February 19, 2008

Absolute Artifice: A Movie Star of the Old School
By DAVE KEHR

More than 30 years after her death, Joan Crawford continues to exert a fascination that has little or nothing to do with her gifts as an actress, a fact that is one working definition of the term “movie star.”

Crawford was an almost entirely artificial creation, from top (those painted-on eyebrows and wide-open eyes) to toe (a tiny woman who began as a dancer, she learned to carry herself effectively en pointe to create an illusion of height).

And yet the illusion was never quite convincing: behind the assertive, aristocratic bearing of “Joan Crawford” audiences had no difficulty discerning Lucille LeSueur, the anxious, highly self-conscious working-class girl born to a single mother (her father left before she was born) in San Antonio. She is always trying too hard: enunciating her words too carefully in hopes of hiding her native twang; moving with a too-studied precision meant to show off her superlative legs; or fixing the camera with that unblinking stare, intended to suggest an alluring hauteur but just as expressive of borderline panic.

Did her public find her duality reassuring, an implicit promise that they too could ascend to the heights of glamour and fame with enough determination and just the right eyeliner? Crawford’s most successful films make her artificiality part of the story line, exposing the device even as they celebrate the illusion.

The second volume of Warner Home Video’s “Joan Crawford Collection” draws on her studio years as a contract player for MGM (1925 to 1943) and Warner Brothers (1944-1952), only the first two acts of her extraordinarily long career. The oldest film in the new collection is “Sadie McKee” (1934), directed by the self-effacing (frequently to the point of invisibility) Clarence Brown.

Here, at the pinnacle of her first period of stardom (and in her last film before the enforcement of the Production Code would rein in her complicated sexuality), she is already playing a thinly disguised version of herself, which readers of the fan magazines would have recognized immediately. Her character, Sadie, is the daughter of a cook (Crawford’s mother was a waitress) who, thanks to the transformative powers of show business (like Crawford, she becomes a nightclub dancer), is allowed to stride across the barriers of class and marry the millionaire son of her mother’s employer (Franchot Tone, soon to become Crawford’s second husband).

Yet Crawford’s bearing throughout “Sadie McKee” is that of the born aristocrat (a visitor to the household identifies her as a “thoroughbred” before he sees her in her maid’s outfit), and the film makes no attempt to dramatize her transformation from servant to mistress of her own palatial home. That story, as the film’s makers and, no doubt, Crawford herself must have realized, could be read in her face.

The three middle films in this set find Crawford working with major directors, whose personal styles trump her own. In Frank Borzage’s allegorical “Strange Cargo” (1940), she is a cabaret “hostess” with a heart of gold who joins a group of prisoners (Clark Gable, Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas) in escaping from a French penal colony with the help of a Christ-like stranger (Ian Hunter).

In “A Woman’s Face” (1941), directed by George Cukor, she is a petty criminal transformed into a great beauty by a plastic surgeon (Melvyn Douglas), with unfortunate results: her new face allows her to be drafted into a plot to murder a 4-year-old boy. The film is more intriguingly odd than artistically successful, though it did reunite Crawford with Cukor, her favorite director.

Charlotte Chandler, in her sympathetic new biography of Crawford, “Not the Girl Next Door” (Simon & Schuster), suggestively quotes Crawford as saying, “If I could have selected a man to be my father, he would have been George Cukor.” He didn’t just help her to do better in the films, she says, “but he helped me to be me.”

And in “Flamingo Road” (1949), a Warner Brothers attempt to recapture the Oscar-winning lightning of “Mildred Pierce,” she is a carnival dancer who confronts a sadistic small-town political boss (Sydney Greenstreet), though her performance recedes into the visual splendor of Michael Curtiz’s deep-focus compositions.

Crawford reasserts her personal authorship with the bizarre “Torch Song” (1953), a harsh self-portrait that seems to anticipate the monster portrayed in “Mommie Dearest,” the devastating 1978 memoir by Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina. Crawford is in full gorgon mode as Jenny Stewart, a Broadway musical star whose compulsive dedication to her craft has transformed her into a castrating terror at home and in the rehearsal hall, at least until she is improbably redeemed by a saintly blind pianist (Michael Wilding, with an idiot grin meant to suggest inner goodness).

There are lines in the screenplay that sound like quotations from Ms. Chandler’s book, though pronounced with extra theatrical intensity: “The first time I ever sang, I fell in love with the audience. I’ve been in love with the audience ever since. I’m going to give them the best that’s in me, no matter who, what or when tries to stop me.”

Apparently, the best that’s in her is a grotesque production number, “Two-Faced Woman,” which Crawford performs in blackface (to a recording originally made by India Adams for a number cut from “The Band Wagon”).

Though weakly directed by Charles Walters (you yearn to see what Douglas Sirk would have done with the vibrantly contrasting hues of Crawford’s dressing gown and bedroom set), “Torch Song” remains the last great expression of the Crawford myth: behind the brassy facade, we find once again the frightened little girl, who must turn to her working-class mother (Marjorie Rambeau) for comfort and guidance.

As she aged, Crawford seemed to become more comfortable in her own skin. The best of her late performances — in Nicholas Ray’s 1954 “Johnny Guitar” and Robert Aldrich’s 1962 “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (in which she watches a clip from “Sadie McKee”) — contain an element of self-parody that suggests that she was finally able to relieve herself of the burden of her obsessive drive for perfection. At least, that’s the only imaginable happy ending for this great and terrible star. (Warner Home Video, $49.98, not rated.)