"Self respect is something you tell yourself you've got when you've got nothing else!" This cynical opinion is a line delivered by the one and only Joan Crawford to Kent Smith in the 1950 film noir "The Damned Don't Cry".The dialogue in this film has a real bite to it, which is one of the reasons why it's one of my favorite Crawford movies. But there's more to enjoy than just the dialogue. The noir look of black and white with shadows is another. It's also a movie that really moves. Most of all, there's Joan and a story that may be melodramtic but it's never boring.
Joan plays Ethel Whitehead, a mousy, browbeaten housewife in a Texas oil town. Richard Egan makes a short appearance as her domineering husband. When their little boy is run over by a truck and killed, Joan packs her suitcase and hits the road. In the big city (not specifically named but apparently New York), she discovers that her lack of job skills is a definite liability, but she knows what men want and how a woman can use her sex appeal to get what she wants from them. Just how far she goes to achieve her aims is mercifully left to the imagination. Suffice it to say that she lands a job as a model and begins to pal around with gangsters.
Then she meets mild-mannered CPA Kent Smith and makes him acquainted with her gangster buddies. He is offered a lucrative job keeping the books for a nationwide crime syndicate run by David Brian. When Smith hesitates and says he doesn't have enough nerve to take a job like that, Joan reassures him with "you don't need it - I got enough nerve for both of us."
Smith wants to marry her, but by then Joan has become Brian's mistress. "He's promised me the world and I've got to have it," she explains to Smith. When Smith gives her a hurt look, she shouts, "don't look at me like that! I can't help myself!"
Brian transforms Joan from Ethel Whitehead into Lorna Hansen Forbes, an alleged oil heiress who soon becomes a popular figure in high society. But Brian doesn't trust the man who runs the Las Vegas branch of his syndicate and needs to send someone out there to spy on him. When he decides that Joan/Lorna is just the right person for the job, she delivers my favorite line in the whole movie - "you want me to ingratiate myself with this rotten thug from a garbage pail?"
The rotten thug is the sinister but handsome Steve Cochran. Joan dutifully goes to Las Vegas and becomes his lover, but in the process she actually falls in love with him and neglects to report any of his activities to Brian. It all ends up with murder and with Joan on the receiving end of a brutal beating by Brian, who explains his violence by saying, "there's only one way to get rid of dirt. Sweep it out!"
Joan flees back to the Texas town where she started from but with Brian and reporters in hot pursuit. I won't reveal the ending, except to quote the final lines from an exchange between two reporters. Looking around at Joan's parents' house and the surrounding town, one reporter remarks, "must be a pretty tough place to get out of."
"Think she'll try again?" the other reporter asks.
"Wouldn't you?"
The DVD of "The Damned Don't Cry" contains a feature called "The Joan Crawford Formula: Real and Reel". I was surprised to learn that this movie was loosely based on Virginia Hill and Bugsy Siegel (later played by Annette Bening and Warren Beatty in "Bugsy"). The director, Vincent Sherman, reveals that Ethel Whitehead began as a 16 year old girl in the original script, but rewrites advanced the character's age after Joan Crawford decided that she wanted to do the film.
Anyway, it's a movie I highly recommend for anyone who enjoys Joan Crawford or film noir. Put them both together and they'll give you a very entertaining evening at the movies.
