Della

This was produced after Crawford's camp Whatever Happened to Baby Jane comeback. 1965? It appears it was on the shelf for at least a year and a half.

As a Crawford vehicle, this is pretty dull. For the most part, Joan Crawford films after 1950 were pure camp. This one is not so unintentionally funny unless you count all these scenes with Vaseline on the lens, her overly dramatic poses or her 1963 Oscars hair. I kept waiting for a Pepsi bottle to appear.

The bright spot is Diane Baker. This was made during her studio contract years where she was properly groomed and given parts commensurate with her looks and talent. Well, except this part. She would go on to one more good film, Mirage, before being kicked to the TV movie curb.

I wish it was a little longer, something is missing. Anyway, the beautiful Diane Baker is excellent embodying a mentally unbalanced young woman. Joan Crawford, a top expert on the characters of very strong women, here she manages to make you shiver only with the force of her steel eyes. Paul Burke and Charles Bickford, as son and father, are good. Worth seeing!

This is essentially a soap opera in so many ways, and the money spent (or lack of it) on location settings or interiors appears to be minimal. Crawford plays Della, a grand, nervous, demanding, slightly off-kilter grande dame who hides in isolation with her strange daughter high above the city's noise and hustle. A hot-shot lawyer operating for an outside corporation wants to purchase a huge chunk of Crawford's property--but she's not budging! Nobody pushes Joan around!

What plot follows is not half as mesmerizing as the period automobiles in glittering pastels or the various fashion statements that Crawford parades as if she had been born to them (one may notice, however, that almost all of her close-ups shift to a very soft focus--no need to adjust your television). Della has lived in this lavishly furnished mansion for decades, but if one looks closely at the garish flower arrangements, the truly tatty color combinations in the carpets and curtains and the weird accent colors chosen by some set decorator in a very big hurry with a very small choice, the corners cut are clear. The same goes for the tacky statues plopped down around the pool, particularly the one dubbed "The Sun God," looking like something from an old Tarzan movie that keeps ending up with flowers stuffed in its mouth for no apparent reason.

But reason isn't what this frenetic melodrama is all about--as you can tell from this review, half the fun of it is enjoying the trappings of a late period Tinseltown Product, a sprinkling of several fine character actors--Charles Bickford and Richard Carlson (looking utterly exhausted!) and the always commanding Joan , rising above the situation just as she did in Mildred Pierce, Flamingo Road or the almost perfect Humoresque . By this time, however, the studios were largely finished, had sold of most of their lavish inventory, and only cared about what money might be made from television. This is primarily a curiosity, and one must bring a good deal of suspended disbelief to the party to enjoy it.

Joan Crawford plays a reclusive millionaire named Della Chappell. She lives with her grown daughter (Diane Baker) in their mansion. They never leave the house and stay up at night. No, this is not a vampire movie but that would have been cool. It actually starts out as a fairly interesting story. Ambitious lawyer Barney Stafford (Paul Burke) tries to broker a land deal between Della and a big company, only to be met with resistance from her. Then Barney decides Della must be keeping her daughter against her will so he has to help her. There's a great deal of tension here and everybody keeps telling Barney he doesn't want to challenge Della. All of this sounds like it could have been a good thriller.

Unfortunately, the movie backs off of this and begins to portray Della in a sympathetic light. It loses all of the tension and intrigue it had built up. What we wind up with then is a rather boring soaper with a disjointed plot. I wondered when watching the opening titles if this was made for TV and, sure enough, it originally was a pilot for a TV series. A car chase towards the end reminded me of the old "Toonces the driving cat" sketches from Saturday Night Live. Not a bad way to spend 70 minutes but no great shakes, either.

If you're expecting a movie from the late period of Joan Crawford's career, you will soon realize "Della" is made for TV. In fact, it was a pilot for what seems to have been intended as a series about a lawyer and his clients, a sort of "Burke's Law" with a legal theme. In fact, by superficial coincidence, the star is James Burke.

Partly artistic (some of the blocking is obviously designed with geometric patterns in mind), partly hack (high lit, artificial environments, antiseptic props) part fashion show (every time we see Crawford she's wearing another exquisitely tailored ensemble), part generically boring (dull narration over dull opening montage, albeit with a fine, lush underscoring by Fred Steiner of "Perry Mason" theme-tune fame; dull men saying dull things in dull environments – featureless boardroom, picnic spot in nondescript city park with bland participants in spotless boring clothes, except for craggy, wild-haired, slightly rumpled Charles Bickford), part intriguing (references to pagan gods, stars and planets woven into a strong mother-daughter conflict with deep, mysterious roots). It's kind of like a rough sketch for a Eugene O'Neill play that never went beyond an outline and instead became a vehicle for Joan Crawford, who makes her usual post-"Baby Jane" style of star entrance, this time descending a staircase. Regal, defiant, tough; upswept silver-streaked hair, shoulders thrown back, menacing eyebrows. Trim and graceful in long shots, soft-focus in close-ups, she plays the title character, a wealthy recluse who, with her daughter (the attractive but undistinguished Diane Baker), has confined herself to her Downton Abbey-like property for several years except for occasional nighttime drives. What is she hiding? Vampirism? (If only.) Adjacent to her palatial domicile is a private garden festooned with statues of pagan gods that look like backyard kitsch from Walmart. The "moon goddess" wobbles when Baker leans against it; the sun god" ("mother and I made it out of clay when I was little") looks like a replica of a gape-mouthed Aztec temple carving and she feeds it flowers for reasons that are never explained. Baker spends a great deal of time gazing at the heavens in her private mini-planetarium which resembles a "Star Trek" set piece.

Into this weird world steps James Burke (a run-of-the-mill actor like Richard Basehart or Dana Andrews: not bad to look at, histrionically competent, but lacking electricity or charisma—in other words, the perfect complement to Diane Baker). Of course Crawford, with the help of the script and the direction, blows them off the screen, and not subtly either. But back to Burke. He plays a lawyer whose father, Bickford, is on the city council and both would like to convince Crawford to sell her property so that a large aerospace company can relocate its headquarters there and do wonders for the local economy. She agrees by phone to meet Burke to discuss the matter – at her place at 2am. Hmmm. While trying to persuade her to sell, he meets and becomes attracted to Baker (also awake and dressed to the nines in the middle of the night) and begins to wonder what is behind this reclusive nocturnal lifestyle. Pop (Bickford) happens to know the answer but he ain't talking'. Otherwise the movie would end at the 30-minute point.

In its time "Della" was probably dismissed as a hopeless clunker, the kind of thing that would have gone straight to video decades later. But through the prism of half a century, certain aspects of it become fascinating if you look at it clinically the way a car mechanic might look under the hood of an Edsel. But if you're expecting a well-conceived and emotionally involving dramatic experience, skip it.