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.

Flamingo Road (Michael Curtiz, 1949)

Joan Crawford and Sydney Greenstreet in Flamingo Road 

Lane Bellamy: Joan Crawford
Fielding Carlisle: Zachary Scott
Sheriff Titus Semple: Sydney Greenstreet
Dan Reynolds: David Brian
Lute Mae Sanders: Gladys George
Annabelle Weldon: Virginia Huston
Doc Waterson: Fred Clark
Millie: Gertrude Michael
Boatright: Sam McDaniel
Pete Ladas: Tito Vuolo

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Robert Wilder
Based on a play by Robert Wilder and Sally Wilder
Cinematography: Ted McCord
Art direction: Leo K. Kuter
Film editing: Folmar Blangsted
Music: Max Steiner

In The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, Andrew Sarris paid grudging tribute to Michael Curtiz: "The director's one enduring masterpiece is, of course, Casablanca, the happiest of happy accidents, and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory." Sarris's point is that Curtiz was one of the most skillful of studio-era directors, able to take almost any project handed to him by the front-office bosses and deliver it with polish and finesse. Certainly Flamingo Road fits that role precisely. As a script, it must have looked like a routine though somewhat overheated melodrama, its sexiness and violence toned down by the Production Code office, with a female lead who setting out on the downslope of a long career and a male lead who not only never quite made it big but also found the film taken away from him midway by a second lead whose career also never took off. At least there was ham to be had in the presence of Sydney Greenstreet, even though he's cast in a role for which he wasn't quite suited. And yet, Flamingo Road works, largely because Curtiz doesn't just grind it out. He treats the material as if it deserved its swift pacing and its occasional injections of humor. He knew enough to let Joan Crawford have her way, which he had done earlier with Mildred Pierce (1945), their finest couple of hours together. There's not much mileage to be got out of either Zachary Scott or David Brian as leading men, but we're not watching them. We're watching Crawford, and Greenstreet (trying to swallow his British accent and play a backwoods political boss), and Gladys George as the proprietor of a "roadhouse" (read: brothel). True, none of the story makes a lot of sense, especially the political intrigues, but there's enough sass and edge in the dialogue to make you forget about the improbabilities.