- Johnny Guitar
In his review of Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, screening this weekend at the Music Box as part of the “Weepie Noir: The Dark Side of Women’s Pictures” series, Dave Kehr calls the film “the archetypal Joan Crawford film,” which it very well could be—I actually haven’t seen it, and I’m also not that sure what constitutes an “archetypal Joan Crawford film.” Crawford’s 45-year career is among the most varied and storied of any Hollywood actress—it transcends multiple eras, stylistic shifts, and industry overhauls. Crawford is the mother of reinvention: She epitomized, according to no less an authority than F. Scott Fitzgerald, the 20s flapper spirit; she was the quintessential MGM glamor girl in the 30s, under direction of studio masters like Frank Borzage and George Cukor; and somehow, she rode it all to her tawdry, Grand Guignol phase of the 50s and 60s. Crawford’s career trajectory makes sense logistically—the camp qualities of her later career do correlate with some of classic Hollywood’s whimsical appeal—but how does one exactly pinpoint a single career- and style-defining performance in a body of work so diverse? Why not point to a few? Here are my five favorite Joan Crawford performances.
- Johnny Guitar (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1954) Crawford is the ultimate genre buster in this B movie masterpiece. Her brusque dialogue and masculine disposition reinforce the notion that audiences cannot automatically rely on genre conventions to comfort and orient them to a film—ambiguous and ambitious characterizations draw us in far more effectively than traditional narrative strategies. Crawford’s larger-than-life persona certainly helps, and of all the actors here, she’s clearly the most attuned to director Nicholas Ray’s unique rhythms, which may explain why she’s the film’s central figure, not the title character.
