18. Joan Crawford in 'Mildred Pierce' (1945)

 

Plot Intro

At a California beach house, a man is murdered. This man is Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), second husband of restaurant owner Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford). When Mildred is informed of the murder, she is taken to the police station for questioning where she discovers that her first husband, Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett) has been accused. Doubting the veracity of this, Mildred tells the police her full life story to prove his innocence, dissecting her two marriages, her business, her financial troubles and her stormy relationship with her daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth), and who truly murdered Monte Beragon and why…

Paul says...

In 1962, Joan Crawford starred with her alleged nemesis, Bette Davis, in melodramatic thriller Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Bette was Oscar nominated for Best Actress while Joan was not. So Joan decided to contact all the other nominees and persuaded them to let her accept the Oscar on their behalf if they could not attend. When the absent Anne Bancroft won the award, it was Joan who took to the stage to give the speech, much to Bette’s absolute fury.

In 1968, Joan’s adoptive daughter Christina was in a play but had to pull out due to illness. The character was 28 years old while Joan was in her 60s but Joan managed to persuade the producers to let her fill in for her daughter despite the huge age gap.

These are just two stories that demonstrate the tenacity and drive that Joan had. Sadly this was her only Oscar so I’m going to have to pack her eventful life into one blog post. As such, I’m going to jump over her childhood and early career, and focus more on Mildred Pierce before getting to the good stuff.

Like Bette Davis in All About Eve, Mildred Pierce was Joan’s big comeback after about 7 years of box-office flops. She was supposed to be playing a dowdy, downtrodden housewife who becomes embroiled in the machinations of her daughter and second husband. But Joan, true to form, plays the role with a full face of expensive make-up and even had her outfits adapted to look more like a Vogue model which infuriated the director. 

But weirdly, it all works, and Joan plays the role with a soft-spoken vulnerability that fits the character. This is melodrama at its finest. It has a genuinely intriguing mystery, a fast-paced story that surprises and grips, and despite its preposterousness, it’s totally convincing. It’s arguably one of Crawford’s best movies and performances, but any of her thriller-melodramas from the '40s and '50s are worth watching. Even some of the lesser-regarded ones are good fun. 

Joan is also helped along by two fabulous performances from the other women in the cast. Eve Arden, known primarily as a comedy actress, delivers some superb one-liners as Mildred’s sassy colleague and Ann Blyth (who is truly outstanding) has a dead-pan menace as Mildred’s conniving daughter. Both were nominated for Best Supporting Actress but sadly lost out.  

Joan didn’t attend the ceremony at which she won the Oscar because she was so afraid of losing, so she pretended to be ill. When her name was announced, she hurriedly threw on make-up and filmed an acceptance speech from her alleged sick-bed. Her career afterwards stayed steady for sometime, but insecurities over her age and her mental health spilled over into her family life…

You may have heard of the movie or the book Mommie Dearest, written by the most famous of Joan’s four children, Christina Crawford. The book, published just a couple of years after Crawford’s death, paints Crawford as a mentally unstable, abusive, and extremely mercurial individual. The movie version, with Faye Dunaway as Joan, exacerbates this prevailing image. You may have seen the famous scene in which Dunaway finds out that her children’s dresses are hanging on wire hangers, to which she reacts with sweeping cries of “NO WIRE HANGERS EVER”. 

The exact veracity of the book is very much under debate. While some co-stars and associates have backed up Christina’s claims and have said to be victims of Joan’s alleged mania, others have disputed them, including Mildred Pierce co-star Ann Blyth who said that Crawford was a friend and mentor for her.

My personal theory is that Joan was a pretty damaged person. Probably suffering from bi-polar disorder which would have gone undiagnosed or at least untreated, traumatised by a series of failed marriages, a stressful career and even some alleged abuse in her childhood from her stepfather, which naturally spilled over into her status as mother. Mommie Dearest as a film is campy fun and Faye Dunaway does a great impersonation of Crawford (although she was apparently livid that she didn’t get an Oscar nomination for it and won’t discuss the role in interviews), Jessica Lange’s wonderful depiction in the Ryan Murphy series, Feud, dissects Joan’s career and mental health with more nuance and empathy. In fact, the final episode had me in tears. 

In her final years, Joan became increasingly reclusive and in bad health, although she gave up drinking in 1974. She died in 1977 aged somewhere between 73 and 77 (conflicting sources obscure her birth year). In her will, she left nothing to Christina, explicitly disinheriting her and her brother Christopher although both challenged the will and received a settlement. While her personal life and rumours may have overshadowed her work and accolades, Joan Crawford remains one of the most well-known, most notorious and most important names from Old Hollywood.  

Highlight

Ann Blyth’s performance as Veda is spectacular stuff. Impassive, cruel, and with just a smidgeon of spoiled brattishness.  

Lowlight

The climax feels a little rushed, but it’s succinct and comprehensible.

Mark

9.5/10

Doug says...

I first watched this in the cinema and was utterly bemused, but entertained. My first understanding of this film was that it was an iconic Joan Crawford film, but where was the shrieking, violent harridan of legend? After some more education, I’ve come to learn that this is actually - potentially - the result of a spectacularly meta moment. My opinion of Joan Crawford is simply that of Fay Dunaway playing her in Mommie Dearest, a performance that is camp as anything and lacks nuance, truth or detail. ‘No wire hangers, ever’ is a line you’ll heard screamed by drag queens more than anyone else and that alone should tell you how it’s seen. 

I’m reliably informed that while this was Crawford’s big win, it’s not an essential film of hers. She often played bitchy, melodramatic women (see The Women where she is the main villain) who flirt with men and - in one famous moment - commit suicide by glamorously walking into the sea wearing a full face of make up. 

Mildred Pierce therefore is actually somewhat of a remove for Crawford, and although she found ways to glamorise it a little through tailoring her own costume, she does understand that it is a role that requires a little drabness and day to day monotony. It’s beautifully performed, you notice that she is constantly doing something in the house: folding linen, making cakes, tidying, sweeping - she’s rarely still, and this energy then carries on through into the scenes at the restaurant where she skilfully learns the trade of a waitress (which I can tell you first hand is no mean feat) and goes from success to success. 

And while Crawford is holding the centre, in her excessively shoulder-padded coats, Ann Blyth is doing sterling work as the evil Veda. She is a clear predecessor to Anne Bancroft’s dead eyed Eve in All About Eve, conveying cruelty and selfishness without even moving a muscle. Crawford and Blyth are backed up by the superb Eve Arden in a smaller role, cracking jokes with a timing and wit that transcends seventy five years and had both Paul and me outright laughing. 

The plot is full on melodrama and grips just enough to stop it from seeming silly. I would recommend it to anyone but I would say to go in with an open mind as you could easily start to poke holes in it, but if you just go with the flow and enjoy the suitably gothic filming, the excellent performances and the satisfying denouement (which was still toned down from the much more sexual novel), you’ll see why Crawford finally nabbed the Oscar she so ardently craved for this movie. 

Highlight

I really do enjoy Crawford’s padded shoulders. In fact it’s the lasting memory I have - her looking like she’s accidentally left the coat hanger in as she descends the stairs. 

Lowlight

 It’s a bit silly really. But good fun. 

Mark

8/10

5. Grand Hotel (1931/1932)

Plot Intro

Five very different people collide together during their stay at the famous Grand Hotel in Berlin. Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) is a disenchanted dancer, worried about her audience numbers, but finds new life when she falls in love with an aristocratic Baron (John Barrymore) who is secretly bankrupt and resorting to thievery in the hotel. A millionaire businessman, Preysing (Wallace Beery) employs and lusts after a young stenographer (Joan Crawford), while one of his employees (Lionel Barrymore), who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, is spending his life savings on the holiday of a lifetime. 

Doug says...

Finally! The first film in our series without shuddering jump-cuts, odd cutaways or inexplicable plot points! It’s taken until 1932, but the film-makers have got their game-face on and are at last presenting us with a decently edited, carefully plotted film! 

So there are downsides: it’s the first time I’ve ever seen Joan Crawford in action and I have to say I prefer her when she’s played by Faye Dunaway. But in general, this is a huge step up in terms of performance and film-editing. I was going to put Greta Garbo in my list of ‘not so great things’ because boy does that woman overact, but I couldn’t do it. There is something so magnetic about her presence that all of the wild flailing in flared linen sleeves can’t undo her star power. 

The plot is simple and very classic ‘Stately Home Drama’ - people come and go, and so do their dramas. But we’re not made to feel that the individual dramas of the people are the focus here - in fact something much larger is. There’s no mistake to this hotel being based in 1932 Berlin. In 1932, a certain German politician was rapidly rising to power - to take the role of Chancellor in 1933. His name, of course, was Adolf Hitler. And while there was a lot of support for him, there was a wariness too. There’s no question as to why the true villain of this film is the only overtly German one (the adulterous, condescending Herr Preysing). Yup, it’s the German-hating period of the Oscars! 

This film would be a light piece of frippery were it not for several specific elements. The first is the lack of catharsis - when Garbo’s dancer character ends the film not knowing about a crucial plot-point we are left, pitying her but also dreading her future discovery of the fact. We see Joan Crawford’s character openly submit to what appears to be near-prostitution. We see (for the first time) the working class people’s drama: one hotel porter is worried about his wife’s being in labour. And the most important thing of the whole shebang is Mr Kringelein, beautifully played by Lionel Barrymore. 

A seeming ‘comic character’ (side-note: the amount of unfunny comic characters - usually with a stutter - so far in our list of films is sadly suggestive of Hollywood’s lack of imagination) - Mr Kringelein is a terminally ill clerk who’s come to blow his hard-earned savings at the Grand Hotel. He starts off insignificant but through a series of speeches and scenes, he becomes the beating heart of the film - standing up for justice, and the overruling of class’ privilege. It is through him that we view this expensive frippery-filled world, and through the people he likes and dislikes that we too warm to or distrust characters. 

What begins as a light comedy of manners becomes something far richer, with Mr Kringelein’s view of this glittering but sometimes false world becoming a portent of Germany’s ominous future ahead.

Highlight 

Kringelein’s drunken yet powerful speech: ‘Life, gentlemen, is wonderful but very dangerous. You must have courage for it, then it’s wonderful.’ 

Lowlight

Joan Crawford’s acting skills. I expected more, Joan. Bring me the axe…

Mark 

7.5/10

Paul says...

It is interesting that while our first Oscar winner, Wings, had a clearly-defined, linear plot, all of our subsequent winners so far have presented a more episodic, anthological plot structure. They have had starring actors, but accompanied by large ensemble casts, and numerous interwoven stories and sequences all based around one particular theme or setting, whether it be the backstage antics of Broadway shows, the First World War, or the development of Oklahoma City. 

Grand Hotel continues this trend, but set within the opulent surroundings of a luxury hotel in Berlin. The central themes seem to be fame and fortune- what these concepts truly mean, and what they are worth. Whether a fallen aristocrat is thieving from hotel rooms to make his way in life, an ageing dancer is worrying about her dwindling audiences, a businessman is desperately trying to make dealings that maintain his empire, or a stenographer/office clerk are seeking out ways in which to keep their head above water, the characters are entirely preoccupied with what they can make of their life both in finance and in notoriety. Could this be connected to Berlin being a scene of an infamous uprising at the time the film was made? I only have 500 words to work with, so I’ll leave the reader to answer that one.

Grand Hotel is the Gosford Park of its day. Large numbers of characters whose storylines criss-cross and collide in unexpected and sometimes touching ways. Whatever happens to the characters before they enter the hotel, and after they exit, is hinted at, and left for the audience to imagine. And as they leave with their own personal dramas, new occupants come in. Really, we are seeing these characters through the eyes of the hotel- we see a brief snapshot, but it’s a salacious and intriguing one.

Lionel Barrymore was the stand-out for me- he evoked a combination of tragedy and comedy in a man who has had to work constantly to stay alive, but now intends to live in the truest sense of the word. Joan Crawford was also engaging in her young pre-wire-hanger days, although quite frankly she could recite Mary Had a Little Lamb and I would hang on her every word. Although she became more synonymous with her feistier, bitchier roles in The Women and Mildred Pierce, here I found her endearing and sympathetic- even if she is nearly upstaged by her eyebrows.

Greta Garbo was less entrancing for me. Despite this being one of the first ever films with an expensive all-star ensemble cast, it is obvious that Garbo has demanded some individuality. She spends very little time with any other cast member except John Barrymore, and her flailing arm gestures and constant cries of despair left me cold. She was certainly an actress of her time (one of the biggest box office draws, in fact), but her career plummeted in the late-30’s, and she would retire in the early 40’s to live in seclusion. To be honest, I can see why- she seems to have had little scope for anything other than tragic glamour.

Overall, I would say that Grand Hotel is good but not great (and certainly not “grand”). Despite being the height of glamour and stardom in 1932, I found it whimsical to the point of being inconsequential. All Quiet on the Western Front had bigger things to say about warfare and even Cimarron had more scope and ambition. Grand Hotel has some involvement but my opinion is that a Best Picture winner should hit you hard like a hammer, and this film simply diverted me for 108 minutes. 

Highlight

Kringelein’s confrontation with his company CEO, Preysing, in which the former stands up for the Little Man with defiance and courage.

Lowlight

Greta Garbo’s “I want to be alone” overacting feels dated now. It’s how I behave when the wrong country wins Eurovision.

Mark

6/10