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...
