Product: Sudden Fear [VHS]
Rating: 4.0
One of Joan Crawford's best roles....
Not many fans of Joan Crawford are familiar with this film, but they should be. Attractive San Francisco location shooting and a superb supporting cast featuring Jack Palance, Mike (`Touch") Conners, and Gloria Grahame, raise the bar of this exciting, nail biter noir classic, despite a rather simple and familiar plot. What's fascinating about the film is how director David Miller takes a familiar plot and presents the drama within it in a most entertaining and absorbing fashion. Crawford plays a successful San Francisco heiress/playwright, Myra Hudson, who falls for Lester Blaine (Palance), an actor who unsuccessfully auditioned for one of her plays. They eventually meet on a train back to San Francisco and after a whirlwind courtship, the two eventually get married, but after a few months into the marriage, Myra later catches on that Lester and his old flame, Irene (Grahame), intend to kill her so he can inherit her fortune.Note Director David Miller's brilliant cinematography--how he effectively telegraphs the use of ordinary objects--an initialed handkerchief, a key, a Dictaphone machine (even a small clockwork mechanical dog!), and his successful use of dissolves, light and shadow, and mise-en-scene to convey the terror and fear that not only registers on Crawford's expressive face within the frame, but is carried thru an entire scene. In this film, Crawford perhaps most successfully exhibits the strong, yet vulnerable characters she made a long career out of playing. Although the intended victim of a nefarious plot to take her life and her fortune, we see how Crawford's Myra Hudson consciously and methodically intends to turn the tables on her unfaithful paramour and his lover just as if she writing a plot synopsis outline for one of her plays.This was Palance's first "starring" role after his smallish role in the classic "Panic in the Streets" with Richard Widmark. He admirably conveys both the aura of vulnerability and deceit necessary to charm Crawford's character into believing he is her doting, loving husband. While this is not in the same league as, say, "Mildred Pierce," it should be considered as one of Crawford's better films and, as it stands, it is a superlative achievement in film noir.