Gloria Grahame

Sudden Fear

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Joan Crawford with her hands to her face

Joan Crawford did not do shading, subtlety or character acting. She did something much more gothic. Sudden Fear plays straight to her strengths, a “woman in peril” movie that starts out in the world of realism but slips gradually into the realm of the histrionic. In early scenes Crawford’s acting looks mummified, as if the light of naturalism had been shone on a museum artefact. Playing a writer whose latest Broadway smash is about to be staged, her Myra Hudson is meant to be a woman born rich who has nevertheless forged her own career away from daddy’s money, and become successful in her own right. And then she meets Jack Palance’s Lester … Read more

The Big Heat

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Debby and Sgt Bannion

The Big Heat is one of the big movies of film noir – see The Big Sleep, The Big Clock, The Big Combo from the classic era, or The Big Easy, The Big Blue and The Big Lebowski from later on. Weak joke aside, it’s big in the other sense too, being important, pivotal, epochal even. Here you get director Fritz Lang at the top of his game and a screenplay that works like a ratchet, almost every scene advancing the story a notch while flinty characters are pushed hither and yon by a cruel and ironic fate. It’s the film that famously starts with the image of a gun on a desk. … Read more