, wealthy young Tod Newton (Franchot Tone) spots Janie in the burleycue chorus ...
A woman's desire to rise above her drab lower middle-class life take her down the road to destruction in this gripping crime melodrama. The story opens as she cowers insider her old home, fearing the inevitable arrival of the murderous gangsters pursuing her. Her tragic tale unfolds via flashback. It all began when she became frustrated by her ...
Joan Crawford is her usual upwardly mobile self in this melodrama co-starring Clark Gable. She plays Marian Martin, a cynical small-town girl determining to give up the idea of marriage. Kept by wealthy attorney Mark Whitney (Gable), Marian assumes a new identity as a divorced woman of the world, but her newfound life of luxury comes crashing down ...
Better known as Reunion in France, this women's-magazine-style romantic melodrama was the first major production for director Jules Dassin -- who was promptly demoted back to the MGM "B" department when the picture tanked at the box office. Joan Crawford stars as Frenchwoman Michele de la Becque, who comes to believe that her fiancé, wealthy ...
In this chilling blood-tale in "Psycho" style, Robert Bloch modernizes the Lizzy Borden story. A wife (Joan Crawford) literally axes her cheating husband and his lover, witnessed by her three-year-old daughter. Mom is packed off to the insane asylum for 20 years before reuniting with the daughter (Diane Baker). From this point, the axe murders ...
Queen Bee offers a stinging portrait of a mad, manipulative woman and chronicles her downfall and that of those around her in this dark drama. On first meeting, Eva Phillips (portrayed with delicious viciousness by Joan Crawford) is the epitome of Southern graciousness and charm. She and her husband, a textile magnate live together in a ...
As a child, "Baby Jane" Hudson was the toast of vaudeville. As an adult, however, Baby Jane was overshadowed by her more talented sister, Blanche, who became a top movie star. Then, one night in the early '30s, came the accident, which crippled Blanche for life and which was blamed on a drunken, jealous Jane. Flash-forward to 1962: Jane (Bette ...
Anthropologist Dr. Brockton (Joan Crawford) believes she has discovered the missing link in this flat science fiction drama. The creature is found in a cave and brought to her laboratory to undergo tests for her research. The hairy beast with the face of a monkey loves classical music and hates rock & roll. When one of the slack-jawed yokels opens ...
The fourth of Joan Crawford's Warner Bros. vehicles, Flamingo Road doesn't hold up as well as her earlier Mildred Pierce or Humoresque, but there's plenty to please the eye and ear. Sideshow kootch-dancer Lane Bellamy (Crawford), stranded in a backwater town, gets a job as a waitress. Lane begins falling in love with Fielding Carlisle (Zachary ...
Based on a popular drawing-room drama by Frederick Lonsdale, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney stars Joan Crawford as a jewel thief who poses as an aristocrat. It is Crawford's intention to pilfer a valuable pearl necklace while attending a society party in the company of partner-in-crime William Powell. Here she attracts the attention of Robert Montgomery ...
MGM's Sadie McKee is a superb example of how the "committee" system of moviemaking in the 1930s could sometimes yield unexpected delights. It all begins when Sadie McKee (Joan Crawford) is brought to big bad old New York by glib vaudevillian Tommy (Gene Raymond), only to be unceremoniously dumped in favor of actress Dolly (Esther Ralston). Cast ...
In the two-hour pilot film for the subsequent TV "occult" anthology, series creator Rod Serling hosts three macabre short stories, introducing each with a framed portrait in a nocturnal art gallery. The first story stars Roddy MacDowall as a covetous nephew who murders his uncle, suffering the consequence of being possessed by a family painting. ...
The Kenyon Nicholson play Torch Song was the source for the Joan Crawford vehicle Laughing Sinners. Crawford plays nightclub entertainer Ivy Stevens, who loses her zest for living when she's thrown over by her salesman sweetheart Howard Palmer (Neil Hamilton). At her lowest ebb, Ivy is befriended by Salvation Army captain Carl Loomis (yes, that's ...
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