La intrigante

Like others on this board, I'm surprised that Joan Crawford would call "This Woman is Dangerous" her worst film. This from the woman who made Straitjacket, Berserk, and Trog?

"This Woman is Dangerous" was Crawford's last film at Warners, and perhaps she felt like she was headed downhill at Warners the way she had headed downhill at MGM. By then she was used to seeing the signs. But for the viewer, on the surface, at least, the movie is serviceable. Crawford stars as Beth Austin, a gangsteress with vision problems and a jealous boyfriend, Matt Jackson (David Brian). She goes to Indiana to have a special operation by a known surgeon, Dr. Halleck (Dennis Morgan), and the two develop feelings for one another. Knowing the good doctor's fate at the hands of her beau if she gives in, Beth resists his advances.

The film is a strange mix of romance and film noir, but the tension is always there. Phil Carey plays Brian's brother, and the two have a volatile relationship; Matt is always sure Beth has run off with another guy; the police are looking for Beth.

Pretty good, though it drags a bit.

I recorded this 1952 Joan Crawford movie because 1) I like Joan Crawford's Warner Brothers era and 2) I liked the title. After seeing this film, I think that they overstated how dangerous Crawford's character was. She is not dangerous at all. It's as if "Mildred Pierce" decided to join a crime syndicate to help recoup lost profits after the failure of her restaurant chain. Crawford plays the same type of strong woman facing hard times that she often plays.

In this film, Crawford plays Beth Austin, the head of the gang of criminals who pull off heists in high class locales. Crawford's character was specifically recruited for her class as she could get the gang into nicer locations and provide a believable front. The gang pulls off a casino heist by impersonating police officers and make off with $90,000. Crawford is also dating one of the gangsters, a man named Matt who will kill without giving it a second thought. The conflict in this film is that Crawford is losing her eyesight and must undergo surgery to try and reverse her declining eyesight before she is blind entirely. Her doctor refers her to Dr. Ben Halleck, portrayed by Dennis Morgan. Morgan is reluctant to perform the surgery, as it is experimental, but Crawford pressures him to do so, figuring that she doesn't have much to lose.

At this point in the film, the movie kind of switches gears from a noir to more of a melodrama. As Crawford works to recover from the operation, she and Morgan begin to fall in love. Crawford accompanies Morgan on a few "house calls" where she sees the empathy and kindness that he displays toward his patients and their families. She also has dinner at Morgan's home one night where she meets his adorable daughter and seems to instantly bond with her.

The tension throughout this segment of the film is whether or not Morgan will find out about Crawford's past. The FBI is on her trail as is the private detective that her boyfriend hires to keep tabs on Crawford to see if there is more going on between her and Morgan, aside from her convalescence.

This film was okay, Crawford was fine in her part and Morgan turned in the same type of dependable performance that he usually does. However, this film couldn't decide whether or not it wanted to be a noir or a melodrama, and it wasn't captivating enough to be a melodramatic noir like Mildred Pierce. While I didn't hate it, I don't think I'll need to watch this film over and over. Crawford called this her worst film. I think she has worse films out there, Ice Follies of 1939 comes to mind, but this definitely isn't among her best.

Not one of director Feist's best, but still decent. He seems to be most comfortable in a tight 60 to 70 minute format, but this one is considerably longer and tends to drag. He's never entirely in control of the mostly maudlin storyline, and never really clinches the romance between Joan Crawford's gangster moll and Dennis Morgan's benevolent eye surgeon. The movie has a hamstrung feeling, as if Feist wasn't allowed to turn loose and be as reckless as he'd like. There are stretches where it's just too stiff and well behaved.

There are some things to like about it however. David Brian is another one of Feist's single-mindedly brutal thugs to rival Lawrence Tierney in the director's earlier "The Devil Thumbs A Ride" and Charles McGraw in "The Threat" for pure undiluted nastiness. His obsessive, murderous, almost infant-like attachment to Crawford is rather disturbing. Along with brother Philip Carey (a brooding, troubling presence throughout) the Jackson brothers certainly make for a memorable pair of crooks.

Also liked the moments just after Crawford undergoes the risky operation to save her eyesight. Feist creates a rather lush feeling of disorientation here and at one point Crawford, whose eyes have been bandaged for some time, makes a perceptive comment to the effect that drifting in the dark for so long has its advantages, that one feels completely cut off from reality and all its concerns.

There's a fresh, exciting scene involving a liquor bottle ill-advisedly thrown through a speeding camper's window and the highway patrol cop it almost strikes (Feist seems to like images of roads and highways just as much as David Lynch) and Brian's fanatic last stand, symbolically taking place in a hospital operating room where Morgan is presumably performing surgery on someone to help them ... see better.

This Woman Is Dangerous marks Warner Brothers termination of the contracts of Joan Crawford and Dennis Morgan. It's a potboiler of a story at best made a lot better by the A list cast.

Joan's a woman of some class who's hooked up with gangster brothers David Brian and Philip Carey and Carey's wife Mari Aldon. After successfully pulling off a heist at a gambling casino, Joan consults a doctor about some vision problems she's having and discovers she's going blind. A really delicate operation is needed and Dr. Dennis Morgan is the guy to do it. So Joan drops out of the gang to go east to Indiana and the hospital Morgan is affiliated with.

While she's repairing her vision, Brian does something really stupid and makes the gang red hot. He kills a state trooper and then in a move I cannot understand ditches the trailer camper they were traveling in with the trooper's body. Might as well have signed a confession.

But Crawford's prints are also in the trailer though the FBI knows she was in the hospital when the murder occurred. She looks like a good bet to lead the FBI to Brian and the rest reasons FBI agent Richard Webb who was also playing Captain Midnight on TV at the same time and in the same manner. So Crawford is staked out like a bird dog.

This Woman Is Dangerous would never get a notice and would be several rankings lower if it weren't for Joan Crawford and the rest of the cast.

If it's true that JOAN CRAWFORD called this one of her "worst" films, then she is just as bad as judging her own work as Bette Davis was. Bette thought so little of "It's Love I'm After" which everyone thinks is one of the best screwball comedies of the '30s, starring Bette, Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland.

If THIS WOMAN IS DANGEROUS sounds like a lurid melodrama, it is. But it's got a lot of good things going for it. First of all, the characters are an interesting bunch--including the two rough and tough Jackson brothers (DAVID BRIAN and PHILIP CAREY), DENNIS MORGAN sincere in one of his better dramatic roles as an eye specialist who treats Crawford and eventually falls in love with her, and a plot that keeps you wondering how the whole affair is going to turn out because Brian's character is such a hot-headed guy with a gun.

Also, it never becomes sappy in the romance department nor does it have the soap opera flavor of many a Joan Crawford film. Instead, it's got an almost film noir quality about the sharp B&W photography, a good score, and other technical qualities that raise it above the norm for what looks like a low-budget Warner film. But the plot has enough interesting moments to keep viewers watching until the final shootout in a hospital while a surgery is being performed.

David Brian seems to be relishing his tough guy role (which seldom varied during his stay at Warner Bros.), and Joan Crawford gets a chance to play out all her anxieties and frustrations with her customary skill. Her career at Warners was just about to come to an end because she was dissatisfied with the scripts she'd been given after making such a strong showing during her first few years with the studio.

A good, steamy melodrama that manages to overcome the improbable story line by being directed in brisk, no nonsense style by Felix Feist, who knew how to keep the pace tight as the story builds toward a climax.