The Best of Joan Crawford

[classical music]

This is David Denby, and for

this week's magazine,

I've written a piece on Joan Crawford,

the redoubtable, slightly unbearable

movie star, who had one of the longest

and greatest careers in movies.

She was insistent, sometimes misery-loving,

and yet, there's something touching

and moving about her as a hard-fighting woman

in the 20th century.

Don't you like dancing?

No. Not with strangers.

Never?

Never.

Thanks very much.

[David] So here she is, early on,

at her most likable, in 1932,

in the all-star MGM production Grand Hotel.

And in the scene that we're looking at,

she's flirting without much hope

with John Barrymore's nobleman.

Her shoulders, which were quite

extraordinarily broad and squared off,

she uses them as a kind of shield,

and also a fence to look over at Barrymore.

And also notice the enormous eyes,

which seem to leap at happiness.

We'll, uh...dance? Hmm?

All right, we'll dance. Hm?

[laughter]

went, I had a restaurant.

They made money. Everything I touched

turned in to money and I needed it.

[David] When she got to Warner Bros.

in the early 40s, she started

making movies that were really much better

for her than her work at MGM,

they were much more within her range,

playing some hard-bitten women

who had to struggle through unhappiness

to gain something.

And then, along came Mildred Pierce.

The performance won her an Oscar.

Here is mid-period Crawford at her forceful best,

plain in manner, expressing what she had always felt,

that a woman had to work harder

than a man to get anywhere

and might get shafted in the end, anyway.

You look down on me because

I work for a living, don't you?

You always have. All right, I work.

I cook food and sell it,

and make a profit on it.

Which, I might point out,

you're not too proud to share with me.

Yes, I take money from you, Mildred.

But not enough to make me like kitchens or cooks,

they smell of grease.

I don't notice you shrinking away

from a 50 dollar bill because it happens to smell of grease.

Take it easy, Mildred.

There's no point in going on like this.

You're interfering with my life and my business.

Come and get me, Mr. MacGuyvers.

We don't want no shootin', Vienna.

I'm not coming peaceably, Marshall.

[David] Here she is in perhaps the best movie

from this later period, Johnny Guitar,

Nicholas Ray's impassioned, beautiful,

very strange western from 1954.

Crawford is about 48 and she's playing

a character who runs a saloon,

and, as you can see, looks good in a gun belt.

You all know it!

[David] When Francois Truffaut saw this movie

he was stunned.

And he wrote as follows

in a film magazine in France,

She is beyond consideration of beauty.

She has become unreal, a fantasy of herself.

Whiteness has invaded her eyes,

muscles have taken over her face,

a will of iron behind a face of steel.

She is a phenomenon.

She is becoming more manly

as she grows older. Her clipped, tense acting

pushed almost to paroxysm by Ray

is in itself a strange and fascinating spectacle.

We don't want you here!

You don't own the earth. Not this part of it.

[Man] You stay and you'll keep

only enough of it to bury you in.

I intend to be buried here. In the 20th century.