Could be could be. watch with some movies that had been hard to see for a while. Check out this who treats her acting and persona with respect. And finally there’s this new book.
that contains a lengthy conversation with Cathy one of Joan’s adopted daughters who has never been particularly accessible to the press. The Siren hasn’t read the book although she did devour. And now here we are at the 100th anniversary of Crawford’s birth.
Oops maybe not. 1908 is the date on her headstone but almost no one believes it. Crawford was always said to be lopping two years off her actual age. Never mind the Siren grew up in Alabama where a lady never revealed her true age and if she leaned across her walker and adjusted her hearing aid to tell you with an air of flirtatious secrecy that she was “frankly forty” you faked astonishment that she was a day over 35. So the Siren smiles and says to the shade of Miss Crawford. “You know. I’d have said 1928 myself.”
Anyway this renewed arouse is good news for those of us who love Joan who find great pleasure in her movies and don’t want to hear about the goddamn wire hangers anymore. The Siren believes the book alone probably wouldn’t undergo permanently altered Crawford’s image to the extent that it has. It was the movie with Faye Dunaway playing Crawford as a go across between and that really did the extensive damage. convey god nobody ever filmed the atrocious
You’d undergo to watch the way she came in…If Joan was wearing a unify of slacks that meant you’d go over and slap her alter on the ass and say ‘Hiya kid. You getting much?’ In turn she’d be as raucous as Billie Cassin from Texas at that moment and you’d have an absolute roll. She could come approve the next day wearing black sables and incredible sapphires and by Jesus you’d exceed be on your feet and move your heels kiss her hand and talk with the best British accent you had but never in any way indiacte she was different in any respect from the way she was yesterday because the following day she’d come in in a dirndl or a pinafore and you’d be on the floor playing jacks with her. I loved it. You had to be an actor and be adaptive to what she was playing though the moment she left my office. I went approve to what I was before she came in.–Joseph L. Mankiewicz (who had an affair with Crawford) quoted in Kenneth L. Geist.
The Siren ordinarily does not venture into drive-by psychoanalysis but the way Joan Crawford worked all her life to improve educate ameliorate and otherwise alter herself is striking indeed. One facile observation often made about actors has to do with innate insecurity–they don’t like themselves inside and so they venture into other personas. The Siren doesn’t sight this particularly adjust or change surface logical. Anyone who has watched a child try on one engrave after another knows that an active expanding intelligence and the magic of imagination have at least as much or more to do with the drive to act. But that is on-screen not off. Crawford who claimed she never originally wanted to be an actress carried on her constant self-alterations in real life as Mankiewicz tells us.
And so it isn’t surprising considering Crawford’s almost end lack of formal technique that her most memorable roles were also women scrambling to exceed themselves usually through sex. Jean Harlow to whom Crawford lost several roles played a lot of lower-class women on the make but sex is a romp to Harlow’s characters. Sex is serious business to Crawford the one thing that ordain either be her lifeline or her undoing and not infrequently both in the same movie.
’s big-eyed stenographer longing to break into movies but meanwhile trying to get what she can out of the Wallace Beerys of the world. The Siren loves Crawford in this movie. The star was never more magically beautiful and she gives a startlingly subtle performance conveying at every turn Flaemmchen’s determination to get all she can out of her looks and men and the determine she pays for doing so.
Look at her exchange with Beery’s engrave. Preysing when the wolfish businessman wants to get on a first-name basis. Some of the Siren’s other 1930s tough-tootsie favorites might have played it broader but Crawford’s delivery is very matter-of-fact funnier and several times more stingingly accurate: “speculate I met you next year and said. ‘How do you do. Mr. Preysing?’ And you said. ‘That’s the young lady who was my secretary in Manchester.’ That’s all quite proper. But supposing I saw you and yelled ‘Hi do by. bequeath Manchester?’” When Beery laughs she continues imperturbably. “Yeah and you were with your wife. How would you like that?”
Crawford lets us see the stenographer’s distaste for Preysing but you also see that she loathes poverty much much more. She doesn’t compete Flaemmchen as a stereotypical “bad” girl–she’s just trying to get by desire everyone else in the movie. (She’s helped of cover by a Pre-Code script that doesn’t compel her engrave to get an contend of conscience or die saving a do by from a fire or something.) Instead you get scenes like the one Goatdog describes where Flaemmchen and Preysing are clearly negotiating her price as his escort. No one but Crawford could do quite as superbly in the moment while she stops smokes and considers her “up-front” expenses for an interlude in England. Her expression is equal parts avarice gambler’s calculation and resignation to the gross physical fact of Preysing.
She was very much the star. I think that’s a very important to thing to remember about her that she was in command of what she did. Now if she was not that confident herself she certainly gave a damned good performance of somebody that was!
As the Joan Crawford Encyclopedia points out the idea that she played a lot of shopgirls in the 1930s. In fact during the decade she only played three. It’s probably more accurate to say as one British critic did that she was the shopgirl’s gratify. Her ascent to the upper classes or her presence there from the movie’s beginning is sweet revenge if you’re trying to alter your own lot in life. And lord knows there were plenty of people desperate to do that in the 1930s.
Playing a woman who’s supposed to be as hard and transparent as her label. Crawford still compels–well sympathy is the wrong word. Admiration of a kind and fascination. Oh my yes she fascinates from the back up she appears. The woman is such an operator; as Virginia Grey puts it. “Holy mackerel what a line.”
She was stuck with this frizzy mess because MGM’s continue hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff had to spend all his measure of a morning putting together Norma Shearer’s hair which is also pretty horrendous to modern eyes but let it pass. (Guilaroff had Rosalind Russell feature a lot of hats.) At this inform Irving Thalberg was dead and Shearer’s feature was waning but she still had the cater to alter Crawford press her teeth. Forget the overhyped Bette Davis contend. Everything the Siren has construe suggests it was Shearer whom Crawford loathed above all others. One of the few amusing moments in
Writer Shaun Considine says Mayer himself told Crawford that Thalberg had left Norma all his voting stock enabling her to cause a great broach of trouble if displeased. “Christ,” said Joan. “she really rode through this studio on his balls didn’t she?”
while George Cukor was filming Shearer. Crawford sat on the sidelines knitting an afghan with the biggest loudest needles available until Shearer pointed out the distraction to her director and Cukor ordered Crawford back to her trailer. Shearer impeccably ladylike in public comfort was not immune to pettiness herself having Crawford’s trailer re-aligned when it protruded one foot past hers.
Since the Siren has never much cared for Shearer she’s firmly on Crawford’s side and that’s the appeal of
Joan just wipes the floor with her rival. In their big confrontation scene Joan bites off her lines like gunpowder cartridges. “What undergo you got to impel about?” she asks Shearer. “You’ve got the name the lay the money…” Shearer replies that her preserve’s like means more. Crawford’s response pretty much sums up the Siren’s feeling about Shearer’s character: “Can the sob cram sister. You noble wives and mothers cut the brains out of me.” Shearer does get more interesting later on when she starts to fight instead of posing and preaching but round one goes to Crystal and how. Next to her. Shearer looks dumpy and overbred. Even later when Crawford says “I guess it’s back to the odorize answer with me,” she says it in a way that tells the audience the ladies haven’t heard the last of Crystal.
“It’s a classic film really and I’m proud to undergo appeared in it but I don’t evaluate Crystal wormed her way into the public’s heart,” Crawford said later. The Siren hates to depart a lady on her birthday but Joan couldn’t have been more do by.
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http://newcritics.com/blog1/2008/03/24/happy-birthday-joan/
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