Sudden Fear

Sudden Fear (1952) is a Joan Crawford vanity picture that manages to be reasonably entertaining, if irritating -- Crawford is featured in almost every shot, frequently in enormous close-up.  The diva acts as if "fit to tear a cat", but she's not really very expressive -- her face is an abstract, mostly immobile wide-eyed mask; as someone once said in another context:  her performance runs the gamut from A to B. The film is extraordinary in some respects -- it's one of the few movies to directly acknowledge and exploit the ghastly appearance of its leading man, Jack Palance.  Palance is a goblin but his bizarre looks are generally taken for granted in other films in which he performs, just part of the equipment of a character actor specializing in heavies (this is the part, for instance, he plays in Shane).  Sudden Fear is a "beauty and the beast" story and Palance's uncanny features are, in fact, thematic to the film.  This is dramatized in the opening sequence in which Crawford, playing the part of an ultra-wealthy heiress and successful Broadway playwright, orders the director of her upcoming romance, in rehearsals, to fire Palance -- "he doesn't look like a romantic leading man," Crawford opines and, indeed, no truer words have ever been spoken.  Palance's character tells Crawford to go to San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor Art Museum to see a portrait of the great lover Casanova -- his point is that Casanova was an unprepossessing man with a large wart on his chin and that great lovers are, often, rather homely and plain-looking.  (Palance isn't just plain-looking; he's as scary as a movie monster).  I characterized this film as "beauty and the beast" but, in fact, it's better described as "the beast and the beast" -- Crawford is strange-looking also with glaring eyes under midnight black eyebrows and a sort of cardboard cut-out figure that is strangely formal and not sexy at all.  Both Crawford and Palance, accordingly, are Hollywood monsters -- it is unchivalrous to note that Crawford was 47 when she ramrodded through this project, an unabashed vanity production.  

Although Joan Crawford and Jack Palance have names in the convoluted plot of Sudden Fear, I can't remember them and, indeed, there's no point to referring to the characters using their sobriquets in the film -- so I'll just retain the usage of calling the stars, in this star vehicle, by their actual names.  After insulting Palance, Joan Crawford leaves Manhattan by train, traveling to her home (actually, at least, two homes) in San Francisco.  Palance turns out to be on the same coast-to-coast train and he courts Crawford, winning her heart during their several days of travel.   The movie is shrewd about concealing Palance's motives -- perhaps, he really loves her or, maybe, this is an elaborate scheme to punish her for firing him from the Broadway show.  In San Francisco, the couple continue their love affair and, in fact, Palance marries the playwright.  But, it turns out that Palance has a hussy on the side, Irene, played by Gloria Graham.  (Graham envisions the role as a sort of pre-pubescent nymphet; she's a sexualized brat.)  Irene and Palance plot to murder Joan Crawford before she can convey her enormous inherited wealth to some kind of non-profit foundation -- she wants to live solely on the proceeds of her plays.  The scheme to murder the playwriting heiress ends up being recorded by a dictation machine in Crawford's mansion and, of course, she hears her husband and his whore conspiring to the kill her.  At this point, the script, never particularly persuasive in the first place, goes off the tracks.  Crawford doesn't flee or report the murder plot to authorities; instead she contrives an elaborate plot of her own to kill Palance and pin the murder on Irene -- we get a fantasy-version of the plot complete with Irene being sentenced to death for the murder of her paramour.  This plan is too complicated to be executed successfully -- it involves carefully forged letters setting up assignations, a written time-table composed in 10 minute increments, Crawford dressing so as to imitate Irene's garb, and all sorts of other tricks and strategems.  At the last moment, Crawford can't bring herself to gun down Palance.  She ends out on the empty, mountainous streets of San Francisco, darting through an elaborate chiaroscuro of expressionistic alleys and lanes with Palance hunting her in a big boat of a car.  This is a spectacular tour-de-force involving glaring lights, dense darkness, canted camera angles, and very deep focus with figures fleeing across the remote background of empty urban landscapes -- all de Chirico's "Mystery and Melancholy of the Street" but with figures playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game in the shadowy arcades and plazas.  

I've called Sudden Fear, a vanity project for Joan Crawford.  There are three set-pieces featuring her emoting in big close-ups.  These sequences are unduly protracted and exist solely to allow Crawford to exhibit her acting chops.  In the first scene, Crawford voicelessly reacts to hearing Palance and Irene plotting to kill her.  Her eyes dilate, she breathes like a creature that is being relentlessly hunted, darting about in confusion, and, at last, simulates nausea (albeit in a very lady-like way) fleeing off-screen to vomit.  In the second protracted sequence, Crawford struggles with herself as to whether she should shoot Palance -- again, she's wide-eyed, anguished, clutching at herself.  The sequence just goes on and on.  At last, in the final shot, Crawford walks toward the camera that tracks with her:  we see her grief and horror become resignation and, then, transformed into something like triumph or, at least, resolute and courageous determination -- it's intended as a showpiece.  The script is overly intricate and profoundly implausible.  There are a number of red herrings or just downright errors in the scenario:  a bottle of poison is introduced into the film but not used and there's a scary winding set of steps without guardrail that lead fifty feet down  from a castle-like villa on the Bay to the stony rocks in the harbor -- but no one gets pitched off the steps.  Palance says that he's never been to San Francisco -- if this is true, how did he know about the picture of Casanova in the museum at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.  Palance's face is one of cinema's great, disturbing icons:  he's like an animate jack-o'-lantern, his taut skin stretched to the breaking point, a caricature of movie-handsome that is, in fact, hideous with a profile that looks like Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.  Mike Connors, credited as "Touch" Connors, later famous as TV's Mannix, has the thankless role of Irene's escort and ostensible boyfriend -- of course, she's really having sex with the monstrous Palance (Connors' cliche good looks are not as intriguing as  the mug on Palance's monster); the poor guy is perpetually teased by Gloria Graham's perverse Irene but, always, comically rebuffed.