Mujer de temple

Despite the noted critic Pauline Kael's unreasonably negative review of this film, it's a lot of fun and a good vehicle for Joan Crawford's talents. Kael described it as overwrought, but in truth it's good old-fashioned melodramatic story-telling with a smart, literate script, and refreshingly quick pacing. The only flaw that bothered me was a musical score that is, at times, laughably incongruous. (The music swells bewilderingly and ominously when Crawford benignly offers Reynolds' Political Boss something for his hangover.)

Sure, you can quarrel with the casting of Shakespearean-voiced Sydney Greenstreet playing a Southern Sheriff, but he's so unrepentently vile and villainous that he's convincing in every role he plays. It is a joy to watch two such formidable actors as Crawford and Greenstreet squaring off in big confrontations.

It's not surprising that, some 30 years later, this became the premise for a night-time soap opera starring, I believe, Morgan Fairchild. It has so many jealousies, manipulations, secret ambitions, double-crosses, plots for revenge - it's just great fun if one doesn't take it too seriously. And clearly, Crawford, Greenstreet, and the director, Michael Curtiz, didn't. They recognized the material for what it was - pulpy entertainment served up with wit and style.

Over the top melodrama that works, under the steady direction of Curtiz. Crawford is an ex-carnie, and Greenstreet is the corrupt sherrif of a small town she's chosen as her haven. He gets her boyfriend to desert her for a more respectable marriage so he can make him a senator, and after she marries a political player he's associated with, he makes life hard on both of them with a combination of blackmail muscle and frame-up push. Greenstreet is wonderfully grotesque, and all the other leads also hold up well. Nice photography in stark toned B & W.

"Flamingo Road" is one of those Joan from the other side of the tracks ending up living large film, and it's great. After how many years of doing these roles, at 45, Crawford still pulled them off with aplomb. She's wonderful to watch in this.

I remember seeing this at a revival cinema, on a big screen, and it was the first time I realized how petite a woman she was - but she always seemed so tall!

In this film, Crawford plays a ex-carny girl who takes up with Zachary Scott. Scott is the protégé of a ruthless political boss, played by Sydney Greenstreet. He turns out to be too weak-willed to do anything but stay under Greenstreet's thumb. He marries someone more proper while Greenstreet does everything he can to drive Crawford out of town.

When Crawford winds up married to an even more powerful man than Greenstreet, he seeks to destroy both her and her husband.

David Brian is excellent as Crawford's husband, as is Gladys George as a roadhouse owner for whom Crawford works briefly. Scott does register as a wimp, stripped of his romantic underpinnings in "Mildred Pierce."

And then we come to Sydney Greenstreet. You're telling me he lived five years after this film? I would have easier believed he dropped dead immediately afterward.

He looks pasty and horrendous as he downs pitchers of milk, slurs his dialogue, and laughs in a very unworldly way - kind of a hah-hah, a sharp intake of breath, and then a higher pitched laugh that sounds like a hiccup. Always a sinister presence on the screen, Greenstreet comes off as evil, all right, but also ill in this production.

"Flamingo Road" became a television series in the '80s. I'll take the original.

Trying to pass off Joan Crawford, then heading toward her mid-'40s, as a plausible nautch-dancer in the side-show of an itinerant carnival proves a misstep from which Michael Curtiz' Flamingo Road barely recovers. But, once the layers of accrued campiness that cling to it are peeled back (and once Crawford discards her Salome-like veils), the movie, far-fetched as it is, generates some interest.

Owing to unpaid bills or some such, the traveling show, in which Crawford was a steamy if not entirely fresh attraction, blows town. Sheriff's deputy Zachary Scott, sent across the tracks to make sure the whole unsavory business has packed up, finds only Crawford, listening to her radio in a mildewed tent. Sparks are struck; he invites her back to town for the blue-plate special in the local beanery and finagles a job for her there as a waitress.

His superior, corrupt sheriff Sydney Greenstreet, sniffs out the burgeoning romance and vows to quash it; he has plans to run Scott for the senate of their anonymous Gulf state (its capital is Olympic City and its capitol a lovingly detailed piece of scenery painting), prerequisite to which is a proper marriage to a bona-fide local girl. Scott glumly acquiesces to the plan, drowning his doubts in drink ("I crawled into a bottle and can't get out"), while Greenstreet frames Crawford on a morals charge and runs her out of town.

New to the mix is David Brian, boss of the state political machine, whose eye is caught by Crawford (now back in town working in the obligatory "roadhouse" operated by Gladys George). He has a whopper of a hangover ("A party's like insurance – the older you are, the more it costs," he says), which Crawford assuages with an eye-opening whiskey sour followed by a home-cooked breakfast. Never underestimate the power of a well-scrambled egg. Next thing, they're married and living in a mansion on high-toned Flamingo Road (complete with a housemaid with the voice and the brain of a parakeet, as in the earlier Curtiz/Crawford Mildred Pierce, except that this time she's not Butterfly McQueen and is, amazingly for the era, white). But Greenstreet starts pulling even filthier strings than Brian – for once, a passably good egg – can countenance. Whereupon, after a drastic development involving the besotted Scott, Crawford slips a handgun into her clutch-bag and pays Greenstreet an amicable visit....

With at least two sensational movies behind him (Casablanca and Mildred Pierce), and one ahead of him (The Unsuspected), Curtiz can be forgiven for Flamingo Road. He brings it some verve, but its identity as yet another of Crawford's rags-to-riches vehicles gets the better of him. While his star supplies some startlingly naturalistic acting (and while the uncharacteristically clean-shaven Scott and the characteristically portly Greenstreet are dependably professional), Flamingo Road has fallen, rather unarguably, into the disreputable if transfixing gulch called camp. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Flamingo Road is not the best Joan Crawford film ever done. But it surely is one of the most entertaining with a few unforgettable characters in the film. No wonder it got picked to be the basis for a night time soap opera in the Eighties.

Sydney Greenstreet is one of those larger than life characters in every sense of the word. His southern county sheriff dominates this film. I would have to say it is my third favorite Greenstreet role, next to The Maltese Falcon and The Hucksters. Joan Crawford good as she is loses all the joint scenes when she's on the screen with Greenstreet.

Joan's a carnival girl stranded in Greenstreet's town and picked up by Greenstreet's deputy Zachary Scott. Greenstreet has big political plans for Scott which include a proper marriage with some modern version of Melanie Hamilton. Virginia Huston's the girl he has in mind.

After Crawford doesn't take Greenstreet's advice and leave town, he has her framed on a prostitution rap. After doing a six month stretch Crawford is understandably wanting vengeance. She takes a job at a road house run by Gladys George where a lot of the state bigwigs meet and enjoy all forms of pleasurable relaxation.

The characters in Flamingo Road jump right out at you, they really were made for a night time soap opera. Of course Crawford is great as she and new husband and ally David Brian gives her a new found respectability. The best portrayal in the film besides Crawford and Greenstreet goes to Gladys George. She's a southern version of the Texas Guinan like character she played in The Roaring Twenties.

If you like soap opera and revenge this is the film for you.