The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (92 page)

Her parents were divorced before or soon after her birth and the mother remarried Harry Cassin, owner of a vaudeville theatre—for a time thereafter she was known as Billie Cassin. At the age of six, she spent a year in bed after an accident to her foot. Two years later her mother and stepfather separated. The family traveled and the daughter’s education suffered. In her teens, she wanted to be a dancer and she worked as a shopgirl to take lessons and enter dance competitions. She got small nightclub jobs before J. J. Shubert hired her for the Broadway chorus of
Innocent Eyes
in 1924. Spotted by Harry Rapf, in 1925 she was put under contract by MGM and made her debut in
Pretty Ladies
(Monta Bell). MGM organized a magazine contest to find her a new name and “Joan Crawford” was the winner. Her first films involved her in small, dancing parts but she won more attention in
Sally, Irene and Mary
(25, Edmund Goulding), played opposite Harry Langdon in
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp
(26, Harry Edwards), and had her first big success in
Our Dancing Daughters
(28, Harry Beaumont). She was the epitome of the flapper, but already marked for unhappiness.

Strongly backed by Louis B. Mayer, she became one of MGM’s leading ladies:
Paid
(30, Sam Wood);
Dance, Fools, Dance
(31, Beaumont), the first of several appearances with Clark Gable;
Possessed
(31, Clarence Brown);
Grand Hotel
(32, Goulding), from which she emerged more creditably than Garbo, one of her chief rivals at MGM; and
Dancing Lady
(33, Robert Z. Leonard). Despite a failure as Sadie Thompson in Lewis Milestone’s
Rain
(32), she made the transition to more sophisticated parts: Howard Hawks’s
Today
We Live
(33);
Sadie McKee
(34) and
Chained
(34), both for Clarence Brown;
No More Ladies
(35, Edward H. Griffith);
I Live My Life
(35, W. S. Van Dyke); and
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney
(37, Richard Boleslavsky and George Fitzmaurice). She still played women tainted by humble origins and blighted in love.

The similarity of parts led to a crisis, and by 1938 she was considered boxoffice poison. She was restored by two Frank Borzage films,
Mannequin
(38) and
The Shining Hour
(38), and by Cukor’s
The Women
(39), a picture that emphasized her glamorous hardness, her social disqualification, and her eventual failure in romance. After
Strange Cargo
(40, Borzage),
Susan and God
(40, Cukor), and
A Woman’s Face
(41, Cukor), her career again slumped and in 1943 she left MGM.

Despite signing with Warners, she made no film for almost two years and even took singing lessons with opera in mind. Jerry Wald asked her to return in
Mildred Pierce
(45, Michael Curtiz)—her first film as a mother, which was built around her capacity for suffering and won her an Oscar. Securing her image of a middle-aged career woman, she made
Humoresque
(47, Jean Negulesco), was very good having a breakdown in
Possessed
(47, Curtis Bernhardt), and
Daisy Kenyon
(47, Otto Preminger), the latter one of her most controlled and touching performances. But her suffering became more bizarre—in
Flamingo Road
(49, Curtiz) and
This Woman Is Dangerous
(52, Felix Feist) she ended up in jail. In
Harriet Craig
(50, Vincent Sherman), she was outstanding and prescient as a domestic perfectionist. David Miller’s
Sudden Fear
(52) involved her in genuine menace, beset by the youthful Jack Palance, but in
Torch Song
(53, Charles Walters) she had only blind-pianist Michael Wilding as a feed.

As she grew fiercer, so her films and male stars seem to have become weaker. In 1954, she made
Johnny Guitar
for Nicholas Ray, and it was all Sterling Hayden could do to stand up to her in recriminating dialogues. And in 1957 she was the horrified guardian of a raped girl in
The Story of Esther Costello
(Miller). Only Robert Aldrich subsequently rescued her from dross—in
Autumn Leaves
(56) and
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
(62), which reflects more on her life in movies than on Bette Davis’s. Not content with that ordeal, she went on to more grotesque horrors, chiefly in the hands of William Castle:
Strait Jacket
(64) and
I Saw What You Did
(65).

Much of her fictional agony was borne out in reality. After a series of failed marriages—to Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Franchot Tone, and Philip Terry—and several miscarriages, she adopted four children and, in 1955, married Alfred Steele, the chairman of Pepsi-Cola. After his death, in 1959, she became the first female director of the company and its official hostess. Her career is that of a preeminent star, digesting poor material and impressing her own image on everything. Always rising to good directors and stories, she is most herself in pulp, staring out at us with savage mouth and rueful eyes. As such, she is an icon in a woman’s magazine dreamworld—as one character refers to her in
Torch Song
, a “gypsy madonna.” Scott Fitzgerald captured its monolithic fierceness: “She can’t change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the Face.… Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as ‘telling a lie,’ because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British.” In truth, she could do much more: she was a pioneer of tough, hurt feelings—until that cause made her too bitter.

Laird Cregar
(Samuel Laird Cregar) (1916–45), b. Philadelphia
Cregar was an oddity who had a short hour at the feast. Younger than he looked and seriously overweight, he went in for fierce diets that contributed to fatal heart strain. He would not have been as interesting if lean, for he was the perfect example of shambling bulk harboring an etiolated spirit. It helps explain his high-strung menace and fastidious grossness to note that, at the beginning of his career, he had a great success playing Oscar Wilde onstage. Up to that point, he had had only small parts in movies:
Granny Get Your Gun
(40, George Amy). But after Oscar, he went to Fox and over the next five years put together some florid character studies. He could be contemporary and malicious—as in
This Gun for Hire
(42, Frank Tuttle)—but he is at his best as a cultivated man possessed by evil. He was in
Hudson’s Bay
(40, Irving Pichel);
Blood and Sand
(41, Rouben Mamoulian);
Charley’s Aunt
(41, Archie Mayo);
I Wake Up Screaming
(41, Bruce Humberstone);
Joan of Paris
(42, Robert Stevenson);
Rings On Her Fingers
(42, Mamoulian);
Ten Gentlemen from West Point
(42, Henry Hathaway);
The Black Swan
(42, Henry King); as a suave Devil in
Heaven Can Wait
(43, Ernst Lubitsch); and
Holy Matrimony
(43, John M. Stahl).

He finished with his best work, two enjoyably lurid accounts of mad genius for John Brahm: as Jack the Ripper in
The Lodger
(44), and the “composer,” George Harvey Bone, in
Hangover Square
. However, the film of
Hangover Square
is also a wretched travesty of Patrick Hamilton’s novel (in which Bone is not a composer). Cregar had urged the book on the studio; and he was mortified by the result. His friend George Sanders (who is in the film) believed that the shock hastened Cregar’s death.
Hangover Square
—for all Brahm’s style, and Bernard Herrmann’s mad music—still waits to be filmed properly.

Donald Crisp
(1880–1974), b. Aberfeldy, Scotland
Donald Crisp was a grand old man of the cinema who became increasingly endearing the more he tried to be a stern Scot. Although retired for his last ten years—since the age of eighty-three—his span was remarkable.

After Eton and Oxford, he served in the Boer War. In 1906 he went to America as an actor. By 1910, he had joined D. W. Griffith at Biograph:
The Two Paths
(10);
Fate’s Turning
(10);
The Battle
(11);
The Battle of the Sexes
(14);
The Escape
(14);
Home Sweet Home
(14); as Grant in
The Birth of a Nation
(15);
Intolerance
(16); and Battling Burrows in
Broken Blossoms
(19). As well as acting for the master, Crisp apparently worked for the British secret service during the First World War and began directing himself, for Reliance-Majestic and Mutual:
The Dawn
(14);
Ramona
(16);
The Countess Charming
(17);
Under the Top
(18);
It Pays to Advertise
(19);
Too Much Johnson
(19); and
The Six Best Cellars
(20). He worked steadily as a director throughout the 1920s, though no more than an enthusiastic recorder of such stars as Douglas Fairbanks and Keaton. Indeed, Keaton hired him for
The Navigator
(24) and found that Crisp’s experience with drama so swiftly adapted to gags that the Scot had to be restrained—there is something very appealing in “old stoneface” having to tell the eager Crisp to calm down. In addition, Crisp directed
Appearances
(21);
The Barbarian
(21);
The Bonnie Brier Bush
(21), in which he acted;
The Princess of New York
(21);
Ponjola
(23);
Don Q, Son of Zorro
(25), in which he acted;
Man Bait
(26);
Sunny Side Up
(26);
Young April
(26);
Dress Parade
(27);
The Fighting Eagle
(27);
Nobody’s Widow
(27);
Vanity
(27);
The Cop
(28);
Stand and Deliver
(28); and
The Runaway Bride
(30).

That was the last film he directed. With sound, perhaps, he found direction too complex—he was almost fifty. Thereafter, he concentrated on acting:
The River Pirate
(28, William K. Howard);
The Pagan
(29, W. S. Van Dyke); as Sigsbee Manderson in
Trent’s Last Case
(29, Howard Hawks); as Leif Ericsson in
The Viking
(29, Roy William Neill);
Scotland Yard
(30, Howard);
Svengali
(31, Archie Mayo);
A Passport to Hell
(32, Frank Lloyd);
Red Dust
(32, Victor Fleming);
What Every Woman Knows
(34, Gregory La Cava);
The Little Minister
(34, Richard Wallace);
Laddie
(35, George Stevens);
Oil for the Lamps of China
(35, Mervyn Le Roy);
Mutiny on the Bounty
(35, Lloyd);
Mary of Scotland
(36, John Ford);
The Charge of the Light Brigade
(36, Michael Curtiz);
A Woman Rebels
(36, Mark Sandrich);
Parnell
(37, John M. Stahl);
The Life of Emile Zola
(37, William Dieterle);
Jezebel
(38, William Wyler);
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse
(38, Anatole Litvak);
Wuthering Heights
(39, Wyler); as Bacon in
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
(39, Curtiz);
Juarez
(39, Dieterle);
The Sea Hawk
(40, Curtiz);
Brother Orchid
(40, Lloyd Bacon);
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(41, Fleming); as the father in
How Green Was My Valley
(41, Ford), winning the supporting actor Oscar;
The Gay Sisters
(42, Irving Rapper);
Lassie Come Home
(43, Fred McLeod Wilcox);
National Velvet
(44, Clarence Brown);
The Uninvited
(44, Lewis Allen);
The Adventures of Mark Twain
(44, Rapper);
Son of Lassie
(45, Sylvan Simon);
Valley of Decision
(45, Tay Garnett);
Ramrod
(47, André de Toth);
Challenge to Lassie
(49, Richard Thorpe);
Bright Leaf
(50, Curtiz);
Prince Valiant
(54, Henry Hathaway);
The Long Gray Line
(55, Ford); in his best performance, as the Lear-like father in
The Man from Laramie
(55, Anthony Mann);
Drango
(57, Hall Bartlett);
Saddle the Wind
(58, Robert Parrish);
The Last Hurrah
(58, Ford);
Pollyanna
(60, David Swift); and
Spencer’s Mountain
(63, Delmer Daves).

John Cromwell
(Elwood Dagger Cromwell) (1888–1979), b. Toledo, Ohio
1929:
Close Harmony
(codirected with Edward Sutherland);
The Dance of Life
(codirected with Sutherland);
The Mighty
. 1930:
Street of Chance; The Texan; For the Defense; Tom Sawyer
. 1931:
Scandal Sheet; Unfaithful; The Vice Squad; Rich Man’s Folly
. 1932:
The World and the Flesh
. 1933:
Sweepings; The Silver Cord; Double Harness; Ann Vickers
. 1934:
This Man Is Mine; Spitfire; Of Human Bondage; The Fountain
. 1935:
Village Tale; Jalna; I Dream Too Much
. 1936:
Little Lord Fauntleroy; To Mary—With Love; Banjo On My Knee
. 1937:
The Prisoner of Zenda
. 1938:
Algiers
. 1939:
Made for Each Other; In Name Only; Abe Lincoln in Illinois
. 1940:
Victory
. 1941:
So Ends Our Night; Son of Fury
. 1944:
Since You Went Away
. 1945:
The Enchanted Cottage
. 1946:
Anna and the King of Siam
. 1947:
Dead Reckoning; Night Song
. 1950:
Caged; The Company She Keeps
. 1951:
The Racket
. 1958:
The Goddess
. 1961:
De Sista Stegen/A Matter of Morals
. 1963:
The Scavengers
.