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Queen Bee (1955)
A movie made for Joan
The only thing this movie lacks is vivid technicolor to truly capture La Crawford stomping through scenes and chewing up the scenery..and also to see how green around the gills Joan was from her heavy drinking. Joan Crawford is the movie, and although Betsy Palmer does her best to keep a few scenes for herself, it's all Joan all the time. Joan is Eva, and evil and loves it. She is married to battle scarred Barry Sullivan who is a lush, and she rules over the family terrorizing each one of them in her own special way, and in a way specifically tailored to torment them the most. She is nothing, if not thoughtful. There is no point going into the details because the best part of the film is the unfolding of each layer, and the unraveling of Eva's life.
It's film noir at the apotheosis of camp, but it's also clever and knows it has a story to tell. Joan Crawford at this juncture of her career had segued into a film noir queen after her win with Mildred Pierce. This little tale has a few things in common with Mildred,but not what you might expect. In Mildred Pierce we are encouraged to pity Mildred and understand that she was in an untenable situation, and was the real victim. There is nothing endearing about Eva at all, and it is intended that the audience will hate Eva hard. The connections between characters are not accidental because Randald MacDougall wrote the screenplay for both films. He certainly knew his Joan. She infamously had an affair with John Ireland during the making of the film, and many years later they were cast again in a William Castle film, "I Saw What You Did." In the final spasms of her career Crawford (and Bette Davis) were cast as horror hags, and this film is on the cusp of that descent. This film is also on the cusp of another of Crawford's well known descents...that of the drunk. It was probably best the film was shot in black and white because Joan looks hard faced in black and white and all the lighting men in Hollywood couldn't soften that.
Having said all that, this film is fascinating because this film doesn't star Joan Crawford, it IS Joan Crawford. Christina Crawford said famously that Joan hated it, likely because it was too close to the bone and doubtless damaged the image and cultish personality she had fabricated and enhanced since the 30's. Christina Crawford suggests that the film showed who Joan was in reality, and there was no acting at all. For that reason this movie is as close to cinema verite as Joan Crawford would likely have flown. If Joan and Christina both hated, I have to love it. The other reason I love this film is because it is so ridiculous; so overblown; so over acted and so melodramatic that it screams for attention (and surprisingly without a southern accent.) This movie is best viewed in jodhpurs with a riding crop and a LOT of booze...why? Well it's the way Joanie would have wanted you to see it.
Mommie Dearest (1981)
A Treasure Trove of High Camp
When Christina Crawford began tapping out her little poison pen biography, little did she know that the book and film adaptation would become cult and camp classics. Faye Dunaway doesn't ACT as Joan Crawford, she BECOMES Joan. The movie doesn't stray far from the book but what Christina Crawford wrote is acted by Oscar winner Dunaway like she was never going to act again. She might argue that after this movie, she didn't act much, and it is often suggested that she blames this film for her acting demise. Poor Faye forgets her role as Evita Peron in First Lady of Argentina and the soporific Disappearance of Aimee.
These were the beginnings of her downward spiral, and I would consider Mommie Dearest a high point in that slow descent. She should embrace the film and the love of gay men all around the world that it has engendered. She delivers her lines and what lines they are...Christina Crawford's word bounce off Faye's razor tongue and then slice through her children. The lines are knives, making little cuts into the psyche of her two adopted children (Crawford adopted four but the other two are never mentioned). Many of the lines are now considered classics and commonly recited by gay men around the world, but more than that, they have reduced the multi decade career of Joan Crawford, to a series of pat clichés recited by drag queens the world over...the most famous being "No wire coat hangers EVER" However my favorite line is "I'm not angry at you Helga, I'm angry at the dirt." Joan had issues with dirt and cleanliness.
Faye Dunaway gives a compelling performance, and it also proves that when she was considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation, this was not hyperbole. She is terrifying in this film and goes from controlled charm to unhinged rage in seconds. She has captured all of Joan Crawford in her grandeur and her ugliness. This film was considered, in the year it was released, the worst film and was panned and mocked. The fact is, it was ahead of it's time, and one thing we can say about Faye Dunaway, was that she took her biopic characters seriously. She didn't play dress up, she inhabited the characters. The only thing that could make this a better film is if it were a musical.
Mahogany (1975)
Do you know where you're going to?
If your answer is no, then hop on board because this is the cinematic equivalent of a train crash you are NOT going to want to miss it. Ms. Ross, is the star of the film. She sings; she dances; she designs; she fights and weeps and she loves and models. She does everything except act...but who needs acting? Acting is over-rated and Diana Ross knew this when she was over-looked for an Oscar for Lady Sings the Blues. This was Berry Gordy's sawwy card for Diana's defeat. The longest music video of all time, and the first sequin-related injury in cinematic history.
The plot (humor me!) is a tale as old as time. Girl has a secret desire to be famous and rich. Girl meets boy. Boy loves girl but girl has bigger dreams than Billy Dee Williams and his jive-talking ways. Girl is discovered and scales the dizzying heights of modeling and managing not to detect Anthony Perkins was gay, all the while enduring bad lines, great lighting and seemingly never-ending photo montages of her looking fab. Do you know where we're going to? Yes...girl finally realized fame and glamah is a mirage and all she really wants to do is return to the projects and have Billy Dee touch her in the mornings...but this time not walk away.
Okay, maybe that's NOT the oldest story in the book, but this is a dazzling music video.
Perhaps someone put the needle on the record and forgot to turn it off, because Diana sings incessantly throughout the entire movie. In it's many permutations, the song Do You Know Where You're Going To is laid against sloppy acting, script and amateur hour hysterics, with the goal, I assume..of holding this whole thing together. It doesn't need music..it needed a script and perhaps some actors.
It needed Ms. Ross (Mahogany). She plays Tracy Chambers who will NOT be held back by a lack of talent, and she makes it clear she is more than a walking coat hanger. She is "discovered" by Anthony Perkins, who, if there was any shred of doubt..is gay. In fact the whole movie is pretty camp. It's a camp roller coaster of hilarity with more hand dancing and drag queenery than you have seen outside of Ru Paul's Drag Race.
Brian Walker is more like a cardboard cut out of a character and here it is brought to life with all the verve and thrill of lichen by Billy Dee Williams. BDW was never really much of an actor, although...fun- fact..he went to school and was a classmate of Diahann Carroll, who later played the wife of his character Brady Lloyd on "Dynasty." Judging by his performance in Mahogany...he had all the required acting chops to make the move to Dynasty...hell...he could have made it to Love Boat!
Brian Walker is a jive-talking community organizer and he takes a liking to Tracy, and thus begins the tale. At one point she arranges a photo shoot of her "fashions" taken in what appears to be a run down boarding house in the projects of Chicago. This isn't the least bit offensive, because the whole movie does away with the idea of taste right from the beginning. Anthony Perkins then lures Diana Ross away from Chicago, and away from the demanding BDW who wants her to give up her dreams and become the good wife.
Just to teach Brian a lesson, Tracy enters into an abusive but rewarding relationship with Anthony Perkins who plays the camp and sassily sadistic photographer Sean. There are ups and downs, and moments of camp gold with some of the fashion shoots, and there is one scene where Diana falls into a fountain and it is later used as a fashion ad...because every designer in the 70's wanted to PROVE that polyester was resilient to fetid fountain water, and impervious to bad acting. In, what seems like an eternity, Tracy realizes she doesn't want this, she wants nothing to do with silk thread, kabuki kimonos and Jean-Pierre Aumont (don't ask!). She wants to leave the splendor of Rome for the brashness of 70's Chicago.
It's high camp 70's cinema. No one dies (except the reputations and careers of everyone who appears in the film) and the whole thing is set to a theme song. Oh, did I mention there is a song? Do YOU know where you're going to? If you have any sense, it is to Netflix to rent this cinematic derailment.
Valley of the Dolls (1967)
Pre-Meth Madness
Aaaah the glory days of drugs and booze, when the fiancée of Roman Polanski would do bust increasing exercises and Oscar winning Patty Duke is a doll popping diva. Perhaps the most ironic part of the movie was that Judy Garland was fired for turning up drunk!!!! Speaking of being drunk...that may be the best state in which to truly absorb this classic film. Scandalously delicious...pass the dolls. This movie is the drug-addled step mother of Mommie Dearest, complete with cat fights, slapping and angry outbursts of absurd lines that are delivered with complete conviction, despite the obvious nuttiness of the words within.
It's so bad it's a hoot. It has everything. It has songs, dance, drugs and Susan Hayward miming up a storm behind a poorly made copy of an Alexander Calder mobile and all the hand dancing that the Candy Champagne Hollywood School of Drag Queenery could teach in pre- production. Patty Duke as Neely (Needy?) O'Hara, is part Lucretia Borgia and part Mary Martin. She is crass, and vulgar and she overacts like her career depends on it...because it did. It's too bad they fired Judy...she could have taught Neely a trick or two.
It all opens with Dionne Warwick gently chiding herself and warning us with the lines... "Gotta get off, gonna get...Have to get off from this ride." She was right, but if you stick with the ride you will laugh and cry....but the tears will be from the realization that what you are watching is the evaporation and demise of the careers of Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke and Susan Hayward. The only one who managed to recover any semblance of a career was Lee Grant who plays over protective and slightly constipated sister to her crooner brother.
Barbara Parkins leaves Peyton Place (literally) for the lure of the big smoke. She is ostensibly a WASP from the east coast where she lived in a colonial period home but the lure of the lights of the big smoke is too much. But Barbara Parkins/Anne Welles is no naive country girl. She can see talent and she has scruples. We later discover that her scruples are flexible and through a series of coinkidinks, is suddenly propelled to glamorous hair model. The process is captured in classic 60's photo montage. Not quite as dazzling as the photo montage dedicated to Diana Ross in "Mahogany" but still one of my favorite fashion photo film montages. Poor Anne Welles. As Dionne reminds us throughout the film (for no apparent reason), Anne needed to get hold of her pride. When did she get...where did she get...how was she caught in this game? When will she know...where will she...how will she think of her name? So many questions...so little plot.
Sharon Tate's character is that of a finely tuned beauty who dreams of something better, all the while having a needy grasping mother and a bossy sister- in-law, played by Grant. Her career faces one disaster after another and in final desperation for money (ain't it always the case!) makes art films in Paris after her crooning husband succumbs to Huntington's. She realizes it's all too much. He appears to only sing one song...and no doubt to her mind, suicide was a welcome relief. She takes an overdose of the dolls, and that's that.
Her widowed husband later runs into Neely who is also at the same care center for booze...although why...no one knows. The end is a revelation that I won't spoil, but let's just say the movie follows the Love Boat plot. Everyone goes through challenges and difficulties, but by the end, all the loose ends are tied up. Some live, some careers die...but it won't matter because by the time the movie ends you will either be too drunk to care or asleep.
I LOVE THIS MOVIE
The Girl (2012)
The Girl...a hatchet job
This movie is in the vein of Mommie Dearest, but without the high camp hilarity and cat fights in the sunken lounge. The entire lumbering disaster should have been called The Fractured Fairy tales of T. Hedren, and it's clear from the start she is a victim. Tippi Hedren is a victim of her beauty, kindness, generosity of spirit and of course her sheer naïveté. Of course, it's nonsense...but not even unintentionally funny nonsense. It takes itself so seriously (like Hedren herself) although for what reason, I have no idea. Toby Jones and Imelda Staunton are good, but they are the only bright lights in a movie that is so underacted and underwhelming that it's painful to watch. Staunton is reduced to a mere cliché but works hard to give her character and the memory of Alma Hitchcock some gravitas.
Now to Sienna Miller, who has all the acting skills of lumber and runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. She is closest dramatically to Hedren herself who seems to blame Hitchcock for her premature career death. What is Miller's excuse for her inexorable and agonizing inability to act? She cannot blame Hitchcock...so I wonder who she does blame. Granted, she has a slim script and so many close ups of her face which is intended for her to emote. However her face is so botoxed, she has no emotion and instead just looks weepy and slack-jawed. It's funny really....Sienna Miller has virtually no acting skills but at least she could be relied on to use her face to give some meaning to her roles. Take that away...and she is a moving speaking coat hanger for replica fashions and an overworked wardrobe department.
The script is clunky, slow and overwrought. The scenes of bad acting are strung together with no apparent connection or rationale and the long lingering camera shots of Sienna with her blank face and shabby accent make the film even less watchable. The final scene where Hitchcock asks Hedren to make herself "sexually available" to him is one of the most unintentionally crass and sloppy scenes in the film, and leads to the claim that Hedren has made repeatedly that it was Hitchcock who ruined her career.
After watching this clunker with Miller as Hedren, it's clear the reason Hedren failed was because she just couldn't act. There is a line, where according to Hedren, Hitch took a "..living breathing woman and turned her into a statue." Perhaps this is the most honest line in the entire film. Both Hedren and Miller have all the acting skills of a statue without the benefits of a statue's silence.