Joan Crawford Collection (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Edmund Goulding/George Cukor/Curtis Bernhardt/Vincent ShermanRelease Date(s)
1932/1939/1947/1950 (October 14, 2025)Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Warner Bros. (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: See Below
- Video Grade: See Below
- Audio Grade: See Below
- Extras Grade: B+
- Overall Grade: A-
Review
A four-film set of Joan Crawford films, at least for me, is something of an endurance test. Bette Davis and James Cagney were great actors, but Crawford was a *STAR*. Rightly or wrongly, today she’s remembered best as the allegedly abusive, self-absorbed sadist of Mommie Dearest, and for the campy performances of her later career, in films as varied as Johnny Guitar, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Strait-Jacket, and Trog. But this set yields a few surprises, modest though they are.
The selection here is a bit misleading. In Grand Hotel and The Women, both MGM productions, Crawford is but one part of larger ensemble casts, though her performances are surprisingly good in both films. Possessed and The Damned Don’t Cry are more typical Crawford vehicles from her subsequent stint at Warner Bros., but it doesn’t include Mildred Pierce, her best Warners film. All four films are repackaged from earlier stand-alone Blu-ray releases.
The granddaddy of the all-star melodrama, Grand Hotel (1932) wasn’t exactly the first such film—most of the big studios made all-star musical revues not long before it, all-star musical revues during the earliest days of talkies, for instance—but there’s a clear, direct line from Grand Hotel extending especially to the ‘70s wave of disaster films, for instance. One can even see direct character connections in films like Airport and The Towering Inferno.
The five top stars here, besides Joan Crawford, are: Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore; they and slightly lesser names Lewis Stone and Jean Hersholt all get above-the-title billing. Everyone is terrific in this surefire ensemble drama—even Crawford is appealing and her acting naturalistic, the affectations that eventually made her a target of lovers of high camp hadn’t taken root yet. But it’s really Lionel Barrymore’s show; those who know him only as mean old Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life are in for a surprise with this 180-degree turn of that characterization. He’s practically a saint in this.
Adapted by William A. Drake from his 1930 play, itself an adaptation of Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel, the film is set at the exclusive Grand Hotel in Berlin, where, according to stuffy, horribly disfigured Doctor Otternschlag (Stone), “Nothing ever happens.” Yet, over the course of the story’s 24 hours or so, a heck of a lot does.
Baron Felix von Gaigern (John Barrymore) is staying at the hotel but is virtually penniless, supporting himself as a gambler and occasional jewel thief. He becomes friendly with Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore), a terminally-ill minor accountant who has decided to spend his last days living it up for the first time in his ignominious life. His former employer, coincidentally, is also staying there: General Director Preysing (Beery), a crude, dictatorial executive hoping to close a merger deal to save his company from total ruin. He hires aspiring actress Flaemmchen (Crawford) to work as his stenographer and, ahem, secretary, with designs on her that she’s not exactly refusing. Along the way, she falls in love with the Baron and through him also becomes close friends with Kringelein.
Attempting to steal her jewels, the Baron encounters the suicidal Russian ballerina Grusinkaya (Garbo), they falling in love just as her dancing career and high maintenance lifestyle seem destined to end her career. (Watching the film for the first time in 35 years, I was struck by how much ‘70s star Sally Kellerman adopted Garbo’s extravagant, theatrical gesturing.)
Grand Hotel is unmissable. Though it has its share of long dialogue scenes between various characters, director Edmund Goulding breaks these up with very cinematic camerawork, often montages showing the hotel’s telephone operators and other workers busy at their jobs or gossiping Greek Chrous-style when there’s a lull in the action. He also does a superb job at spatial relationships: the busyness of the hotel is reflected in its hive-like design. Even the words “The End” as the story concludes is done cleverly.
Garbo’s flamboyant performance might please her fans, but here she feels almost shoehorned in; stylistically she’s at odds with the other characters, though being a prima ballerina gives it some justification, one supposes. Her iconic declaration of “I want to be alone” notwithstanding, she resonates less than the two Barrymores and Crawford do. Indeed, for Crawford this was something of an opportunity to break into the top-tier of the biggest MGM stars, and she delivers. It’s sad in one sense to see her really connect with audiences in such a primal way—audience identification and all that—without any of the later career quirks that audiences laugh at and drag performers imitate. Likewise, this is one of the last films with John Barrymore at near-peak form, before his drinking turned him into something of a joke, too. The best Garbo scenes are those where she’s with him, he seemingly bringing out the best in her.
Originally released on Blu-ray in 2013, this is a good transfer of a very old film, in its original black-and-white and 1.37:1 aspect ratio. In addition to the DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono, there’s audio options in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and subtitle options in all those languages, plus Japanese and Korean. Supplements include an audio commentary by historians Jeffrey Vance and Mark A. Viera; the making-of featurette Checking Out: Grand Hotel (12 minutes); newsreel footage of the film’s premiere at Hollywood’s Chinese Theater; Nothing Ever Happens, a 2-reel parody of the feature; Just a Word of Warning theater announcement; and a trailer for this and Week-End at the Waldorf, a 1945 quasi-remake.
GRAND HOTEL (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): A/A-/B+/A-
Touting an all-female cast with more than 130 speaking parts, The Women, based on the 1936 play by Clare Boothe Luce, is no proto-feminist story, even in the hands of screenwriters Anita Loos and Jane Murfin. As its opening titles suggest, the women of The Women are likened to wild animals (a snarling black cat, a leopard, etc.), these mostly frivolous socialites having nothing better to do than spread vicious gossip about one another, steal away each other’s husbands, and get into the occasional cat-fight.
At the center of this whirlwind of activity is Mary Haines (Norma Shearer), the contented mother of Little Mary (Virginia Weidler) and wife of the never-seen Stephen. Mary’s idyllic world of family harmony and material comfort is shattered when Mary’s garrulous cousin Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) goes to a ritzy beauty salon to get the latest nail color, “Jungle Red,” only to have manicurist Olga (Dennie Moore) gossip about how Mary’s husband has been “stepping out” with perfume counter girl Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford). Sylvia virtually orgasms over this salacious bit of news, salivating while lunching with unsuspecting Mary, Sylvia cruelly setting up an appointment for her with Olga, hoping the loose-lipped manicurist will unwittingly tell Mary the same news about Stephen, as indeed she does. Mary is shattered by the revelation.
Crawford’s part as the avarice potential homewrecker occupies maybe 15 minutes of the overlong 133-minute film’s screentime, but she uses it well. With Crystal utterly lacking in scruples, the audience takes an immediate dislike to her and truly loathes her by the end. Yet despite its big cast of names, the picture belongs entirely to the unconventionally beautiful Norma Shearer. The film’s best scenes are intimate personal conversations—between Mary and her husband over the phone, between Mary and her daughter—which resonate with their universality. Shearer is very good in these more personal, emotionally truthful moments. Out of her league in pictures like Marie Antoinette and Idiot’s Delight, roles like everywoman Mary in The Women played to her strengths.
The rest of the cast is variable. Cukor encouraged Russell to play her part broadly, but they go way overboard; she’s like something in a Tex Avery cartoon. Joan Fontaine, as the youngest of the grown women, is fascinating to watch. Her screen persona not yet formed, her looks and mannerisms look less like the Joan Fontaine that immediately followed in pictures like Rebecca, and more like Bridget Fonda during the 1990s.
The film not only found room for virtually every woman on the lot, but bit players from all around Hollywood. Part of the fun of The Women for film buffs is identifying the actresses playing these myriad fleeting bits. Among them here are Virginia Grey, Three Stooges foil Dorothy Appleby, Gladys Blake, Marie Blake (Grandmama from The Addams Family), Carol Hughes and Pricilla Lawson from the Flash Gordon serials, Butterfly McQueen, Barbara Pepper and others.
The six-minute Technicolor fashion show is included in this otherwise black-and-white film. It really doesn’t add anything but running time, but as a time capsule of women’s fashions circa the late 1930s it’s interesting, though throughout the film are equally outrageous over-the-top designs for the various socialites, especially when a gaggle turn up at a Reno, Nevada dude ranch—Marjorie Main awaits—while they play out their divorces.
Originally released in 2014, this Blu-ray disc offers a strong transfer of the 1.37:1 standard film, with a DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track that’s okay. Optional English subtitles are provided on this Region-Free disc. Extras are mostly up-rezzed shorts: From the Ends of the Earth and Hollywood: Style Center of the World are one-reel shorts only vaguely related to the feature presentation. One Mother’s Family is a one-reel cartoon about a mother hen and her chicks. Alternate Fashion Show Sequence is a different insert, in black-and-white and with different staging, its exhibition purpose not entirely clear. Trailers are included for this and the 1956 musical remake, The Opposite Sex.
THE WOMEN (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): A-/A-/B+/B+
Possessed (1947) is a pretty good noirish psychological melodrama. Crawford’s acting affectations were definitely starting to take root by this time, but in this case, it sort of complements her character, a deeply obsessive, quasi-schizophrenic hearing voices and having hallucinations.
The story opens in downtown Los Angeles, where zombie-like Louise Howell (Crawford) wanders into a small restaurant, she vaguely looking for someone named David. Taken to the psychiatric ward of General Hospital, Dr. Willard (Stanley Ridges, of To Be or Not to Be) gradually learns her identity and story via flashbacks.
Sometime earlier, while working as a nurse to the ailing wife of wealthy oil man Dean Graham (Raymond Massey), Louise was having a love affair with engineer David Sutton (Van Heflin) at a nearby cabin. However, while she’s passionately in love with David and wants to marry him, he views the relationship as a casual fling, Louise’s clinging behavior spurring David to end the affair. He soon leaves for Canada after being hired by Graham.
Soon after, police discover the body of Graham’s wife at the bottom of a lake, spitting distance from Graham’s mansion and lakeside dock. He believes she committed suicide while an inquest rules the death accidental. Graham’s young adult daughter, Carol (Geraldine Brooks) arrives at their home in Washington, D.C., she concerned that her father may be having an affair with Louise, and that she may have been responsible for her mother’s death. For his part, Graham unexpectedly proposes marriage to a surprised Louise, who accepts, possibly hoping David, now staying at the Graham home, will become jealous. However, soon after Louise begins to suspect that David is zeroing in on a receptive Carol. In her increasingly troubled mental state, for Louise this just won’t do.
Possessed is mostly quite good, especially the first-half of the picture, with its moody prologue in downtown Los Angeles—Louise even encounters the city’s now-long-gone Red Cars—and the early scenes with Louise and David are credibly, emotionally honest. Who hasn’t been on one side of a relationship where the other party loves you too obsessively or not enough? And the business with Mrs. Graham being found dead and the ambiguity of who, if anyone, is responsible intrigues.
The picture can be forgiven for all its psychobabble hooey; the science of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment was, after all, in its infancy. One doctor even gives Louise the exact same test given to Bette Davis to diagnose a brain tumor in Dark Victory. But many of Louise’s symptoms and her growing paranoia certainly seem convincing.
The downside is the film’s overlength, and the melodramatic turns it takes in its last third, possibly at Crawford’s insistence, as she had new writers brought in mid-production, giving it little reminders of Mildred Pierce, her biggest Warner Bros.-era hit. However, there’s enough high-key dramatics of Joan maybe losing her mind, including a Petrocelli-like violent crime that turns out didn’t happen. It and similar scenes are imaginatively written and staged, though the film is a little schizophrenic itself; partly it tells its story from Louise’s deluded perspective, including a couple of hand-held POV shots, but also has a scene at the end that’s like the conclusion of Psycho, where Simon Oakland tries to explain to the cast (and audience) what it’s all about.
Originally released to Blu-ray in 2014, Warner Archive’s disc offers an impressive video transfer of this 1.37:1 standard, black-and-white film, with almost equally impressive DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono, with optional English subtitles. Supplements consist of a breathless audio commentary by Drew Casper; Possessed: The Quintessential Film Noir, a 9 1/2-minute featurette geared to more general audiences; and a trailer.
POSSESSED (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): B+/A-/A-/B-
Director Vincent Sherman’s The Damned Don’t Cry is definitely film noir, but Crawford’s protagonist sends the entire enterprise teetering toward high camp. Borrowing heavily from Mildred Pierce, it’s much more a star vehicle for her in the way John Waters’s Female Trouble (1974) is a star vehicle for Divine.
Ethel Whitehead (Crawford) suffers a life of poverty, living in near-squalor with her parents, cheap oil worker husband Roy (Richard Egan), and their little boy, for whom Ethel can’t even afford a bicycle like the other kids in the slum neighborhood. After the son is run over in a traffic accident, Ethel leaves Roy hoping for a new life in the Big City, but with no education or experience, opportunities are few and far between.
While working as a model for a dressmaker selling clothes to retailers, like the later Save the Tiger, Ethel is expected to “entertain” out-of-town buyers. Sandra (Jacqueline deWit) offers to show her the ropes (while stealing part of Ethel’s cut), but virtually overnight Ethel sheds all her morals, ruthlessly determined to swagger her way to the top.
She drags mild-mannered accountant Martin Blackford (Kent Smith, in the Whit Bissell role) with her to the home of middle-man gangster Grady (Hugh Sanders) for a job; his success with the books leads to an introduction to top man George Castleman (David Brian), a powerful gangster whose criminal network is nationwide, though he’s concerned about loose cannon Nick Prenta (Steve Cochran), a rebellious Bugsy Siegel-type. Nevertheless, through sheer bravado and force of will, she becomes Castleman’s mistress and right-hand moll.
Though slickly done with many good scenes, such as a meeting of Castleman’s underlings that’s like something out of The Godfather, Part II, Crawford unsubtle, even campy performance renders many moments with her laughable and ludicrous. She’s almost believable when Ethel is dirt-poor, Crawford looking haggard and not wearing makeup. But as a fashion model, the men all salivate absurdly at this good-looking but obviously middle-aged actress, and her transformation to streetwise semi-prostitute is absurdly abrupt. Crawford clues in her audience in the crudest possible manner: she starts chewing gum.
The picture follows the usual genre tropes well most of the time, despite several clumsy moments. During a party scene there’s an extremely awkward and grainy insert given to a bit player, taken from an odd angle besides, that seems to have no purpose until it becomes clear that a shot of the actor was needed for a later scene when one of Prenta’s torpedoes recognizes her from that earlier gathering.
Warner Archive’s black-and-white, 1.37:1 standard presentation (from 2023) is excellent, essentially flawless, with inky blanks and excellent sharpness and contrast throughout, as is the DTS-HD Master Audio (mono). As with the other features, this is supported by optional English subtitles. Supplements consist of an audio commentary track by director Vincent Sherman; a 13-minute featurette from 2005, The Crawford Formula: Real and Reel; a one-hour radio adaptation for The Screen Director’s Playhouse with Crawford and Frank Lovejoy; and a trailer.
THE DAMNED DON’T CRY (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO/EXTRAS): B-/A/A/A-
Though a mixed bag of classics and near-misses, there’s interesting and appealing material in all four films that should be experienced at least once. Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV