Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952)

Jack Palance and Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear

Myra Hudson: Joan Crawford
Lester Blaine: Jack Palance
Irene Neves: Gloria Grahame
Steve Kearney: Bruce Bennett
Ann Taylor: Virginia Huston
Junior Kearney: Mike Connors

Director: David Miller
Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, Robert Smith
Based on a story by Edna Sherry
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Boris Leven
Film editing: Leon Barsha
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Joan Crawford could play almost anything but soft, but then she never had to -- I suspect she saw to that. What she could do instead was play vulnerable, though you often felt a twinge of sympathy for the person who was attacking her, knowing that she had ways of getting more than even. David Miller's Sudden Fear is a revenge drama, and one of the best. Crawford's Myra Hudson is a playwright who uses her skills at contriving a plot to get even with her cheating, murderous husband, Lester Blaine. Her plot goes awry, but fate gives her a hand anyway. What Crawford knew how to do better than almost anyone was to play off her two most notable facial features, her enormous eyes and her strong mouth and jaw, in alternation. So when Myra is falling in love with Lester, the eyes tell us everything we need to know; when the truth about her husband is revealed, the eyes grow moist and anguished and the mouth and jaw tremble; and when she sets out to take her revenge, the mouth grows hard and the jaw firm. Crawford learned this kind of control in silent movies, of course, and used it effectively throughout her long career. Changing tastes in acting, abetted by parodies of Crawford's performances, have made recent generations see her performing style as mannered, though critics have begun to re-evaluate and praise her real acting gifts. Crawford and her costar, Jack Palance, received Oscar nominations. Palance, with his knobby, death's-head face and carnivorous grin, initially seems like an odd choice for a leading man -- as Myra Hudson herself acknowledges when she fires him from her play -- but he's hugely effective in the role of faux swain and greedy menace.

Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947)

Houseley Stevenson and Tom D'Andrea in Dark Passage

Vincent Parry: Humphrey Bogart
Irene Jansen: Lauren Bacall
Madge Rapf: Agnes Moorehead
Bob: Bruce Bennett
Sam: Tom D'Andrea
Dr. Walter Coley: Houseley Stevenson
Baker: Clifton Young
George Fellsinger: Rory Mallinson

Director: Delmer Daves
Screenplay: Delmer Daves
Based on a novel by David Goodis
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Art direction: Charles H. Clarke
Film editing: David Weisbart
Music: Franz Waxman

Time doesn't just heal wounds, it also makes bad movies into interesting ones. Dark Passage is, on the face of it, a bad movie, a silly thriller whose plot depends on a series of absurd coincidences. But it has survived and achieved almost cult status because of several things: the eternal chemistry of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and its wonderful views of San Francisco in the late 1940s among them. And, I think, because writer-director Delmer Daves knew enough to take its absurdities with a straight face, keeping his tongue only slightly in his cheek as he unspools the story of convicted wife-murderer Vincent Parry, who manages to escape from San Quentin in an open barrel precariously perched on the back of a truck, to survive a barrel roll from the truck on Highway 1, to be picked up first by a guy we later learn is an ex-con who had done time in San Quentin and then by Irene Jansen, who is convinced that Parry is innocent. She takes him to her handsome apartment -- an Art Deco building at 1360 Montgomery St. that still attracts movie-loving tourists -- and gives him shelter, even though she's also friends with Madge Rapf, who testified against Parry at the trial. Leaving the safety of Irene's apartment, he hails a cabbie named Sam, who recognizes him but believes he's innocent, and who takes him to a back-alley plastic surgeon who -- for $200! -- gives him a new face. And so on. Much of the first part of the film is done with a subjective camera, giving us Parry's view of things, including the film's best -- that is, funniest -- scene: the doctor explaining the procedure as Sam kibitzes over his shoulder. His face bandaged, Parry returns to Irene, who nurses him until the bandages come off and we see Bogart's face for the first time -- though even with bandages on, he's identifiably Bogart. And so on as Parry gathers evidence that proves the real murderer was Madge, who inconveniently takes a header through a plate-glass window, robbing him of his proof. Pauline Kael was representative of the earlier response to the movie, calling it "miserably plotted" and "an almost total drag," but if you have an easily willing suspension of disbelief, a taste for old-style star chemistry, and an interest in seeing the Golden Gate Bridge without bumper-to-bumper traffic, Dark Passage can be a lot of fun.

Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

Joan Crawford and Eve Arden in Mildred Pierce 

Mildred Pierce: Joan Crawford
Wally Fay: Jack Carson
Veda Pierce: Ann Blyth
Monte Beragon: Zachary Scott
Ida Corwin: Eve Arden
Bert Pierce: Bruce Bennett
Lottie: Butterfly McQueen
Mrs. Maggie Biederhof: Lee Patrick
Inspector Peterson: Moroni Olsen
Kay Pierce: Jo Ann Olsen

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Ranald McDougal
Based on a novel by James M. Cain
Cinematography: Ernest Haller
Art direction: Anton Grot
Film editing: David Weisbart
Music: Max Steiner

Mildred Pierce provided Joan Crawford with her shining Oscar moment, even if she had to accept her statuette from her sickbed -- surrounded, to be sure, by press photographers. But I don't think it's her best performance. I prefer her as Crystal Allen in The Women (George Cukor, 1939), who, though she loses her sugar daddy still manages to kiss off the "respectable" women with a splendid curtain line. Or as Helen Wright, the consummate rich and predatory patroness in Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946), treating the Fannie Hurst melodrama as if it were Ibsen, inhabiting every absurd moment with full conviction. Or even as Millicent Weatherby in Autumn Leaves (Robert Aldrich, 1956), in which she fights against the hardness into which her face was beginning to settle as she turned 50 by crafting an image of a younger, more vulnerable woman. There are things about Mildred Pierce that don't quite work,  particularly the shifts from film noir, shot with expressionist flair by Ernest Haller, to "woman's picture" opulence of setting. But it is still an indispensable film, as essential to defining Crawford's career -- and hence to an understanding of how Hollywood viewed women in the 1940s -- as Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) was to Bette Davis's.