THE DAMNED DON'T CRY: Blu-ray (Warner Bros., 1950) Warner Archive

 Joan Crawford topped out the best years of her silver age at Warner Bros. with Vincent Sherman’s The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), at times, an absorbing melodrama about a common frump who aspires to the good life and gets it with reprisals and regrets served up in equal portions along the way. For Crawford fans, The Damned Don’t Cry is, quite simply, a deliciously over-the-top amalgam of everything about the actress and her movies made famous throughout her lengthy career, with Crawford already, arguably, past her prime, still clawing her way to the top, using unsuspecting average Joes and high-profile thug muscle to get ahead - lying, conspiring and nearly dying her way to the inevitable conclusion, faced by all unrepentant gold diggers forced into redemption before the final fade out. The Damned Don’t Cry is, among its many other attributes, a wickedly amusing, ripped from the headlines, thriller/mystery with Crawford as its most ravishingly unromantic and fiery enigma: Lorna Hanson Forbes…or is it Ethel Whitehead? That birth name always reminded me of a pimple about ready to pop.

Crawford could see the writing on the wall at Warner Bros. by the time she made The Damned Don’t Cry. It had been a fabulous run, beginning with her Oscar-winning turn as Mildred Pierce, five years earlier, followed by an uninterrupted string of screen smash hits – and this, at a time when the studio’s own diva, Bette Davis was comparatively faltering in her career. It must have stuck in MGM’s L.B. Mayer’s craw, he had unwisely assessed Crawford as all washed up and very prematurely cut her loose from her indentured contract after a nearly twenty-year reign as his shop girl makes good. Jack Warner was a gambling man, however, and offered this seemingly exiled Hollywood royalty a chance at a comeback. And a chance was all Crawford needed. In hindsight, Crawford and Warner Bros. were tailor-made for one another. Whereas Crawford at MGM had been the glamorous clothes horse and mannequin, stylized all out of proportion and perpetually cast as the struggling working-class gal, Crawford at Warner Bros. became the deceptively enterprising gal who triumphed over adversity in a string of incredibly dark and brooding, noir-ish melodramas. Crawford had but one request for Jack Warner before the ink had dried on her contract, “No more goddamn shop girls!”

Warner would honor that request. The Damned Don’t Cry doesn’t take Crawford quite so far back to the shop. But it does start her off in the sticks of some near-forgotten mining town, married to the rather uncouth blue-collar boob, Roy (Richard Egan), and put upon by her brutally embittered father, Jim (Morris Ankrum).  After the death of their only son, Tommy, killed by a passing truck while riding the bicycle Ethel bought him against Roy’s strenuous objections, Ethel decides to leave her husband. After all, what is there to keep her perpetually aproned to this little life any longer? “Let her go,” Jim cynically tells Roy, “She’ll find out what it’s like out there,” to which Ethel as cruelly replies, “Whatever it’s like, it’ll be better than what’s here!” And indeed, for a brief wrinkle in time, what Ethel finds is better. She gets a job modeling clothes for dress manufacturer, Grady (Hugh Sanders), who also tries to pimp her to his out-of-town buyers. It’s no sale, at first. But then, Ethel is taken under the wing of fellow ‘model’ – Sandra (Jacqueline deWit) who informs her there is plenty of extra cash to be made by being ‘nice’ to these boys after hours. Pretty soon, ‘being nice’ hardens Ethel to the ways of the world. She discovers Sandra has been skimming off the top from their money made as prostitutes and decides to even the score, taking a bigger cut on their last outing before dissolving the partnership once and for all.

All is not lost. Ethel affixes her star to Grady’s accountant, Martin Blankford (Kent Smith) who is also cooking the books for bigtime organized crime leader, George Castleman (David Brian). Seeing no future in keeping her self-respect (“Self-respect is what you tell yourself you’ve got when there’s nothing else!”), Ethel decides to trade up for one of Castleman’s hotheaded goons, Nick Prenta (Steve Cochran), going places - or so he thinks - and destined to double-cross and take over Castleman’s underworld empire. It all gets a lot seedier as Lorna sets up digs as a fashionable socialite in Arizona, ‘marketed’ by the wealthy society matron, Patricia Longworth (Selena Royale) and newly rechristened Lorna Hanson Forbes. Giving lavish parties for Nick and his buddies, and making the rounds, no more as the gal most likely to succeed, but as the grand diva of this maison, Lorna gets reintroduced to Castleman who is now operating in Vegas as Joe Caveny. Things heat up, at least sexually, between Joe and Lorna even as she continues to two-time him with Nick who is planning to wipe Joe off the face of the earth. But Joe isn’t about to let either Lorna or Nick get away with murder.

It’s really rather delicious to watch Crawford who, behind closed doors, was having an on again/off again affair with director, Vincent Sherman throughout the making of The Damned Don’t Cry, chew up and spit out her male counterparts in this movie – the ravenous man trap or queen bee to whom all are subservient and disposable. Martin is a congenial enough fellow. But he utterly lacks the gumption to transform himself into the sort of money man Ethel craves. She tries Castleman on for size but gravitates toward Nick because underneath his slick façade he’s a scrapper, just like her. The new money and new name are as thin as ice and just as cold. The Damned Don’t Cry is based on a story – Case History by Gertrude Walker, slightly ‘cleaned up’ by screenwriters, Harold Medford and Jerome Weidman to satisfy Hollywood’s self-governing code of ethics and very loosely based on gangster moll, Virginia Hill’s complicated romance with real-life Vegas mobster, Bugsy Siegel. So, how long will it be before Castleman discovers Lorna and Nick’s affair? The blood-stained carpet, unearthed by police at the start of the picture, inside the fashionable desert bungalow Ethel/Lorna shares with Patricia Longworth seems to suggest he has already exacted his revenge. But then a mysterious body turns up in the desert and the police begin to suspect the elegant Ms. Forbes is more the culprit than the patsy.

Only the ending of The Damned Don’t Cry rings untrue, as a moderately repentant Lorna slinks back to the mining shack she once shared with Roy, hiding out and proving Jim was right all along, at least until Castleman can track her down, with good guy Martin belatedly coming to her rescue. Martin is the eleventh-hour redeemer, saving Ethel from Castleman and a complete slippage back into the muck and mire from whence she emerged not so very long ago.  Crawford is at the top of her game in The Damned Don’t Cry. In just a little over 90-mins. she effortlessly morphs from besieged martyr and matriarch to enterprising femme fatale, and finally, into the remorseful ‘good girl’ that, arguably, she used to be before marrying Roy. But it is really kind of sad to recall how Crawford toppled from this ‘god spot’ at Warner Bros. barely a year later, the studio investing in some high-profile properties that failed to gel or reinvent Crawford’s reputation yet again – the net result, the cancelation of her second studio contract and another move, this time, over to Columbia for an even more uneven string of hits and misses.  Although the screenplay for The Damned Don’t Cry runs the gamut of contrivances borrowed from nearly every Joan Crawford hit from the forties, there is enough original snappy dialogue to fuel the picture as a stand-alone. The Damned Don’t Cry is hardly a cheat. It also contains the most startlingly un-Crawford-esque brutalization of its star, as Castleman, having confronted Lorna about her affair with Nick, ruthlessly pummels her to a bloody pulp.

Director, Vincent Sherman is a master at this sort of woman’s picture - but with a twist. Arguably, no one ever man-handled Joan Crawford. Thus, after Sherman openly admitted he would not be leaving his wife for her, Crawford gave Sherman a well-deserved slap. He reciprocated by popping her one in the mouth with his fist, sending her careening to the floor with a split lip. These backstage sparks seem to have spurred Crawford on to greatness. As with all Crawford’s movies, her performance in The Damned Don’t Cry drives the story and she proves unequivocally to be in command from the very first to the last frame. Joan Crawford has always rated very high marks for being a peerless professional. Here was an actress so attuned to her own emotions, possessing an uncanny faculty to manipulate them to suit the scene, she could cry salty tears on cue and even control out of which eye the water flowed. Too much of what has been written and debated about Joan Crawford after her adopted daughter’s hatchet job, Mommy Dearest, has revolved around the rebranding of Crawford as the maniacal and superficially preening barracuda, the soulless abuser of children and unrepentant viper who ran through husbands as easily as she deprived herself of any lasting happiness in life.

True and fair enough: Crawford likely was never happy with her station in life – either personally or professionally. Neither was her childhood nor her youth idyllic, the latch key kid who lived with her impoverished and unstable mother behind a laundry. Fame – first as the darling of the dance halls, then later, as a movie star, brought Crawford the sort of lifestyle she desperately craved. But it also unearthed the demon of her competitive nature, arguably, her most self-destructive quality.  Considering how successful she was at establishing her own ‘brand’ in Hollywood, Crawford’s misfires in private seem minimal, and yet, ever more tragic. Happiness eluded her, despite her best efforts. In the years since her death, and, following the publication of Mommie Dearest, Crawford’s reputation has remained tarnished by this falsely concocted image of the Janus-faced gargoyle, despite Crawford’s other adopted children - Cathy and Cynthia - both denying the claims as made in Christina’s tell-all as complete fabrications. In reviewing The Damned Don’t Cry shades of the Joan Crawford depicted in Christina Crawford’s scathing biography begin to emerge and further blur the lines between fiction and reality. Crawford on celluloid, and particularly in The Damned Don’t Cry, could be a ruthless and destructive force of nature. But is this really Joan Crawford as she was?

In 1953, Crawford elected to have dinner at the Brown Derby, simultaneously conducting an interview for Variety to countermand a rather brutal article recently published in Confidential Magazine (the National Enquirer of its day). At the table were three of Crawford’s former spouses: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Franchot Tone and Phillip Terry – each, apparently harboring no ill will as they smoked, ate, drank and cajoled into the wee hours. Clearly, Crawford had left an impression on those who knew her best as something better than the fighty harridan depicted in Confidential and later exorcized in Mommie Dearest.  Viewing The Damned Don’t Cry today is far more telling about where Christina Crawford might have gleaned at least part of her inspiration while penning her accounts of life with Joan. Indeed, parts of this picture seem to run a parallel course to whole chapters in that biography. Crawford never – at least until the very end, when she became a veritable recluse in her apartment – ever surrendered the impression she was a ‘star’ – first and foremost. “When I leave this apartment, I am Joan Crawford first and foremost,” she once explained to a reporter, “If you want the girl next door – go next door!”   

Fans of Crawford need never go ‘next door’ to get their fix with movies like The Damned Don’t Cry still readily in circulation. The Warner Archive’s (WAC) remastered Blu-ray brings the essential list of Crawford/Warner classics down to only one remaining to receive the hi-def glamor treatment – the shocking and exceptionally nuanced, Humoresque.  On The Damned Don’t Cry, the B&W original camera negative renders a grain-rich presentation, more naturally nuanced, with handsome amounts of fine detail, and bang-on contrast. All age-related dirt and scratches have been expunged. This looks dazzling.  The 2.0 DTS mono is adequately represented with no hiss or pop. Extras are all ported over from Warner Home Video’s now defunct DVD and include an all too brief featurette on Crawford’s style, a ‘Director’s Playhouse’ radio adaptation, and finally, an informative commentary by Vincent Sherman – the latter, well worth the price of admission. Aside: when listening to the commentary track, the audio repeatedly cuts out during the scene where Nick and Lorna share a romantic exchange. This was true on the DVD. Not sure why it was not corrected for this Blu-ray edition. But there it is. Bottom line: The Damned Don't Cry may only be 'second-tier' Crawford, but second-tier Crawford is usually better than first-tier everybody else. Highly recommended on all fronts and lots of fun to boot.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

1