The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912-1960 by Dan Callahan

Author:Dan Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel.

Called upon to write a screenplay for Crawford in the 1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald watched some of her films and came away with these insightful remarks: “She can’t change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face, so that when one wants to indicate that she is going from joy to sorrow, one must cut away and then cut back. Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as ‘telling a lie,’ because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British.”

In her best films, Crawford is allowed to totally immerse herself in one emotion and then the camera cuts to allow her to do another emotion. A total creature of the cinema, she was never tempted to work in live theater. Crawford can’t do two or three things at once as some performers can, but it could be said that no one else plunges into single emotions as extravagantly or fully as she always did. She can’t do transitions, but she can sustain one extreme mode of feeling for as long as necessary or possible. As an older woman, Crawford made a specialty of being in one emotion, getting tempted briefly by another one, and then returning decisively to the original emotion, which is maybe part of the obsessive-compulsive side of her persona.

After Dancing Lady (1933), a star vehicle with all the trimmings where Gable was again her leading man and she got to dance, theoretically, with Fred Astaire, Crawford finished out the 1930s with a series of formula films where her exaggerated Adrian clothes and ever-changing hair styles seemed to be more important than her scripts, directors, and co-stars. This is her least interesting period as a star, a kind of cinematic desert of light cocktail comedy-drama.

As if to compensate, she took the business of being a movie star off-screen more seriously than ever. “Even in her bath, Joan Crawford looked as if she were about to make a public appearance, just in case a crowd happened to drop by,” said columnist Radie Harris. She married Franchot Tone and tried to attain some culture to suit him, reading Shakespeare plays aloud at home and then going to the studio to do fluff like No More Ladies (1935) and The Bride Wore Red (1937).

On radio, Crawford actually attempted to do Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which she plays fairly well until the last scene, where she flat-out doesn’t seem to understand why Nora has to leave her husband. On screen, her eyelashes got longer and her voice got more strained and syrupy, until finally she was named, with Hepburn and Dietrich and a few others, box office poison.

There was a steady stream of men in her life, including a 17-year-old Jackie Cooper. “She was a very erudite professor of love,” Cooper wrote in his memoirs. “She was a wild woman. She would bathe me, powder me, cologne me.

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