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Joan Crawford The Essential Biography. Chapter 9

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   Chapter Nine
  SCARRED
  
  
  A Woman's Face (1941) turned out to be one of Joan's best movies. She played Anna Holm, scarred in childhood by a fire caused by her alcoholic father. Reactions to her disfigured face have made her cold and bitter, although deep down she still desires love and pretty things. She owns a roadhouse, from which she and a gang of confederates blackmail the indiscreet. When some love letters written by a married woman named Vera Segert (Osa Massen) fall into Anna's hands, she goes to her home to demand payment for their return, but winds up being treated by Vera's husband Gustaf (Melvyn Douglas), a plastic surgeon who restores her facial beauty after a series of painful operations. In thrall to her lover Torsten (Conrad Veidt), Anna takes a job as governess to a four-year-old boy whom Torsten wants her to murder so that he can claim an inheritance. Realizing that Torsten is a monster, Anna kills him instead and winds up facing the music with a now-smitten Dr. Gustaf at her side.
  A Woman's Face offers another thoroughly accomplished performance from Joan under the tutelage of Cukor, who by now had clearly become one of her most sympathetic directors. With Cukor's help, Joan created three separate phases for her character: the merciless bitch with a hidden romantic side we first meet at the roadhouse; the happy but emotionally stunted woman with the pretty, unscarred face; and the softer woman who realizes that she is not the monster others regard her as and that she is worthy of a good man's love. The story is told primarily in flashbacks during Anna's trial for Torsten's murder in Stockholm. At first we only see her from the other characters' point of view. In her first appearance in the courtroom, we see the "soft" Anna she has become, even though the audience isn't yet aware of what will happen to her or even if the operations on her face were successful (during this scene she is photographed only from one side). Cukor does a fine job of building up the suspense over whether Anna's face was properly healed.
  Although the premise of the film - that physical scarring can make a person "evil" or even excuse their actions - is psychologically dubious, the script is rich with ironic humor and wonderful dialogue. After Gustaf repairs her facial damage, he tells Anna "I've created a monster - a beautiful woman with no heart." To which Anna replies "Indistinct from other women with beautiful faces?" Confronting Vera about her indiscreet letters, Anna sneers, "Such silly letters. Such childish writing. Such cheapness. Have you read any real love letters? George Sand. Keats. Browning. Do you know anything about love in that miserable soul of yours that dribbles itself out of these letters? Can you imagine loving a man so greatly, so completely, that you surrender everything you have just to be near him, just to have him near you. That's love as I know it."
  Then follows one of the great sadomasochistic scenes of classic film: During this speech, Vera notices the disfigurement on Anna's face and, in a fit of incautious malice, deliberately raises the shade of the lamp near her and flicks the switch so that the hideous scar is fully illuminated. "So that's love as you know it, " she snickers cruelly. Humiliated and outraged, Anna repeatedly slaps the childishly whining Vera and shouts at her to "Get the rest of your jewels!" Photos of Osa Massen jeeringly forcing the lampshade up as Joan's eyes bulge in fury are prime collector's items, but the forceful, harpy-like figure of Joan with her half-gargoyle, half-glamorous face hovering over the cringing doll-like Massen remains an even more indelible image. Osa Massen never had such a good part again, and she was absolutely perfect in the role.
  In another memorable scene, having fallen for sinister Veidt, Anna comes back to headquarters wearing a pretty new hat. One of her co-blackmailers, Christina (Connie Gilchrist), has spitefully placed a forbidden mirror on the wall. When Joan spots her scarred features in the mirror, she grabs for her gun in the drawer, fully intending to shoot everyone in the room, but she is disarmed. The supporting players in the film were particularly well chosen: Donald Meek and Gilchrist as two of her partners in crime; Marjorie Main as a no-nonsense housekeeper who takes a dislike to Anna; Conrad Veidt, particularly in a wonderful scene with Joan when Anna returns from the hospital - Torsten realizes that her face is now normal and begins to laugh with her as they sit at the piano. Playing not merely a sociopath after money, but a truly demonic figure who hopes to use wealth apparently (in an uncharacteristically silly moment) to take over the country or even the world, Veidt's Germanic characterization was clearly influenced by the belief that the United States would soon be entering the war. (The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor a few months after the film was released.)
  Little Richard Nichols, who had appeared with Bette Davis and other stars in some significant films, is adorable as Lars-Erik, the boy who is nearly murdered - a real charmer. There is a very suspenseful scene when Anna takes Lars-Erik in a kind of open cable car over a rushing waterfall, fully intending to push him to his death. There is also an exciting chase in which Torsten takes off with Lars-Erik in a sleigh, with Anna and Gustaf in frantic pursuit. While it is fascinating to imagine what Hitchcock might have done with this script - not to mention how Hitch and Joan would have gotten along - it must be stated that Cukor's direction is top-notch all the way.
  At first, Cukor had trouble getting Joan to play the part the way he wanted her to. It's not that she was doing Anna Holm as if she were still flighty Susan, but she was simply exhibiting too much personality for such a bitter, utterly miserable and conscienceless woman. Cukor made her recite multiplication tables, among other tricks, to shed her voice of excess emotion, so that she could create this twisted creature, so different from anything Joan had played before. Cukor's techniques helped, and Joan's effects in this are appropriately muted. She is allowed one moment of unbridled happiness - after her successful surgery, a little boy smiles at her instead of looking away in horror - but that unemotional blankness informs her performance almost until the end.
  Joan spoke well of A Woman's Face her entire life; it was her high-water mark at MGM during this period. As with Fredric March in Susan and God, she thanked Melvyn Douglas for what she called his "consummate underplaying that made me look good." In this she was being overly generous; she was glad that Douglas was bland enough (a competent but unmemorable performance) not to steal attention away from the star. "I think that was the picture that finally made people sit up and notice that there was a lot more to Joan Crawford than what they thought, that I could be given a strong dramatic assignment and really come through. Too bad I was given such shitty movies afterward. It was so damn frustrating." Douglas noticed that Joan's demeanor on the set was completely different from her refined manner during the filming of A Gorgeous Hussy. "She had again become rough, bluff and hearty," Douglas recalled.
  Joan's reviews for A Woman's Face were generally excellent; the critics and public now thought of her as an actress, not just a movie star. There were those who felt that, as in Susan and God, Joan was a real character in the first half of the movie and reverted to her movie-star mode in the second half - but this is not really a fair assessment. Cukor, who usually defended Joan's acting in his films, once stated that "When she becomes pretty, she becomes... Joan Crawford." But he meant this more as a deficiency of the script than of Joan's work. The picture was also criticized by some for turning into a conventional thriller, which is odd since it is made clear from the very outset (at a murder trial, no less!) that A Woman's Face is not a straight drama. Many years later, Cukor said of the film:
  "I may have reservations about the picture, but all in all I think it turned out very well, and Joan was wonderful. We weren't trying to do The Snake Pit or Possessed (the 1947 Crawford film, not the 1931 one], something along those lines. Joan really gave her all in that picture. She never complained about the heavy, disfiguring make up, she let me direct her and do special exercises to help bring forth the performance I knew she could give, I really think she put one hundred percent into it. I think she got across the struggle she was undergoing in the second half of the film, the love she felt for Conrad Veidt versus her love for the boy, her need to feel whole and decent. She was very compelling. I think it remains one of her best performances."
  Indeed, Joan's performance in A Woman's Face (along with her Oscar-winning turn in the later Mildred Pierce) has stuck even in the minds of people who weren't necessarily big fans of hers - and in strange ways. Premier special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen was thinking of Joan in A Woman's Face when he created his Medusa for the fantasy film Clash of the Titans in 1981. The sequence with the Medusa (a model brought to life with 3-D animation) was photographed with special lighting inspired primarily by A Woman's Face: "I say 'Joan Crawford lighting,'" Harryhausen explained to Cinefantastique magazine, "because this Medusa is a woman with fine bone structure and films of Joan Crawford like Mildred Pierce and A Woman's Life (sic) always photographed her in interesting ways, putting shadows in, just showing her eyes, or part of her face stepping from shadow into light." As Joan died four years before Clash of the Titans was released, we can only wonder what she would have thought of inspiring the depiction of a gorgon. It must be said, however, that Harryhausen's "stop-motion" Medusa almost "acts" with the flair and star quality of the real Joan Crawford.
  So far Joan had taken on Greta Garbo, Margaret Sullavan, Norma Shearer, and even Bette Davis (offscreen, marrying the man Davis was after), and triumphed over all of them, as if she really were the mythical gorgon whose stare could turn people into stone. For her next assignment, Joan would find out if she had what it took to take on studio newcomer Greer Garson - a woman with true polish and sophistication.
  Joan was to become disillusioned about her next assignment, When Ladies Meet (1941). She played Mary Howard, a best-selling novelist who has fallen in love with her married publisher Rogers Woodruff (Herbert Marshall), who also functions, improbably, as her editor. Her old beau Jimmy Lee (Robert Taylor) schemes to bring Mary together with Rogers's glamorous but long-suffering wife Claire (Greer Garson) during a weekend in the country. This leads to a marvelous sequence with the two women confessing their romantic hopes and fears, unaware that they're discussing the same man. The engrossing comedy-drama may have had old situations (it was a remake of a 1933 picture with Myrna Loy and Ann Harding), but it put a fresh twist on them. Although the movie is talky at times, there is some excellent dialogue. Although Joan was playing the "other woman," she got a lot of competition from Greer Garson in the looks department: Garson made sure that she had never looked sexier or more luscious than in When Ladies Meet. The character Garson plays seems almost too masochistic and noble for words, but she makes good points as she expresses compassion for all of her husband's many romantic cast-offs. For the most part, the acting by all of the players, Joan included, is quite Hollywoodish - theatrical and superficial. Joan is often "actressy" and artificial, if effective - as this is a very theatrical piece, it works. The picture survives the stylized acting, but toward the end it becomes rather conventional. Also, we get the point of view of both wife and mistress, but we don't hear enough about the husband's motivations.
  Joan didn't especially enjoy making the movie, and would give out a little trembling "yuchh" whenever it was mentioned. "I got to wear some beautiful Adrian gowns and that was it! It was a real comedown and letdown after A Woman's Face. Talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous!" (As already mentioned, she said the same thing about doing Ice Follies of 1939 instead of Gone With the Wind. It was one of her favorite phrases.) Joan had wanted to star in The Spiral Staircase as the deaf-mute eventually played by Dorothy McGuire in 1946, but the studio felt she'd done enough deformed "stunt" performances and should concentrate on being glamorous again.
  Joan had had enough clout to take the starring role in Susan and God from Greer Garson, who was an import and a newcomer to MGM. Garson had done Pride and Prejudice instead; it ended up being a much better picture. Still, Garson was hardly a major star, so Joan accepted her as the love rival in When Ladies Meet. She also accepted that it would seem like unfair competition if Garson were not also allowed to look beautiful; audience sympathy would be entirely with the less attractive wife and not with the mistress. She and Garson had a perfectly cordial relationship, but things soured a bit when Garson received an Oscar nomination for Blossoms in the Dust and Joan was, to the surprise of everyone, passed over for A Woman's Face. (At the time, Joan had never been nominated for an Oscar.) Joan was furious that, as she saw it, MGM had used its considerable clout to back a Johnny-come-lately - part of the "British Invasion" - instead of herself.
  Some of Joan's anger understandably spilled over toward Garson, but she didn't really blame her. She blamed the MGM executives, especially Benny Thau, a top Garson booster. "After all the money I made those miserable bastards," she fumed to Jerry Asher and others. "I've got nothing against Greer, but why couldn't they let her pay her dues, the way I did?" Joan was bitter that she had made so many movies for the studio and Garson was nominated for an Oscar for only her fourth American movie.
  Joan was capable of honest admiration for talented costars, among them Garson. But she had fought for many long years to get where she was, and she couldn't help but see other prominent actresses at the studio as legitimate threats to her career, and therefore her livelihood - not to mention to her stardom and to her life itself, all of which were practically the same thing to her. She was determined never to be labeled "box- office poison" again. This made it all the more remarkable that, despite her competitive feelings, Joan was quite often kind and helpful to younger actresses like Gail Patrick and Betty Furness, among others. True, she did not see them as competition - yet - but that could always change, indeed perhaps in part because of her advice. As for major stars (Shearer, Sullavan), or newcomers with big studio clout behind them (Garson) Joan knew that they were quite capable of fending for themselves.
  Over the years, Joan and Garson maintained a cordial but not warm relationship. According to Garson, Joan invited her to a dinner party in her home several years after the completion of When Ladies Meet. "Joan sat herself at the center table, surrounded by the most desirable men, including a certain Buddy Fogelson, whom she knew I was dating," she wrote. "She placed me at the studio electricians' table, with the words, 'Oh Greer, dear, you get along with everyone.' Our table had more fun than any other." When dessert was served, Garson moved her chair from the electricians' table to Joan's, seating herself next to Fogelson. "There was nothing Joan could do about it."
  One senses there is more to the anecdote. Joan would probably not have been quite so deliberately insulting if she hadn't felt that Garson was looking down on her. Sensing Joan's competitiveness, Garson had always kept her distance, which may in turn have made her seem remote and haughty to Joan, which would certainly have irked her. She may well have wanted to charm the pants (literally) off Buddy Fogelson, while Garson sat watching in a snit, unable to do anything about it. It is unlikely that Joan would have achieved her objective, as Garson and Fogelson later got married. "Joan was just completely nonplussed that I refused to feud with her, " Garson stated. As Garson related the story about Joan and the dinner party in 1991, many years after Joan's death, when it was open season on her reputation, it should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.
  In They All Kissed the Bride (1942), Joan played Margaret Drew, a very unpleasant businesswoman who doesn't brook incompetence in any form. She's mad as a hornet at reporter Michael Holmes (Melvyn Douglas), certain that he will libel her in a piece he's working on. This was the movie that Carole Lombard was planning when she died in a plane crash in January 1942; Joan took over for her, but it's doubtful that even Lombard would have been any better in the part. Another candidate, Myrna Loy, could never have played a tough businesswoman as convincingly (although she would probably have been funnier). Once again Joan demonstrated her underrated acting ability; she was also very beautifully photographed in the film, but then during this period she was at the height of her beauty. Her hairstyle - very bushy on top and at the sides - was also rather sexy. Douglas gave a nice performance as her adversary/love interest, but as leading man he was hardly "dreamy" enough to set the screen on fire. Douglas resented having to do the picture during wartime; he wanted Harry Cohen to release him from studio commitments so that he could work full-time for the government. Cohen refused, claiming that Joan would not do the picture without him.
  Overall, They All Kissed the Bride is rather dull and dreary, despite the actors' game attempts to inject life into it. The mediocre script makes much too little of the premise, although there are a couple of good scenes, which the supporting players certainly helped punch up. The most amusing and energetic scene occurs when Joan enters a dance contest with employee Johnny Johnson (Allen Jenkins), who doesn't know that she's his boss. As they frantically jitterbug their way across the floor - Margaret getting dragged along and swept around, finally emerging a little worse for wear - the picture briefly comes to life. Joan also has a fine drunk scene a bit later. The other notable scene features Nydia Westman as Margaret's secretary; she tells her boss what it's like to be married, how one becomes attached to - and then lonely without - one's partner for life. She tells movingly of lying in the dark, listening to her husband sleep, telling God to "please take me first... take me first." As Marsh, one of Joan's executives, Roland Young has a funny bit in which he and Johnny Johnson take turns punching each other, and the always reliable Billie Burke is fine as Joan's mother. When Margaret's sister Vivian (Helen Parrish) gets married early in the picture, the anxious Burke says "I do" along with the bride!
  Joan met her third husband, Phillip Terry (né Frederick Kormann), when a press-agent friend brought him to her home for dinner. Terry was under contract to MGM, and was handsome, pleasant, and gentlemanly - just the kind of man Joan was looking for. After her divorce from Franchot Tone, she dated many men - Glenn Ford, Cesar Romero - but as husband material, no one had ever jumped out at her. Joan was becoming convinced that she and marriage just didn't mix. But something new had entered the equation. When it was clear that her union to Tone was going to dissolve, she applied to adoption agencies for a baby, and she continued to do so after she was single. Joan had become convinced that a child would allow her to share the love she had bursting inside her without the complications of marriage, with its tricky questions of sex and compatibility. Babies gave love, they didn't get jealous over your stardom, expect you to give up your career, or have nasty quickies in dressing rooms. There was more to it than that, of course. Despite her active career and social life, Joan was lonely, and she was always haunted by the fear that the absence of children may have contributed to the dissolution of her marriages. There is good reason to believe that Joan wasn't so much unable to have biological children as that she preferred to adopt in order to keep pregnancy from interfering with her career. On top of everything else, she was genuinely grateful for her success and the advantages she enjoyed, and wanted to share them with another. She truly looked forward to having a child whose life she could enrich beyond measure, someone whose early life would be entirely different from hers, because of her own generosity. Joan may or may not have had great parenting skills, but her motives were pure. The first baby Joan adopted was a blonde girl named Christina. A year later she adopted a blond baby boy, which she at first christened Phillip Jr.
  Joan had two reasons for marrying Terry after knowing him for only six weeks. She thought that he would make the perfect husband - and even more important, the perfect father. Christina arrived quite some time after Tone had departed, so Joan had the baby but no father. Joan desperately wanted her daughter to have a father figure, and when little Phil also entered her life, it became even more important for the presence of a male role model.
  Phillip Terry was a thirty-three-year-old actor who'd had small parts in minor pictures before meeting Joan. During their marriage, which lasted from 1942 until 1946, his career moved forward - he had good supporting roles in The Lost Weekend (1945) and To Each His Own (1946) - but he never really made it to the big time. After he and Joan divorced, his film career deteriorated until there were often several years between film assignments; he eventually wound up in movies like The Leech Woman (1960) and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966).
  But in 1942 he had every reason to be hopeful, and whatever his true feelings toward Joan at the time of the marriage, he saw the union as the start of something exciting and glorious. What Joan liked about Terry - and what made him good father material - was good breeding, kindness, a quiet masculinity and a gentle passivity, all of which made it easy for Joan to picture him reading to the children and bouncing them on his knee. Joan's decision to marry Terry after only six weeks was not a mature one, but at the time she felt certain that Terry was the man she needed, if not wanted. Terry had the requisite good looks and charm and was dependable enough in bed, he made an attractive escort, so on that level Joan was satisfied enough with him as a husband. It felt like love, it looked like love to those around them. Joan was sure that if it wasn't love, it would be eventually. "It was perhaps the greatest mistake I ever made," she would say years later. Until that realization hit her, she did her best to make the marriage - which began on July 20, 1942, in her lawyer's office - work.
  In the early '40s, the studio made Joan make two war-related duds, Reunion in France and Above Suspicion. Joan was completely ill-suited for both. In Reunion in France (1942), her last, ignominious picture with Mankiewicz as producer, she was happy to be teamed with John Wayne; she had always had her eye on him. The studio had to promise her Wayne as costar or there would have been hell to pay. Joan later regretted letting her hormones make her decisions instead of her brains. As she told one interviewer, "If there is an afterlife, and I am to be punished for my sins, this is one of the pictures they'll make me see over and over again." Joan was angry at herself for not putting up more of a fight over the script due to her preoccupation with her new marriage and babies, among other things, and even angrier that her designs on Wayne came to nothing.
  Joan plays a Parisian designer named Michelle de la Becque, who is so utterly apolitical - on the eve of World War II, no less - that she comes off like a complete moron. She doesn't even seem to get it when she returns to Paris and finds that the Gestapo has taken over her townhouse! Michelle's lover, industrial designer Robert Cortot (Philip Dorn), is apparently collaborating with the Nazis. Michelle meets up with Pat Talbot (Wayne), an American who joined the Royal Air Force and was downed in French territory, when he hides out in her pied-à-terre and, with some trepidation, she decides to help him. Then Michelle and Pat, enjoying a growing affection, have to flee Paris and make it to the border, with Robert and his German associates in hot pursuit. It turns out that Robert is only to be pretending to be helping the Nazis, and he and Joan are reunited after Wayne makes the "ultimate sacrifice." Joan wasn't anybody's idea of a Frenchwoman, and the very concept of a super-glamorous and elegantly attired Joan Crawford versus the Nazis was glossy and unreal, and the trivializing combination of the Nazi oppression of Paris and haute couture almost offensive. The script had its moments, but director Jules Dassin was not able to make the most of them. The film rarely evokes a sense of menace, and both Joan and the film are extremely superficial. Joan has some good moments such as the scene in which she stands up to a German officer and the one in which she argues with clothier patron Natalie Schafer over a coat in which information has been secreted. Schafer recalled:
  'I think Joan was just about at the end of her rope. She wasn't brutal or offensive to me or to anyone else - just tightly wound. I think she knew her days were numbered at MGM, she was smarting over the assignments they had given her. Reunion in France was not right for her and she just did not want to be [on the set]. But she remained very professional in spite of all that. That was Joan. Whatever was going on in her mind, you might see glimmers of it in her expression, in her off-camera mood, but she was always about getting the work done, being a pro. She thought of her colleagues who were there to do a picture, fair or foul.'
  Despite that tension, Joan was on the prowl for John Wayne, who wasn't on set very much, as the movie was nearly completed before he even put in an appearance. She made her move on him in the dressing room, and Wayne rebuffed her with as much charm as he could muster. He was married and in no mood for a dalliance. Joan didn't take no for an answer so easily, and she threw herself at him more than once. Wayne would quickly wipe off her lipstick and get himself out of the dressing room as fast as he could. She was a bigger star than he was at the time, but there was only so much he would do for his career. Wayne stayed out of Joan's dressing room, but he would tell people that for years afterward he would get come-hither looks from Joan, as well as salacious little notes expressing the wish that they could "get together" at her house. Wayne was more amused than angry by it all. Even in later years Joan would fume about the man who got away and the terrible picture she made because she'd been so hot for him. "That lousy movie! Just because I wanted to get Wayne in the sack! And the only thing he could play was cowboys. We hit it off like filet mignon and ketchup!"
  Philip Dorn, who played Robert, was not Joan's type. Stories that she threw Dorn out of a two-shot on a Paris street by flinging her hips at him because he had rejected her, and that she and Dassin nearly traded punches because of it, are amusing but more than a little exaggerated. Joan was highly sexed, perhaps even oversexed, but she didn't throw herself at every single man she encountered, and she was too professional to get into fistfights with her director over such a casual incident. Shouting matches, occasionally - punching matches, no. It is true that she and Dassin did not get along well, but Dassin's comments about her later should not be taken too literally.
  Above Suspicion (1943), her last film at MGM for many years, was a poor suspense movie taken from a Helen MacInnes novel. Joan and Fred MacMurray play Frances and Richard Myles, a newlywed couple honeymooning in 1939 that gets drafted by the British Secret Service to go on a mission for them inside Germany. They have to obtain "magnetic plans" but don't know who has them. The foolish clues and directions the pair receive only ensure that they can be certain of no one that they meet. One senses that the entire affair could have been handled much more straightforwardly; at times Above Suspicion seems more like a parody of a spy film. The running around becomes so ludicrously convoluted that at one point Frances even says, "We climb through train windows, fire a shot in a theater, sing 'Annie Laurie' backwards, and Boris Karloff will fall out of the closet with an apple in his mouth." ("Unfortunately, neither Joan Crawford nor Fred MacMurray look quite bright enough to unravel the tangled skeins of this screen melodrama," wrote one wag at the New York Herald Tribune. "Much ado about nothing," wrote another.) Alas, Karloff doesn't turn up, but Basil Rathbone, at his most sinister, does play a Gestapo chief. A murder in a hall during a concert is lifted from the first version of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchcock improved upon the scene in his second version), but in Above Suspicion the murder is utterly impossible: the assassin fires from an angle from which he couldn't possibly hit his target.
  Joan enjoyed working with Fred MacMurray, whom she found likable and charming, if not necessarily her cup of tea sexually. Also in the supporting cast was Bruce Lester, a young actor who had been Bette Davis's lover for a time. Director Richard Thorpe remembered that while he found Joan professional, much of the time she listlessly went through the motions. "I think she knew that she was living on borrowed time at the studio. There were no explosions of temperament; she just had her mind on other things." Thorpe would occasionally ape Hitchcockian tricks like subjective tracking shots, close-ups of significant objects, and so on, but to significantly lesser effect. Like Reunion in France, the movie is generally devoid of the requisite tension. Movies like this without The Master of Suspense himself at the helm are almost always far less effective.
  Joan was at her best portraying women having man trouble, women suffering emotional crises, situations she could plumb with her expressive face and often intense acting. While Reunion in France at least gave her some opportunity to do that (what with desperate Wayne and alleged traitor Dorn in the picture), Above Suspicion was a real slap in the face; it presented her as a happily married woman struggling not for anyone's love but simply to stay alive. Not her métier. Not her meat. Not Joan at her best.
  Which is how MGM wanted it. They thought she was done for good.
  They couldn't have been more wrong.
  
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