The Damned Don't Cry!

The antihero may be a modern icon, but long before we had Tony Soprano, Walter White or Don Draper, we had Joan Crawford. Sure, she was ostensibly Lane Bellamy, Jenny Stewart or Myra Hudson but, really, she was Joan Fucking Crawford. She became the star of a series of Cinderella stories where there's no fairy godmother, just Joan being her own wicked witch, magicking herself from downtrodden to divadom. The Damned Don't Cry! is one such tale.

The criminal milieu and hardboiled characters also place it at the edge of noir, while the rags-to-riches, plain-to-fancy plant it as a classic women's picture. The Damned Don't Cry! contains many classic Crawford tropes, from the opening ditching of the small town to the noble self-sacrificing finale. In between, there's plenty of what you go to Joan Crawford for: Modeling designer fashions, dining in fancy restaurants, laughing at threats and, more than anything, slapping people around and telling motherfuckers off.

So, we open with a body being dumped in the desert. It's the corpse of George Castleman, an infamous gangster. When the police visit his stunning mid-century home, they find a series of home movies of "the fabulous woman who chose to call herself Lorna Hansen Forbes."

They go to her stunning mid-century home and find a large bloodstain on the carpet but no Lorna. It seems she is the "widow of Wyoming oil magnate, Denver socialite, Texas heiress" or... something. It begins to occur to everyone that they actually have no idea who she is or where she came from.

But the lady and her mink are driving to a shack in the middle of nowhere, where she is angrily received by some hostile old people who live their lives in an intense state of chiaroscuro. "Darling of cafe society" Lorna Hansen Forbes is really slag from nowheresville Ethel Whitehead and it's flashback time. Crawford puts up with her backwater town and worthless husband, her cramped house and her mean dad, but when her little boy gets run over by a truck, well, there ain't no point in staying. And so, the trademark Joan Crawford "I'm blowing this burg" moment comes...

(Hey, at least she gets out, Bette Davis spends all of Beyond the Forest being far more vicious than Joan and she never gets beyond the train station.)

Anyway, Joan heads for the big city, turns down a job as a maid, gets a gig at a cigar stand, flashes the seams in her nylons and winds up with one of those Garment District fashion house dress-modeling gigs where you show off the necklines and the peplums and make nice with out-of-town buyers. (Think Dorothy Parker's "Big Blonde.")

But, of course, our girl is better than this. She latches onto a meek accountant and, somehow through her Joan Crawford superpowers, turns him into a well-paid accountant for the mob within about six hours. Sure, he doesn't like the idea, but if he wants a slice of Crawford, he's gotta pay up for the pie.  

But, of course, all of this is just a way for Joan Crawford to cuddle up to the head gangster, George Castleman. Like Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face or Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman, our heroine sees each man as just another rung to climb.

But Castleman thinks that the lady needs a little polishing...

Maybe it's not him doing that to you. Maybe it's the hat.

Thus, he recruits an aging, addled society lady to oversee Ethel Whitehead's transformation (via a year in Paris) into the wealthy and glamorous Lorna Hansen Forbes, thrower of fabulous parties and wearer of fabulous gowns, a doll worthy of such a classy guy as himself. It's all simply fine, a stone cold gas -- until Castleman begins having issues with rival gangster, Nick Prenta, and figures that the best way to keep an eye on him his send this swank dame to the West Coast to, ah... make nice.

This is where it becomes clear that The Damned Don't Cry! is based on the saga of Virgina Hill and her relationship with Bugsy Siegel, although Hill's actual story is far more interesting than what is -- or could be -- portrayed here...

... the original was quite a dish herself...

And so Joan Crawford sets herself up in a mansion in Beverly Hills and sets her sights on landing her gangster... well, the gangster her gangster has sent her after. And so she goes to the casino and looks all over...

Of course, Nick is a cocky asshole with no class but he reeks of testosterone. (And check out that head of hair!) Lorna is at first irked, but soon hooked. She forgets about her gangster back home, forgets about the spying she's supposed to be doing and the information she's supposed to be supplying...

I'm not kidding about the glorious real estate: Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs home, Twin Palms, was used as Nick's house and doesn't Joan have a fabulous time swanning around in it...

Of course, this is the world of Joan Crawford, baby, where the good times never last, but we roll with the punches. And, well, punches are something that might happen when the first gangster finds out about the second gangster. I mean, he told you to fuck him, he didn't tell you to like it.

The Damned Don't Cry! is definitely on the post-zenith side of Joan's career (and i'm not even talking about the first or second zenith, i'm talking about after Mildred Pierce, even) but it still has a bit of that old-school flash and Joan is still 100% a movie star, if not quite still the femme fatale she once was. But, with its curious mix of low-down plot and high-class finish, The Damned Don't Cry! is entertaining enough...

This Island Earth

This Island Earth: It's got everything you come to schlocky 50's sci-fi movies for!

It may look goofy now but, in its time, This Island Earth was some high-end shit. It got good reviews, especially for the visuals and the script. The cast is headed up by Howard Hughes piece Faith Domergue (He picked her up when she was 15; at 17, she rammed Hughes' car while he was out with Ava Gardner.)

The rest of the cast is your standard bunch of B-movie yahoos. Our hero is the hilariously (but actually) named Rex Reason, who looks kind of like Paul Newman's ugly, slow younger brother. We've got some aliens with big foreheads and an assortment of scientist types. And, of course, the large-brained-yet-stupid alien in MC Hammer pants.

Ah, Universal International Pictures, the mark of quality. Of course, anything that is universal is also international, one would assume... So, anyway, Ugly Newman is supposedly a scientist-pilot-genius and babbles about science but i am distracted by his oddly small hands. He flies his plane, he loses control, it turns green and hums.

All the dialogue is like this -- random assemblages of early STEM jargon... Science science compounds science. Atoms science science science electricity. Science? Science. Plutonium. Science science.

Then, the bookcase he ordered from Ikea arrives, but instead the box contains parts for something else and instructions that are even more vague than what he expected to come with the Borgsjo.

Once assembled, it seems to make a really awesome television -- sorry, an interocitor. An interocitor is an alien television that can see you, talk to you and shoot lasers at you if so inclined. The TV is a gift from a spaceman named Exeter, who wants Tinyhands Newman to join his super-scientist super-squad.

And so he gets on a plane with no seatbelts and no pilot -- kind of like Spirit, but with more leg room. He falls asleep on the flight and wakes up to Faith Domergue driving a station wagon and wearing an oil slick of lipstick.

She takes him back to "the club," where he meets the other scientists recruited by the aliens. And Exeter explains why he has been summoned here and what it is the aliens want...

Holy shit, someone tell Tom Cotton he needs to write another letter!

But Jargonbarker Newman is suspicious. Although i don't see why he should be: A group of alien beings tricked him into building a magic television and then flew him in a magic pilot-less plane to a magic science camp where scientists from all over the world are living in an isolated mansion, working on a mysterious project. None of these developments bothered him until now...

Not to mention that Exeter and his buddy Brak (no, really) seem to have ways of convincing scientists to play along, aside from beautifully landscaped grounds and a generous meal plan. And is it just me, or do Exeter and Brak seem to be some kind of varietal of Oompa Loompa? Could it be that they need all of that nuclear power to protect themselves from the Vermicious Knids?

The aliens decide to return to their home planet, but first they have to blow up the mansion and all of the scientists in it... wait, isn't that what happens in The Rocky Horror Picture Show? So they're kind of Oompa Loompas and kind of Transsexual Transylvanians?

The three scientists who managed to dodge the sunlamp lobotomy attempt to escape by car, by foot and by plane, but only  Faith Domergue and Newman make it to getting sucked up by the high-pitched humming of a hubcap...

The aliens have decided to keep the pair, since they seemed pretty close to perpetrating whatever science was supposed to be perpetrated, although i'm still not sure why it is the superior alien race needs humans to solve their engineering problems...

And finally the film picks up and heads off to space! One thing i will say for This Island Earth is, while the scenes of the spaceships and planets are by no means convincing, they do look wonderful. Nice use of color, good drawings, slick aesthetics....

This is the aliens' home planet of Metaluna, which is under attack by the Zagons (which is apparently how you say "Vermicious Knid" in Oompa Loompese) who somehow can remote-control meteors and ceaselessly bombard the surface of the planet with them.

And here comes the monster! Well, actually, a mutant. Now, this isn't a Zagon, but some kind of lower life form that serves the Oompa Loompas. Anyway, planet under attack, Earthling scientists, genius aliens, powerful-but-dumb mutants, meteors exploding everywhere... can't help but end well, really.

Like The Angry Red Planet, This Island Earth earns punk rock points for being name-checked by the Misfits. And then of course there's the comic books, action figures, greeting cards, tattoos and T-shirts. It's also gotten the MST3K treatment -- it actually ranks as one of the less goofy films in the series. Sure, it's cheesy, but it's no The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent or Amazing Colossal Man and certainly no Brain That Wouldn't Die: This Island Earth is not that level of bad. Of course, how much you (or i) consider that good remains up for discussion...