THE DAMNED DON'T CRY (1950)

And here we have Suffering Saint Joan once more being led to the gallows. Joan Crawford spent most of her time in film noir enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. In the thirties, she’d be a glamorous figure—a romantic icon on par (and often paired) with Gable. But by the late forties and early fifties when she made her transition into film noir, she was no longer anyone that the audience was supposed to want to emulate. She was there to suffer—either because of her own sins or because of fate itself. Either way, you knew things weren’t going to end well.

THE DAMNED DON’T CRY is an entry in the Tramp Sleeps Her Way To The Top subgenre of film noir. On paper, it might seem like this would be the most sexist of femme fatale offshoots. And, to be sure, there are sexist undertones to the whole affair. This movie tells the story of an unhappily married working-class woman named Ethel Whitehead. After she loses her child in an accident, Ethel leaves her husband and strikes out on her own. She gets a job modeling clothes at one of those places where a rich married man buys an outfit for the wife and tries to rent the model for himself. Ethel starts running through these guys, picking up dinner and some cash, until she can position herself to come into some real money. Eventually, this leads her into a relationship with some shady characters like George Castleman (David Brian) and Nick Prenta (Steve Cochran). Both of these guys have feelings for her, but she’s always working an angle. Soon enough, though, she underestimates one of them, and then pretty much everything goes to hell.

THE DAMNED DON’T CRY and films like it have a structure that is one part cliché and one part Production Code mandate. Throughout the classic period of noir, ambition was treated with a mixture of admiration and distain, and ambitious women got it especially rough. A movie like this has a simple message: a woman is not supposed to leave her husband, no matter what, and certainly not because she wants a better life. She will invariably find that no such life exists, that only heartache and pain await her in the end.

These hoary old clichés went back to the earliest days of film, and by 1950 the Production Code had long since turned them into law. The woman who would use sex to get what she wants from men is a woman who must be punished.

And yet.

What makes THE DAMNED DON’T CRY interesting is the way it does due diligence to the mandate for moral comeuppance while at the same time placing us in the corner of the beleaguered protagonist. This film would make a good companion piece to the 1956 WICKED AS THEY COME starring Arlene Dahl in a similar role. Both movies situate their damned and wicked women in dire economic circumstances and then watch as they try to fight their way out with the only weapon they have: sex. There’s a subversive element to both movies. Though both have obligatory punishment at the end, there’s no doubt whose side we’re on. It’s strange, really, how these films work. By the end, they’ve become tragedies of a certain noir hue.

THE DAMNED DON’T CRY is powered by Crawford’s performance. Here was a movie star. She can play it halting and sweet—as in the early scenes with her young son. And she can play it mean and dirty. The movie gives her a lot of lines that crackle, as when she sets one hapless suitor straight on his world view:

I know how you feel. You're a nice guy. But the world isn't for nice guys. You've got to kick and punch and belt your way up because nobody's going to give you a lift. You've got to do it yourself, because nobody cares about us except ourselves.

Crawford sells these lines with the combined weight of twenty years of playing scrappy working girls. Of course, she herself had lived a similar life. When she says this, you’re hearing the weight of her own life behind the words. Crawford helped, uncredited, on the script by Harold Medford and Jerome Weidman, from the story by Gertrude Walker.

After this film there was more suffering to be done—in film noirs like SUDDEN FEAR or melodramas like AUTUMN LEAVES or Nicholas Ray’s gonzo western JOHNNY GUITAR—and beyond that lay the indignities of her late career horror movie roles. Here, though, you have her in something of her noir prime. We’re not supposed to like her, but we do. That was Suffering Saint Joan’s genius.