Joan Crawford in Film Noir: The Actress as Auteur

by David Meuel

Joan Crawford's contribution to film noir during the 1940s and 1950s, though rarely discussed in its totality, is one of her most impressive and far-reaching career achievements. Several of her noir and noir-tinged efforts contain arguably her best acting work, and all bear her personal stamp. These aren't conventional film noirs, they are Joan Crawford highly distinctive films that extended the boundaries of noir content and brought added depth and dimension to the noir style. Unlike most actors who routinely adapted to the needs of particular film projects and directors, she approached each film, first and foremost, as a Joan Crawford vehicle, often exerting great control over multiple production functions and at times operating as a de facto producer.

Examining these films as a collective and relatively cohesive body of work, this book highlights what Crawford aspired to achieve in her art, how--when the circumstances were right--she could deliver superb results, how she helped expand the possibilities for noir, and why the best of her efforts speak across the decades with such intensity and authority.

225 pages, Paperback

Published March 7, 2024

Reviews

[Ian B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked that at the start of this book, the author notes his intention (a) to disregard the abusive mother monster of Christina’s exaggerated and/or fictionalized memoir and subsequent movie version, and (b) to refuse to view Crawford and her work ‘which is often highly emotional and deeply personal – through an absurdist high-camp lens [which results in a] viewing experience… greatly tainted and diminished.’ I thought that was a very useful reset.

I’m not sure the auteur theory is quite as much in favour at it once was, even regarding the big beasts of male directorship. Joan Crawford seems to have functioned as a de facto producer on many of her key noir titles, finding material, commissioning writers, ordering rewrites, assembling and monitoring talent, and so on. Today a studio release may have twelve or fifteen co-, associate, executive and just plain producers, but back then people didn’t clamour for credit quite so much. As a star-producer, did she at her height exert as much influence on her vehicles as, say, Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock on their films?

The nature of noir is famously slippery, and Meuel defines it as a style rather than a genre. Reflexively, I would have gone for the latter, but I certainly see his argument; although in fact, can’t it be both? The kind of mean streets thriller we all recognize as typical of the genre, and the stylistic elements of that genre adopted – as here – by women’s pictures and melodramas for their own narrative purposes? I found Meuel’s analysis of noir tropes across Crawford’s work of this era really interesting. He talks about homme fatales (Conrad Veidt in A Woman’s Face, Van Heflin in Possession), then goes on to make two fascinating observations about the figure of the femme fatale. First that in Mildred Pierce, Ann Blyth’s spoilt Veda:

is the story’s femme fatale, the evil woman who leads the hapless hero [Crawford] to ruin and/or death. The twist here, of course, is that the femme fatale is not the male protagonist’s romantic interest but the female protagonist’s daughter.

Then in The Damned Don’t Cry, he identifies the doubling of Crawford’s character as ‘the stock noir femme fatale’ (using her sexuality to manipulate men, to move up in the world) and ‘the naive, ill-fated noir protagonist (a character who is almost always a male) who realizes too late that she is in over her head and then pays dearly for her past criminal associations.’

I also enjoyed finding out about Crawford’s TV noirs, both of which are on Youtube, so I was able to watch them before arriving at the relevant chapter.