Best Oscar film The Broadway Melody, and The Hollywood Review of 1929 gives us a song and a Charleston dance by Joan Crawford, as well as the first presentation of the song "Singin' in the Rain."
We have a few firsts and lasts among the 1929 films: Blackmail, director Alfred Hitchcock's first sound film; Hallelujah, the first film produced by a major studio with an all African-American cast; and Spite Marriage, Buster Keaton's last silent movie.
From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books. From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.
Possessed (1931) marked a turning point in Joan Crawford’s
early career. In one stroke, she
transformed from playing devil-may-care flappers to playing tough,
sadder-but-wiser women. The giddy 1920s
were over in 1931, and the rough decade ahead required gals made of sterner
stuff. Though she plays a kept
woman in this movie, and therefore “possessed,” she is really self-possessed,
choosing a life for herself on her own terms.
Directed by Clarence Brown (see more on Brown
in this previous post), the film is a kind of rags-to-riches story more
than it bears any moral fallout for a woman choosing to be a mistress rather
than a career woman or wife. This was
the Pre-Code era, after all. Like many
films of this period, there is an unflinching depiction of modern life, both in
the hardscrabble mill towns of the Great Depression and in Park Avenue
society. Survival in both realms
requires a certain degree of cynicism.
We begin with the shrill reckoning of a factory whistle, and
a swarm of slow-moving, sweaty-faced workers leaving the plant in Erie,
Pennsylvania, and one of them is Joan.
It’s a paper box factory, and Joan is restless, tired of living in poverty,
of “buying happiness on installment.”
She’s also tired, perhaps, of Wallace Ford, a concrete worker looking to
get a big contract to settle himself in business. He wants to marry her, but Joan wants more.
In my favorite scene in the movie, she pauses to watch a
train slowly pull into the depot by the factory, with the giant smokestacks and
industrial jungle as a backdrop. The
train is a magic carpet to anywhere else.
She looks into the train windows and sees many life scenes in tableau—cooks
preparing food, a maid in uniform ironing her lady’s unmentionables, a scantily
clad woman preparing her toilette, a couple in evening clothes, slowly dancing
to a photograph.
At the end of it, is a charming
drunk man played by Skeets Gallagher, also in evening clothes, hanging off the end of the lounge car,
martini glass in hand. He strikes up a
conversation with Joan, amused by her, and playfully warns her away.
He offers her a sip of champagne.
Back home, Joan’s mother, played by Clara Blandick, whom you’ll
remember as Aunt Em in The Wizard of Oz, is a careworn woman, angry at
Joan for having her head turned by a wicked city fellow. They fight over Joan’s desire to get
away. “If I were a man it wouldn’t
frighten you,” she tells Ma, that she would be expected to go out into the
world and get ahead, to get what she wanted.
Joan leaves the dirt of the factory town behind, goes to
Park Avenue, New York City, finds the charming drunk man, now with a hangover,
who does not remember her. He wants her
to go, but she has no place to go and wants suggestions.
“The East River is full of girls who took advice from guys
like me.” She wants to know how to get
away, and he says she needs a rich man to help her but does not infer that he
is that rich man, and offers, “Never tell them anything. A man likes to think he’s Christopher
Columbus discovering America.” He is
flippant but speaks with authority.
Two gentlemen appear, one of them in Clark Gable, who is a
wealthy lawyer bent on a political career.
Joan does a little sneaking around to get to meet him. She is warned away by Mr. Gable’s colleague, played
by Frank Conroy, and charges that she is obviously a gold digger, and they are
not fooled. Joan, true to her bold and honest nature, is glad they see that she
is a gold digger, that she wants to take up with a wealthy man. “I couldn’t waste my
time if you weren’t.”
Gable is amused by her, perhaps even charmed at this early
stage. Mr. Conroy tries to nip this in the bud: “She’s only after your money.”
Gable glances at Miss Crawford. “Are you?”
“Yes.” When she
leaves with Gable, she throws Conroy an over-the-shoulder look.
Gable takes her to an expensive French restaurant. She is out of place, but not in over her
head. Gable remarks, “I like women who
know what they want.”
One of the delightful and fascinating aspects to the movie
is that here we have two very strong leads who both capture our attention because
they are both gorgeous people with a powerful screen presence and equally
comfortable in their characters and with each other. There is no scene stealing and no reason for
it.
We jump ahead in time and Joan is ensconced in her own apartment
but spends a lot of time at Gable’s palatial flat, in which she is the
acknowledged mistress of the house as well as Gable’s mistress. She comfortably orders dinner off a French
menu, directs servants with confidence, is dressed and coiffed like a society woman,
and even Gable’s pals now admire her, even wonder why he doesn’t marry her.
Mr. Gable had been married before and he is sour on
marriage, because his ex-wife was unfaithful to him.
But he holds Joan Crawford in high regard; he loves her, respects
her and is proud of her, is sensitive to insults against her. Perhaps it is a Pygmalion and Galatea scenario. To protect his political image, Joan poses as
a divorcee friend, but the charade is easily seen through by a cheap floozy
whom his buddy Frank Conroy has picked up—and Gable is disgusted that Conroy would
not only cheat on his wife, but cheat with such a lowly, tacky creature.
Joan, classy gal that she is, is kind to her, but the floozy
only notices, “You certainly picked yourself a swell sugar daddy.”
Mr. Gable kicks Conroy and his mistress out, offended by
them both. Joan, despite having the good
manners to treat the woman in a friendly way, is humiliated. Despite improving herself in education on the
finer things, on gracious life, she will always be regarded as low class.
Gable is upset for her sake, but she bucks
up, and he likes that. He admires her
moxie; perhaps in part because it relieves him of ever having to save her
disgrace by marrying her.
Joan’s old beau from back home shows up, Wallace Ford, now
an up-and-coming concrete contractor looking for business in the big city. He is stopping by to secure a paving
contract.
There is a tantalizing, suspenseful scene where Joan tries
to hide the portrait photo of Gable on her mantle, and Gable, who arrives,
tells him to call for an appointment to discuss the paving contract. He tells Gable that he wants to marry Joan at
last, now that he is a successful businessman.
Protecting Gable, Joan goes to Coney Island with Wallace
Ford—and Gable at last has the sense to get quietly jealous—and the amusement
park montage includes a ride on the merry-go-round and the reaching for the
brass ring to complete our allegory. Joan
rides a carousel horse side-saddle.
Gable is now running for governor of the state, but his
friends refute his intention to at last marry Joan because no one would really
be fooled. “It’s a sad thing to see you
give up a brilliant future for a woman like that.”
Joan overhears, sneaks out of the apartment, pretends to
reenter, and picks a fight with Gable.
When he says he wants to marry her, she says she is going to marry
Wallace Ford, saying that he is her own kind.
Gable calls her a tramp and slaps her.
Gable need not worry about Joan’s nuptials; when Mr. Ford
finds out she was Gable’s mistress, he responds, “I wouldn’t have you.” He is disgusted by her, but he recants when
he realizes his contract with the state is on the line, he offers to marry her
if she fixes it. Joan kicks him out.
The class warfare, the self-sacrifice, the struggle of an
ex-gold digger to think of herself as anything else culminates in a convention
scene where Gable makes a speech (against joining the League of Nations because
we should mind our own business—we’ll be sorry for that), and a smear campaign
hits the hall with questions and accusations about his mistress.
Joan is there, watching Gable be heckled, and she defends
Gable, leaving in tears.
Back out in the rain, marching, broken-hearted and embarrassed
through the city streets, Joan passes a line of campaign posters with Gable’s
portrait on them, as if they are flickering messages to taunt her. She climbs the steps to the El, and just
before fadeout, Gable catches her. They
are together again, win or lose.
It is a very different kind of film from the other
movie she made with the same title in 1947, which we discussed here last week. It’s fun to watch Joan Crawford’s films from
different eras and see how much she reflected the contemporary image of women. Unlike many other actresses, historical
pictures didn’t seem to fit Crawford’s style.
She was a woman of the twentieth century, hard-edged, realistic about
restrictions placed on her, but stoically staring them down. Triumph didn’t always mean winning; frequently
it meant only having the strength to endure.
She had one of the most enduring careers in Hollywood.
From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books. From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.
Possessed (1947) starring Joan Crawford presents a mixture
of dreamlike quality and cold, hard, and even bitter reality. There are times when her character seems to
skillfully navigate these realms, and at other times is only helplessly tossed
in the unexpected currents between them.
In some scenes, we don’t know where she is in control and where she is
not, and that is perhaps the most interesting facet of this film and points to
Crawford’s real skill as an actress.
The movie begins in a fog (or smog)-shrouded Los Angeles
with Miss Crawford stumbling in a trance on lonely city streets in the twilight.She appears without makeup, emotionally
wounded, whimpering the name “David,” like someone lost, searching.She is almost somnambulant but perks up when
she sees men who might be David, but turn out to be strangers, and she is in an
agony of sorrow and worry.These are
real city streets, and we’ll note that in the scenes set in actual locations,
Joan Crawford’s state of mind is weak and confused, but on the artificial soundstage
sets, she is in full command of herself. At least at first.
When she enters a drugstore (add this to our collection of
movie drugstore scenes), she collapses and an ambulance is called. She is whirled
through the real Los Angeles into a real Los Angeles hospital, rolled on a gurney
through endless halls where our viewpoint is only the ceiling, with bright
lights above and the faces of interns and nurses leaning over to peer at
us.An ER doc leans right into our face
with his light.Joan, and we, are
ordered to be taken to “psycho.”
The Psychopathic Department is kept behind locked doors and
Crawford’s room has windows on the bars, so for a moment we are taken back to
the nightmare years when mental illness reduced one in the eyes of society to
that of an animal—but this post-war noir captures an era where curiosity about
mental health led to progressive, if admittedly slow, changes.We see a grim, tired, elderly doctor, played
by Stanley Ridges, take on Joan as a patient, with a young doctor to learn—and to
whom he can spout medical jargon and plot exposition.
As he gives her an injection of some psychotropic drug, he prods
her to talk and we are inevitably launched into our first noir flashback.There are, of course, several.
David is Van Heflin, a self-possessed scamp and free spirit,
the kind who doesn’t like to be tied down—at least not by Joan Crawford.They enjoy a cozy evening in his lakeside cabin,
as he plays a Schumann piece for her on the piano.He is an engineer with a gift for
mathematics, clearly educated in the arts as well, but down to earth enough to
be wryly dismissive of whatever bores or does not serve him.Joan, whom he feels is smothering him, is
beginning to fall into both categories. Like
many men of his generation, and certainly enough of them in noir films, he is
jaded by the war.“Blame it on the army,
blame it on the war, blame it on anything you like,” he says as to why he wants
to break up with her.She doesn’t accept
the explanation.
We may be both sympathetic and impatient with Miss Crawford,
as we see early on her need to cling to him.He wants to go away for good, and she is heartbroken.Yet, she is not helpless.Not yet. The scene shifts and we see she is actually a
nurse, on private duty to a wealthy man’s invalid wife.The man is played by Ramond Massey.He appears enigmatic at first, but will later
show infinite patience and mercy.
The wife is demanding, accusing, and we may feel we are
being set up for somebody wanting to knock her off to get her out of the way.
Unfortunately for Joan, Van Heflin continues to have a
connection to her through Raymond Massey, when Mr. Massey, spending the summer with
his invalid wife in a nearby lakeside home, hires him for an engineering job in
Canada.In a moment alone with Heflin,
we are jolted by the shift in her personality from a competent nurse, crisp and
efficient, to a suspicious, screaming and somewhat nutty woman accusing Heflin
of seeing another woman.
We are wrenched back to the psych ward and Doc Stanley
Ridges proclaims she has split personality with a persecution complex.We dive back into another flashback.
Massey’s wife has drowned in the lake beside their vacation
home.Police drag the lake in the
nighttime for her body, which is found.At
an impromptu inquest held in his home, the death is proclaimed accidental, as
the woman liked to walk near the water, and was felt to be despondent. Interrupting the proceeding is a teenage girl
and a small boy.They are Massey’s
children, who have been away in boarding school.The daughter, played by Geraldine Brooks,
accuses Joan Crawford of killing her mother.Her mother’s letters to her were full of accusations of Joan carrying
on with Mr. Massey behind her back.
As with any good mystery or noir, there are these such incidents
that pop up that make certain people look guilty, and then certain other
people, and then we’re not sure we can trust anyone.Geraldine Brooks plays a not-too-dissimilar
role here as she played in Cry Wolf, also made in 1947 (covered
in this previous post) – that of a sensitive, somewhat mercurial young
woman at first angrily spurning and then being drawn with needy affection to an
older sister-type newcomer to the fold.She had a lovely quality of being believably earnest and making us concerned
over her walking a tightrope between making wise decisions and foolish
ones.
But we are immediately distracted by the prospect that Joan
could have bumped off her patient, though she seems to have no yearning to be
with Mr. Massey and become Geraldine’s new stepmother.Ah, but Mr. Massey wants her to stay and take
care of his little son.Then he wants
her to be his wife.
Did he bump off the missus to have Joan?
Joan is still seething over the reappearance of Van Heflin
in her life when he is hired by Massey and comes to confer with him in his
richly wood-paneled study about drilling for oil in Canada.Just as the oil and coal industry today and
its minions decry solar and wind power in a jealous competition for profits,
Heflin and Massey joke, “Here’s to oil and down with atomic energy.”
Joan taunts Heflin when he treats her with sly civility but
otherwise has no interest in her.
She
tells Massey she is quitting her job now that the invalid is dead—she knows she
needs to get away from Heflin—but he abruptly asks her to marry him.She laughs a little hysterically—more a sign
of her increasingly brittle mental health than rudeness, but she accepts and
acknowledges she does not love him.Mr.
Massey here begins an extraordinary role as a humble, kindly, and gentle
husband who counts himself lucky to be with her.
He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to kill anybody.Did he kill his wife?
Geraldine is told of the coming nuptials and is not happy,
but she concedes to Joan that her father told her how sick her mother was, and
that her death was not Joan’s fault.Joan, in a patient and magnanimous gesture—or maybe just looking for an
out—declares she won’t marry Massey if Geraldine doesn’t want her to, and that
makes Geraldine feel bad.They make up,
and we have another shift in the story.
The wedding reception is in the Massey’s mansion, and who
arrives but Van Heflin, glib, confident, and apparently relieved Joan is
somebody else’s problem.With his smart-aleck
greeting to her frosty one, we have to wonder if he’s back just to tease her,
and if his cynical charm hides a mean streak.He comes upon Geraldine Brooks.She
remembers him from when she was a little girl, actually having proposed to him
when she was eleven.Van is amused and interested
and—uh-oh, Geraldine might be getting a little serious.We will discover soon that Van is getting
serious, too.
Joan is furious and warns Geraldine to stay away from Van,
but not out of motherly concern.She’s
still obsessed with him, and in the sane moments when she’s on the arm of her
husband as the new lady of the manor, we might briefly forget the depth of her
obsession.But something happens again, even
a small look or gesture, and she beings to spiral into angst and fury.
In a very complicated and fascinating sequence, Joan, having
left a concert hall after Van Heflin shows up to join the flirtatious Miss
Brooks, and now alone in the mansion on a dark and stormy night, the tension from
her obsession with Van Heflin manifests itself in hallucinations.The clock is loudly ticking, driving her
nuts.Van brings Geraldine home, and after
her laughing, “We fooled her, didn’t we,” Joan confronts her.Geraldine is cold with her again, and again
accuses her of killing her mother to be with Massey, and Joan shoves her down
the stairs, killing her.
Joan is shocked, frozen at the sight of Geraldine’s body
crumpled at the foot of the stairs below.
Suddenly, the front door opens and Geraldine enters, home
from the concert.The entire previous
scene happened only in Joan’s mind.She’s
losing it, and Geraldine is sweet to her, is concerned about her, but does not
know what is wrong.Joan knows what’s
wrong.
She’s cracking up.
Sent to a medical doctor by Massey, she is defensive and
walks out of the office, but confesses to Massey that his first wife is
haunting her.Massey takes charge and
brings her back to the lake house so she can face her torments and all the
creepy shadows there.At one point left
alone, crying, she walks toward the camera, walking toward the door buzzer that
seems to call her, “Louise…”It sounds
like bandleader Alvino Rey’s “Stringy” steel guitar talk box.“Looo-w-e-e-z-ze…”The sound stands your hair on end, and
suddenly this movie has morphed from a film noir to a mystery to a horror
film.Joan screams, and Massey comes to
the rescue, comforting her, demonstrating that his first wife’s ghost is not
here.
She wails that she is afraid, and confesses that she killed his first
wife, helping her to commit suicide.It’s
a powerful scene by Joan as she breaks down and cries.Massey tells her she wasn’t even there when
his wife drowned.Joan was in the
village on her night off.
Joan is relieved but amazed she had nothing to do with the
death, and thanks him profusely, and we sense that they might have a happily
ever after ending with a genuinely consoling marriage.Massey takes her to dinner and they are
prepared to enjoy themselves at last—but wouldn’t you know it, Van Heflin’s there at
the restaurant with Geraldine.They are engaged.
He is just as uncomfortable seeing Joan as she is of seeing
him; her obsession for him has at last made him awkward rather than dismissive.
Joan gets pointedly chatty, non-stop, laughing, trying too
hard, and the others notice.When she is
alone with Geraldine, she urgently tries to warn her off Van.To Van she remarks, “I told you once I’ll do
anything to keep you and I will.”She
has turned from begging to threats.
Massey, meantime, wants to get her some psychiatric counseling,
but she accuses him of wanting to put her away.
She drops in on Van, this time with a gun.She uses it.But she does not say, “If I can’t have you, nobody can,” instead she
says, “You’re not going to marry her.You’re not good enough for her.”True
that.
Back to the psych ward with kindly Doc Stanley Ridges again,
and she mumbles “David,” and then, “I killed him!I killed him!”
Doc meets with Massey and discusses the long work of her
recovery.Joan is not responsible, he
says, for her actions, but does not know if the jury will agree.It is a new world of understanding of mental
illness, a glimmer of light among the noir shadows.Raymond Massey will stand by her, and see her
through whatever happens.
Directed by Curtis Bernhardt, it’s a film of skillful twists
and turns.Joan Crawford soundly delivers
one of the best performances of her career, turning manic, angry, fearful,
sorrowful, and desperate in a tour-de-force of closeups that reveal a
vulnerability she perhaps preferred to conceal in other movies with broader,
more theatrical performances.
As many film buffs know, this was not her first movie called
Possessed.We might call it Re-Possessed,
as the first film, from 1931, quite different in tone and topic, featured Joan
Crawford playing opposite Clark Gable.There she is a girl from the wrong side of the tracks gaining a position
in high society in the wicked city as Gable’s mistress.
We’ll talk about that next week.
Have a look at more posts in the Classic Movie Blog Association’s
“A Haunting Blogathon: In the Afterlife” from
these great bloggers here.
From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books. From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.
Joan Crawford’s Oscar award was the measure of her success.
Arguably the pinnacle of her career, but in a career of so many makeovers and
incarnations, so much achieved for the struggling young chorine with the
Dickensian childhood and the lifelong need for recognition, with the strong
on-screen personality and even stronger off screen, we may wonder not so much
what an Oscar is worth, but what it was worth to her. It’s easy to assume she
wanted it bad, but what was it worth
to her?
Joan Crawford won Best Actress for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), a movie which
represented, yet again, another phase in her career as she had left, by mutual
agreement, her over two-decade association with M-G-M, and attempted to rise
from the ashes at Warner Bros. We covered Mildred
Pierce here in our series on Ann
Blyth, who, along with fellow castmate Eve Arden, were nominated in the Best
Supporting category.Both lost to Anne
Revere.
Joan Crawford was up against a tough field of other nominees
herself: Ingrid Berman for The Bells of
St. Mary’s, Greer Garson for The
Valley of Decision, Jennifer Jones for Love
Letters, and Gene Tierney for Leave
Her to Heaven.
Reportedly, Joan feared that Ingrid Bergman was the shoe-in
to win.I would have thought Gene
Tierney was the more likely close contender with her powerful performance as
the glamorous sociopath.Ingrid had won
the statue only the year before, and Greer Garson and Jennifer Jones were former winners as
well.
The
18th annual Academy Awards was presented on March 7, 1946. It was the first
post-war awards, and the austerity that marked the ceremony during World War II
was gone in a stream of klieg lights and the flash of camera bulbs
popping.Plaster statues had been given
out during the war—every metal except the fillings in your teeth was promised
to The War Effort—and the post-war Oscars were bronze with gold plating.
Director
Michael Curtiz had not wanted her for the role.Bette Davis had first dibs, and she turned it down.Curtiz preferred Barbara Stanwyck, who was
interested, but he agreed to let Joan Crawford test for the role—as if she were
an up and coming newbie—but was bowled over not only by her performance, but
her willingness to work hard and humble herself to play a non-glamorous role,
and worse still, the mother of a much more glamorous nearly grown daughter,
played by Ann Blyth, who nearly stole the movie. Joan was generous to the
newcomer and they became lifelong friends.
Bob
Hope and James Stewart were co-hosts for the event, which was held at Grauman’s
Chinese Theater.Radio station KECA
broadcast the awards ceremony, with a nationwide hookup on the ABC radio
network.ABC was only three years old,
having been established in 1943 and formerly known as the NBC Blue Network.(The NBC Red Network became at that time
simply NBC.) The radio program began at 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time.
Joan
Crawford came to Hollywood with the name of Lucille LeSueur, and Pete Smith,
head of publicity at M-G-M, saw great promise in the young actress, but not in
her name, which he felt had to go.He
set up a “Name the Star” contest in Movie
Weekly magazine, and fans voted on the name.Joan reportedly was less than enthused about
the final selection, but seemed to immediately grasp that she owed her career even
more to the fans than to the moguls, and she courted them for the rest of her
life.Her career, and her ultimate
success, came through artifice, and she embraced it.
But
she did not go to the ceremony.She
listened to the Academy Awards on the radio that night on station KECA.So sure she would not win, and fearing losing in so public a setting, she spent the evening at home in her Brentwood mansion, in bed.She reported that she had a fever and
pneumonia. She was 41 years old and undoubtedly wondered where her career was
going next after this evening.
Joan Crawford's Oscar ceremony program
Charles
Boyer presented the award for Best Actress.Joan Crawford sipped a few cocktails for courage.
He
read Joan Crawford’s name.
We
can only imagine her reaction.
Michael
Curtiz accepted the award on her behalf.
Cue
hairdresser and makeup artist, and off to Joan’s bedroom.
After
the ceremony ended, Michael Curtiz went to her bedside to present the award, in
the company of the press.Several other
well-wishers, including young Ann Blyth, arrived at Joan’s house to
congratulate her. It was considered to be an enormous comeback for a woman who
had been regarded as a has-been only the year before.Her bed jacket and nightgown acceptance of
the gold-plated prize was plastered all over newspapers, outshining any other
victory of the evening.
In a
woman notorious for hungering for legitimacy, did it give her the measure of
self-worth she craved?
Years
later, in a series of conversations in the 1960s and early ‘70s with
interviewer Roy Newquist and published in his book Conversations with Joan Crawford, published in 1980, she presents a
more complex, even sadder perspective on the event:
I remember how I felt the night the
Awards were presented. Hopeful, scared, apprehensive, so afraid I wouldn't
remember what I wanted to say, terrified at the thought of looking at those
people, almost hoping I wouldn't get it, but wanting it so badly—no wonder I
didn't go. I stayed home and fortified myself, probably a little too much,
because when the announcement came, and then the press, and sort of a party, I
didn't make much sense at all, even though I wanted to spill over...
I think the Academy voters honored me as
much that night for A Woman's Face and Strange Cargo and
maybe Grand Hotel as they did for Mildred. Or maybe it was for just staying
around that long. Hollywood is like that; they compensate for their sins of omission
later on, like the special awards they had to vote to Chaplin and Garbo in
order not to seem completely ridiculous...
Winning
the Oscar did revive her career, splendidly.She received two more Academy Award nominations, for Possessed (1947) and for Sudden Fear (1952).I assume she attended those awards, but I
don’t know and I hope someone will fill us in.
And funny, the morning after, when I
realized the award wasn't a dream after all, I realized that Mildred Pierce really rang down the curtain on "my" Hollywood. The
character I played in that film was a composite of the roles I'd always played—and
a few elements from my own personality and character. (Not the long-suffering
bit; I'm too much of a Christian Scientist to suffer very long at a stretch.)
My professional and personal worlds had changed so much—good friends were dying
or moving away—the public was restless about making up its mind what it wanted
to see—the studios were in bigger and bigger trouble. No, my day, my long and
golden and often glorious day, had ended, and Mildred Pierce was sort of the bittersweet celebration of the end...
...In some respects everything that
happened afterward—except Alfred [husband
Alfred Steele]—was anti-climactic...It's
like being a mountain climber: After you've done Everest, what's next? And,
why?
Joan
Crawford’s film career ended with Trog(1970) and she rang the curtain down herself, taking no further work, disillusioned
with the film industry, with her own aging, and as the next few years passed,
with ill health.She did not appear in
public after 1974, and suffering from cancer, died in her New York apartment of
a heart attack in May 1977.
Her friend,
director George Cukor held a memorial service at the Academy of Motion Pictures
Arts and Sciences.He said of her in his
eulogy:
“She was the perfect image of the movie star,
and, as such, largely the creation of her own indomitable will. She had, of
course, very remarkable material to work with: a quick native intelligence,
tremendous animal vitality, a lovely figure and, above all, her face, that
extraordinary sculptural construction of lines and planes, finely chiseled like
the mask of some classical divinity from fifth-century Greece. It caught the
light superbly, so that you could photograph her from any angle, and the face
moved beautifully....The nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she
became—her eyes glistening, her lips avid in ecstatic acceptance. The camera
saw, I suspect, a side of her that no flesh-and-blood lover ever saw....I
thought Joan Crawford would never die. Come to think of it, as long as
celluloid holds together and the word Hollywood means anything to anyone, she
never will.”
The Oscar she
won was left to her daughter, Cathy Lalonde, along with all of her mother’s
property, and shared an inheritance with her sister Cindy. She sold the Oscar
at auction in 1993.It was only the
third time an Oscar was offered at public auction, and it was the first major
award to be sold in this manner.Expected
to fetch between $8,000 and $12,000, the winning bid to a private collector was
$68,000.
What is an Oscar
worth?It depends on who you talk to.
Almost twenty
years later, Joan’s Oscar was sold again at auction, in 2012. For
$426,732.Does a gold-plated bronze
statue appreciate in value?Or is it the
reputation of the actress that has cachet?
That Oscar is
13.25 inches tall and weighs 6 pounds, 2 ounces.The plaque on the base is engraved:
“Academy First Award
To
Joan Crawford
For Her Performance In
'Mildred Pierce'”
It was described by Christie’s auction house to have, “Light speckling and
rubbing to finish and scattered chips to base, else near fine.”In other words, it had flaws.But was still, like Crawford's body of work, “near fine.”
The souvenir program from that March 1946 ceremony
at Grauman’s Chinese Theater was also auctioned off, and expected to fetch
between $80 and $120.It sold for $875.
In 1970, right around Trog and before her self-imposed exile from the public view to the
confines of her New York apartment, she participated in an interview with David
Frost on his television show.With an
expression that seemed to indicate she had re-lived that bedside Oscar win many
times in her memory, she remarked as if still enthralled:
“I don’t think the public knows what the Oscar means to us.It is one of the most emotional things that can
ever happen to a human being.”
