During World War II, Hollywood eagerly joined up with America and her allies in an effort to whip a little Axis tail and they too wanted to launch their own assaults trumpeting freedom, courage, and sacrifice. But in wartime, you have to be able to think outside the box and come up with that one-two punch the enemy never sees coming! Thus the excruciatingly unsuccessful teaming of Joan Crawford and John Wayne in a movie about occupied France. (Another unpleasant aspect of a wartime movie like Reunion in France is that sometimes the audience suffers a little friendly fire and becomes collateral damage.) Continue reading “Reunion in France (1942)”
Category: Joan Crawford
Torch Song (1953)
I’m assuming that there was a time when Joan Crawford didn’t resemble the cartoonish hag that Faye Dunaway portrayed her as in Mommie Dearest. By the time Torch Song was made however, that time had sadly passed. Continue reading “Torch Song (1953)”
The Best of Everything (1959)
Despite starring Joan Crawford, Stephen Boyd, and Hope Lange, The Best of Everything manages to spend most of its two hours on exciting stuff like Joan throwing files on people’s desk, making them work late, and watching Lange go from dumb girl who just took the secretary job until her boyfriend gets back from London, to power-hungry wench that doesn’t care about men anymore once she’s jilted, to gal who is sweet on Mike Rice (Boyd), to dumb girl who is going to break up her old boyfriend’s marriage and then realizes that he’s only using her.
She isn’t the only woman that this movie focuses on though. This is a soap opera which means that you have the lives of a bunch of lonely, pathetic women intertwining. And by intertwining, I mean that occasionally they show up for work together and every so often they’ll all be back at their apartment at the same time to mope around about the latest stunt whatever piece of trash they’re dating just pulled. Continue reading “The Best of Everything (1959)”
Flamingo Road (1949)
This movie got off to a good start with me because we’re told right away that Flamingo Road was the road in this town (Bolden) where all the really powerful people lived. I like a movie that explains its obscure title early on because otherwise I’ll spend my time watching the movie and wondering just what the dickens the title is supposed to mean.
Even better, a sleazy carnival is visiting the wrong side of the tracks in town and Lane (Joan Crawford of Possessed) is dressed up in one of these harem girl outfits and shimmying along to that “there’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance” song that most of us had committed to memory by the second week of first grade. Continue reading “Flamingo Road (1949)”