The New Yorker:

The case for Joan Crawford.

By David Denby
December 26, 2010

Must we hate Joan Crawford? The question sounds a little odd. Must we think about Joan Crawford at all? That’s perhaps a little more like it. Crawford the always posing, eternally hardworking star, with her affairs and marriages and triumphs and miseries and comebacks, inspires both exasperation and wonder. Her ferocious will to succeed seems a grim version of the life force itself. Few men go weak in the knees dreaming about her, as they might with Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth; nor is she the kind of woman men could imagine bantering with blissfully as a lover, as they might with Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck. She’s the date who raises your blood pressure, not your libido. She was always a bigger hit with women than with men, but, at this point, young women eager to emulate her drive and success may shudder. The ravenous smile, the scything broad shoulders, the burdensome distress, the important walk and complicated hair—she’s too insistent, too laborious and heavily armed, and also too vulnerable. She lacked lyricism and ease, except, perhaps, when flirting onscreen with Clark Gable, her offscreen lover and friend, with whom she made eight movies. She almost always tried too hard—it was Crawford who reportedly uttered the grammatically ambitious sentence “Whom is fooling whom?”—and she demanded that you capitulate to her vision of herself. Many people dismissed her as crazy.

Yet if Joan Crawford is not very likable she would, in a just world, be widely honored for a series of fiercely effective performances and for her emblematic quality as a twentieth-century woman. She was no feminist, but, willy-nilly, she got caught up in the dilemmas of strong women who are also the kind of highly sexual women who need men. Constantly refashioning her appearance through one era after another, Crawford was also the prototype of the modern celebrity (Madonna is the obvious heir) who places herself at the vanguard of current erotic taste and thereby becomes attractive and slightly threatening at the same time—a combination that no one can ignore. In her more than eighty movies, she played flappers, working girls, adulteresses, matrons, and, most notably, the anguished heroines of melodrama—women embracing the reality principle whose iron tenets are that life is hard, satisfaction elusive, and happiness never without cost. If there was something grindingly literal-minded and relentless about her, who could say that she ever ducked anything difficult?

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