Joan Crawford Centenary
Classic Film Queen Crawford Would have Been 100 On March 23
It's a happy 100th to Joan Crawford , who, sadly, is preserved primarily by camp
Joan Crawford Centenary
They were tough broads all, each of the hard-headed trio who in 2007 and 2008 are being remembered for making it (if only spiritually) to the hundred year mark: Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and, this month, Joan Crawford (Crawford was born March 23, 1908.)
Camp Idol
Davis is the one whom time has left in good standing, a robust precursor of the feminist-era woman. Stanwyck, regretfully, is all but forgotten - her melodramatic style looks like unnecessary excess against today's Stanislavsky-influenced realism - while Crawford is preserved by something that is equal parts indignity and idolatry: camp.
It's a hangover from the film version of her stepdaughter's best-selling tell-all, 1978's Mommy Dearest, which reframed Crawford as a female impersonator's wildest dream: a larger-than-life castrator queen, the height of femininity powered by the lowest drives of masculinity.
A Better Tribute
As tribute, does the woman deserve better? You bet your over-made eyebrows. The plotline of Crawford's career is one of incorruptible tenacity, irrepressible reinvention, and decades-long box office monopoly. It's a long trek on determined stilettos from anonymous chorine to jazz-age poster child, then from Depression-era ingénue to middle-aged mega star - not to mention a monster movie coda prompted by the comeback smash, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Mildred Pierce
Her best remembered performance is the title role in 1945's Mildred Pierce - again, no doubt, because of the complicated mother-daughter dynamic therein that would end up mirroring her own life. Thankfully, it's just as fitting a memorial in another way, for the Crawford of Pierce is the artist at her peak, each of her idiosyncratic qualities - from her hermitic histrionics to her operatic sexuality - operating on all cylinders.
There is also, for all of the fences the Crawford style erects so expertly, a great deal of truth in her performance. Mildred, it can be argued, is part Joan, the part born of common stock and bad breaks that rose to prominence through hard work, semi-secret savvy, and, when convenient, heady samples of her feminine wiles.
Ironically, it was a part coveted by both Davis and Stanwyck. But the former would have made her too smart and the latter would have made her too soggy. In Crawford, ever-smart producer Jerry Wald and veteran helmsman Michael Curtiz found just the right balance of too-simple stubbornness and reluctant sentimentality.
The Queen
Fine then. Let her continue to be the plaything of queens. To those of us with a true appreciation for things past, she will simply be a Queen herself.
