Joan Crawford (left) and Bette Davis (right)
Adult melodrama figurehead Joan Crawford gripped cinema screens and audiences with her indomitable, seductive intensity. Meanwhile, iconic, eagle-eyed acting powerhouse Bette Davis reigned for nearly two decades as the favorite choice of Warner Bros. for turbulent and explosive cinematic narratives. While possessing many similarities, the two actresses were vastly different in their approaches to acting and in the types of roles they brought to life on screen.
Film historian Max Alvarez leads a gloriously melodramatic journey through the volatile lives and unforgettable careers of two extraordinary Hollywood stars. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night—or two.
May 13 Possessed and Obsessed: The Films of Joan Crawford
“Joan Crawford and her camera,” said director George Cukor, director of The Women (1939). “It was the greatest love affair I have ever known.”
For legendary director Michael Curtiz, Crawford elicited audience empathy as a struggling single mom in Mildred Pierce (1945) and a stranded carny dancer in Flamingo Road (1949). For the vastly underrated Jean Nugelesco, she dazzled as a manipulative patron-of-the-arts in Humoresque (1946) and a hardened book editor in The Best of Everything (1959). For the uncompromising Robert Aldrich, Crawford endured mentally unstable relatives in both Autumn Leaves (1956) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).
Joan Crawford was not always Joan Crawford. She was born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas to parents of Irish-Swedish and French-Canadian descent. After her father abandoned the family, Crawford worked in difficult manual labor jobs before turning to professional dance as the result of winning a Charleston contest. By 1924, she was dancing on Broadway and within a year was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After appearing in over a dozen silent films, MGM recristened her “Joan Crawford,” and a star was immediately born. Although Crawford was put through the paces at the studio by such accomplished directors as Tod Browning (The Unknown, 1927), Sam Wood (Paid, 1930), Clarence Brown (Possessed, 1931), and Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel, 1932), her truly great roles came only after she left the studio in the early 1940s to command less glamorous parts.
May 20 Dangerous Deception: The Films of Bette Davis
“I was the female Marlon Brando of my generation,” wrote Bette Davis in her 1962 memoir, The Lonely Life. Indeed, this specialist in high-octane film dramas flourished during the Golden Age of Hollywood when studios catered to women moviegoers and women moviegoers responded in droves.
Davis was fearless on screen, never reluctant to compromise her unconventional good looks with frightful or unflattering makeup if the role called for it. For her hospital sickbed appearance in 1934’s Of Human Bondage, Davis truly looked deathly. For The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex (1939), she agreed to shave her head to accommodate the demands of the Queen Elizabeth cosmetics. And who can forget all that frightful makeup for her Baby Jane Hudson?
Unlike most women film stars, Davis was not pigeonholed into portraying only heroic or sympathetic parts. Director William Wyler brought out her brilliant best as an aspiring homewrecking Southern belle in Jezebel (1938) and not one but two husband-killers in The Letter (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941). Eventually Bette Davis’s unstable and destructive characters won her a major following that has endured to this day. Whether dominating the proceedings as hardened Broadway diva Margo Channing in All About Eve or stealing her scenes as Joan Crawford’s caregiver-from-hell sister in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the firestorm known as Bette Davis continues to rage in our cinematic memories.
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