Showing posts with label joan crawford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label joan crawford. Show all posts

Friday, August 03, 2012

JOAN CRAWFORD'S ACTING STYLE

Haw! I can't wait to see if the blog can handle a picture this big! I pity the people who are looking at this on a mobile phone. 

Anyway. that's Joan Crawford in a close-up from "Humoresque." Tonight I watched a TCM documentary on Crawford at John's place, and I saw a lot of pictures I'd never seen before. Seeing them provoked what I thought was a deeper understanding of Crawford's  acting style. I'll tell you what that understanding consists of, but first take a look at the pictures (below) that provoked it.  

Crawford (or her photographer) tried out a number of personas in her portraits. Any one of them represents a possible career path she might have taken. Here (above) she tries out  an innocent girl-next-door look, layered over with ambition, neurosis and intelligence.


Here (above) she's purely innocent and idealistic. I don't doubt that she could have pulled it off on screen, but I'm glad she didn't go this route. Innocent is a great look for young actors, but she wouldn't have have been able to sustain it as she got older.


Ditto the weird, hard-core sci-fi look. She's great at it, but you can only play that for so long.

She experimented with weirdness a lot. 

I think she wanted to convince the studio to make the kind of stories that favored her kind of nuanced weirdness.  Maybe she was inspired by Garbo.


All those experiments with innocence and weirdness weren't wasted, though. As her later persona evolved, she just folded these qualities into it. As time went by she developed an immensely layered screen personality. 

How would you describe this close-up expression (above) from "Humoresque?" She looks weird, innocent, mature, young, dignified, idealistic, hurt, worldly, shocked, vulnerable, steely, philosophical, kind, and potentially cruel...all at the same time! Sheeesh!


For me Crawford's best period was middle age. She'd had a lot of random nuances before that, but that's when she finally figured out how to focus them. During that period she discovered dignity. She kept the fascinating youthful nuances and allowed them to co-exist with a caricature of the kind of dignity the best people seem to acquire in mid-life. Not only that, but she bundled these qualities together in a stylized, over-the-top theatrical style. 

So that's it. That, I humbly submit, is part of the secret of Joan's midperiod acting style.




Tuesday, June 08, 2010

CRAWFORD SLAPS


 How 'bout some Joan Crawford slaps (above)? There's some real dooseys here.  Slaps are a useful dramatic device. The writing in a scene builds up to its slap, as does the performance. The worse thing a writer can do to an actor is to leave them rudderless in a scene that meanders all over the place. Slaps give a scene a direction, something to build to.



My favorite screen slap of all time is the one in "Mildred Pierce" where Crawford's daughter slaps Joan on the stairs. Crawford is completely disoriented and nearly falls off screen. No wonder...the slap was real. Crawford insisted on it. I wonder how many takes it took to shoot it?




Was Crawford tough in real life? I'm not sure. The stories are contradictory. In the interview above Arlene Dahl implies that Crawford deliberately threw her drink at her while at a dinner party. In the same interview Gloria DeHaven says Crawford unselfishly taught her a really useful vocal technique, and  tells us what the technique was.



My guess is that the real-life Crawford was usually pretty nice, but we can hope that there were exceptions. I like to think of her as the hostess in this scene (above), where she fires her maid for dropping a cup. Crawford's real life daughter Christine, author of "Mommy Dearest," claims she was just like the roles she played in "Queen Bee" and "Harriet Craig."

BTW, I think the person who uploaded this video meant to title it: "Joan Crawford Is Pissed in the Movie Entitled 'Harriet Craig.'" The present title implies that Crawford did something unspeakable to someone named Harriet Craig.



What a whiner Crawford's real life daughter was! Here (above) Christine gets the punishment she deserves by being a guest on a nightmarish Italian TV show that never lets her speak. Watch it to the end because the actor who dubbed Cliff Robertson's voice does an even more over the top vocal than Robinson.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

MORE JOAN CRAWFORD PICTURES


Aaah, Joan Crawford (above)! I don't think she ever took a bad picture. Or maybe she did and had the bad ones burned.



John K used this photo in a blog post, and I nearly fell on the floor laughing. Even when she's getting molested by her dog (above), Crawford came off looking good.



She did great angry poses (above).



She was also good at pouty scheming (above).



She had great poise. Gee, I miss that. The last time I saw that in a film was when Michele Yeow (spelled right?) came off that way in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."



Like Garbo and Dietrich she was good at looking bored (above) by the men who were always trying to paw her.

When she liked a guy, though, she throw herself into the experience, laughing at all his jokes, and hanging on his arm. A man in this position had to take a bath in kerosene to get her off. Of course the inevitable day came when she realized she'd fallen out of love and had to murder him.



I hope you're enlarging some of these pictures.



She cultivated a neurotic, confident look.



How many women could confidently wear a bosom of flowers (above)?

Crawford looked good in still photography and she had the wisdom to transfer that look to cinema. Maybe she got the idea from silent films, which seemed a little artificial and "stagey" because they took so many of their visual cues from still photography, but which had a powerful graphic impact.



Joan wasn't happy unless she was scheming.



Fortunately in real life she had the relaxation derived from sucking her children's blood....just kidding.



Sometimes her creepy pictures got a bit too creepy. The one above is genuinely scary.



As I said before, Crawford had terrific poise (above). Poise is about more than standing up straight. It has to do with style and character projection.



Even her conversational poses were stylized.


The famous legs (above). Men in the Crawford films always had to compliment them. Was that in her contract?



Crawford may be my favorite actress. You can laugh at her, but she was a great stylist.




Sunday, February 21, 2010

JOAN CRAWFORD PICTURES


Here's (above) a Joan Crawford coffee mug. Unfortunately it's been out of print since the fifties. A larger version would have made a great front piece for a car or a locomotive.



Here's (above) the tortured Joan.



Her plans for conquest have backfired, gone awry.



Joan's husband is on the other side of the bathroom door (above), lying unconscious in a bathtub that's rapidly filling with water. She steels herself to listen to his final struggle if there is one. How much will the life insurance amount to? Did she remember to wipe her fingerprints off the rim of the tub?



Huh? What's HE doing in the courtroom? I thought Big Joe paid him off!



Sometimes Crawford's characters (above) grow weary of life. When will it be over, all this game-playing? Why can't the rich just give her their fortunes? Why must she have to work so hard for them?



Poor Garfield (above) should have known better. No man can have Joan for more than a short time. She's tired of him, but he can't take the hint.



You don't mess with Joan!



You're a man, and you're head over heels in love with Crawford...pathetic, because she won't give you the time of day. Normally she looks the other way when you're around, but it's just dawned on her that maybe she can use you.



Pretty as a cupcake, but there's larceny in those eyes.



Woken out of sleep by the sound of crying (above)! It sounds like the woman she used to work for, the one she deliberately drove mad so she could marry her husband...but she's been dead for weeks now! How can it be!?



Ha! It was almost too easy! Did that plain Jane of a girlfriend really think she could keep a man like David?



Joan relaxes (above) after cheating her deceased husband's daughter out of her inheritance. She'll send the girl away to boarding school and have the fine old house to herself. Ah, life is good!



Sometimes Joan played honest but rather cold women who worked hard to get where they were. These women were nobody's fool in the business world, and they dominated the men in their personal lives...that is, until they encountered...HIM.



You can buy dolls of Crawford and Davis, the way they looked in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" The Davis doll (above) came out the best.



Above, two Crawford look-alikes . I'd say the picture on the right comes closest.

BTW: I'm a guest on the latest ASIFA Animation Archive Podcast. The URL is on the sidebar.