ALL DRESSED UP WITH NO PLACE TO GO

Last night's Joan Crawford Film Festival on Turner Classic Movies proved why this one-time glam movie star degenerated into a bitter Mommie Dearest. She kept getting upstaged!!

In the first movie we saw, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Ms. Crawford was confined to a wheelchair while co-star Bette Davis acted crazed circles all around her. As Bette and her heart-shaped facial mole were plotting diabolical, evil deeds, poor Joan just lay in bed with a piece of tape over her mouth.  What's the acclaim in that?  

Things got even worse in the second flick, I Saw What You Did, in which Joan's overacting was overshadowed by her enormous necklace and stacks of really bad hairpieces.  Playing a love-starved next-door-neighbor to a homicidal maniac, Joan had to wear what appeared to be a fallen chandelier around her neck.  And her various hunks of fake hair bounced around independently of each other, threatening to fly off with every word.

Of course, it didn't help that her biggest dramatic line in the script was, "Why, you're nothing but a tramp!!" Mercifully, she was murdered off an hour into the movie.

Getting any respect in the acting world must be difficult to achieve when the audience can only focus on bad hair-dos and even worse jewelry.  It's gotta be enough to drive an actress Berserk, another really campy Joan Crawford movie that stars her eyebrows and a circus whip.

The Flaming Bore gives  Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? three flames out of four.  I Saw What You Did earns two flames.  And Joan's stylist has no flicker of hope.