Question. Has anyone ever filled a movie screen with cigarette smoke more authoritatively than Joan Crawford (see above)?
Well, let’s celebrate the ways audience can escape its quotidien woes by watching a darn good (and often unheralded) film. And if it happens to star a furiously puffing Crawford, so much the better.
One of Joe’s favorites is Warner Bros.’ 1950 noirish drama, The Damned Don’t Cry, starring Crawford who here is assisted by Steve Cochran and Kent Smith (he’s the match-holding guy above). Joe was pleasantly surprised that the movie was one of the top box office hits the year it came out.
Kent Smith, it should be noted, made a career out of playing plain vanilla types, but in two marvelous RKO titles produced by Val Lewton — 1942′ Cat People, directed beautifully by Jacques Tourneur, and the film’s sequel, 1944’s The Curse of the Cat People — he turns in excellent performances as a concerned husband (in the first) and loving husband-father (in the second).
In any event, we can think of few better films than The Damned Don’t Cry as unadulterated escapist entertainment.
Crawford plays an ambitious woman of uncertain backround (which generally means, poor) who dumps her tightwad husband (Richard Egan) to take up — after several sexy stops along the way — with a syndicate boss (played smoothly by David Brian). The plot is said to be based on the actual antics of notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel and moll Virginia Hill.
And, yes, Joan smokes impressively.
THE DAMNED DON’T CRY… brought to you by Chesterfield Cigarettes, that is the 1951 Screen Directors Playhouse NBC radio production, that also starred Joan Crawford and Frank Lovejoy.
Oh speaking of Lovejoy, I just saw the remastered I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI for free on YouTube. Good movie, despite the fact that very few knew at the time, that the “Communist threat” was created by the very same elite than run everything else. A charade that would see us losing all our manufacturing to China, and later be replaced by the “terrorist threat.”
THE DAMNED DON’T CRY is a good movie with a great title, taken from Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, but it was Jerry Wald a former writer turned producer, who made the picture… When Crawford was let go from MGM and signed on at Warner Brother’s, her first picture was the classic MILDRED PIERCE, and Wald produced that.
The Crawford/Wald teaming also gave us HUMORESQUE, POSSESSSED, FLAMINGO ROAD and the radio version mentioned above.
Jerry Wald was one of the best and most prolific producers of the 1940’s and 50’s, just look him up on the IMDB, and see how many of your classic favorites he made…
More than likely Wald was a smoker, but it was probably being a very hard and busy worker, that ended his life with a heart-attack at age 50.