STRAIT-JACKET 1964 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com /2014/04/strait-jacket-1964.html
“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small!” – Norma Desmond Sunset Blvd. Perhaps that oft-quoted Gloria Swanson line has endured because it conveys so much Hollywood truth. I know I’m certainly of the opinion that movies got smaller when it comes to Joan Crawford, the Oscar-winning actress (with a capital-A) dubbed—with equal parts admiration and castigation—“The Ultimate Movie Star” who saw her decadeslong status as the last of the grande dames of the silver screen flounder as the larger-than-life scale of motion pictures shrunk to living room size. Getting kicked by Bette Davis in the anteroom of a decaying Hollywood mansion in 1962s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was Crawford’s last onscreen pairing with anyone even remotely able to keep in pace with her particular brand of old-school star-wattage. Following that, every film role and episodic TV appearance only seemed to emphasize the brobdingnagian degree to which the 5'5" actress towered over her second-rate material and dwarfed the lilliputian talents of her co-stars and directors. There's no denying that Joan Crawford was an actress given to theatrically histrionic excesses; a to-the-manner-born camera hog, prone to mannered, over-stylized gestures and gimmicks that morphed over time into camp and self-parody. And sure, the severe, mannish extremes of her late-career physical appearance lamentably coincided with an accelerating artificiality and lack of concern for subtlety in her acting (which wasn't all that subtle to begin with) which caused her to come across more like a haughty female impersonator than one of the great beauties Joan Crawford as Lucy Harbin (close-ups like this don't just happen, folks) of Hollywood's Golden Age. But however one may feel about Crawford, it’s difficult to imagine anyone thinking the star of Mildred Pierce and A Woman's Face deserved the likes of William Castle; a charming, obviously sweet-natured guy, but arguably one of the most pedestrian movie directors ever to hoist a megaphone. You'd think, what with my being such a devotee of entertainingly bad movies, I'd number myself among those who regard "King of the Bs" William Castle as some kind of patron saint of schlock. I certainly can attest to having my favorites (those being: Strait-Jacket, Homicidal, and I Saw What You Did), and even concede that the worst of them are often so inoffensively lightweight that they're somehow always watchable, if not exactly enjoyable. But beyond having a nose for truly bizarre and offbeat material, Castle has always struck me as lacking the requisite vulgarity 1/12
necessary for creating truly epic bad films. Something about him always seemed too bland and suburban, perhaps too decent or too sane, to ever really go to the dark places the topics of his films suggested. William Castle was a showman, a producer, and an inveterate huckster, but as a director he appeared to have no demons to exorcise, no overarching ambitions, and was without that spark of neurotic lunacy that made the films of directors like Ed Wood (Plan 9 From Outer Space ), Bert I. Gordon ( Attack of the Puppet People), and his idol, Alfred Hitchcock, so compelling...and weird. In fact, one of my chief frustrations with William Castle films is the nagging certainty that all of his movies would likely to have been vastly improved had Castle stuck to producing, and had somehow been prohibited from directing them himself. (See: Rosemary's Baby). And while I'm of the opinion that an actress of Joan Crawford's reputation didn't deserve a director as mediocre as William Castle, there's also little question in my mind that at this particular stage in her career, Joan Crawford (and her ego) desperately needed a director as respectful of her faded star status as William Castle. From everything I've read, Castle was so beside himself at having actually landed a bonafide movie star for one of his typically bargain-basement horror opuses (blowsy Joan Blondell had initially been cast), that he treated Crawford in a manner more befitting her days as MGM's reigning boxoffice darling than as the star of secondary roles in The Best of Everything (1959) and The Caretakers (1963). Obsequiously conceding to her every whim (approval over script, cast, and cameraman; 15% participation in profits; hefty Pepsi-Cola product placement), Castle gave Joan her first sole leading-lady role since 1957s The Story of Esther Costello. So what if it was in another derivative, cut-rate homage/ripoff in Castle's tireless (tiresome) quest to duplicate Alfred Hitchcock's career? At least Joan and her falsies didn't have to compete with Bette Davis for camera time.
Diane Baker as Carol Harbin
An original screenplay penned by Psycho's Robert Bloch, Strait-Jacket casts Crawford as rural hotbox, Lucy Harbin (“Very George Kennedy as Leo Krause much a woman, and very much aware of the fact”). First glimpsed in a 1944 flashback through a Vaseline haze we’ll come to grow progressively more familiar with over the course of the film, 57-year-old Crawford (unconvincingly) plays 25-year-old Lucy as a superannuated Sadie Thompson driven to murder when she catches her faithless 2nd husband (Rock Hudson protégée Lee Majors making his film debut) in bed with another woman (Patricia Crest). Seizing upon a nearby axe as her weapon of choice, luckless Lucy is nevertheless favored with a rare crime of passion twofer: the raven-haired honky-tonk homewrecker lying next to her husband obligingly 2/12
keeps quiet and stays stock-still, patiently awaiting her turn until after Lucy has completed vigorously bisecting her hubby's head from his bare-chested torso.
John Anthony Hayes as Michael Fields
Rochelle Hudson and Leif Erickson as Emily and Bill Cutler
3/12
When I was growing up, Joan Crawford's name was synonymous with B-horror movies. It was years before I knew her from anything other than Berserk, Trog, Strait-Jacket, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
For Those Who Think Young Crawford, "Star of the First Magnitude" and Pepsi-Cola Board of Directors member, was not above a bit of old-fashioned hucksterism
4/12
From the repeated, wild-eyed hacks taken at the now literally separated lovers, it's clear Lucy has been driven crackers by the night's events and is soon carted off to the funny farm wearing the film's titular item of clothing. But no matter how unfortunate Lucy's timing, winning by a landslide in the "worst evening ever" sweepstakes is Lucy's 6-year-old daughter Carol, whose world-class kindertrauma encompasses being left alone in a desolate farmhouse while her father barhops; being awakened by said father and local floozy, who then proceed to make out in front of her without benefit of a closed door; finally to have it all capped off with witnessing her axe-wielding mother going postal on the lovers while dressed in a garish, floral-print dress, cacophonous Auntie Mame charm bracelets, and tacky, ankle-strap shoes. The horror!
Vicki Cos as young Carol Harbin Diane Baker wasn't required to play Carol as a child, but it's up for debate as to whether 25-year-old Baker would have made a more convincing 6-year-old than Crawford does a 25-year-old
Jump ahead twenty years: Carol is a lovely, well-adjusted (?), budding sculptress living on a farm with her uncle and his wife (Leif Erickson and Rochelle Hudson), about to embark on a new life with her rich fiance-to-be (John Anthony 5/12
Hayes). The monkey wrench in the works is that her mother, who has been institutionalized all these years, is scheduled for release. Will she be welcomed or reviled? Has she been rehabilitated or is she still a raving maniac with questionable fashion sense? Any way you cut it (heh-heh), the stage has been set for a doozy of a family reunion. WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM Two words: Joan Crawford. For fans of overthe-top Joan (that would be: everybody) who heretofore have had to content themselves with brief-but-welcome snippets of unchecked ham seeping through otherwise reined-in performances held in precarious check by watchful directors; StraitJacket—to use the hyperbole of old-movie publicity—gives you Joan Crawford as you long to see her…the Joan Crawford you love…the Joan Crawford whose take-noEthel Mertz: "Are you insinuating that I'm daft, loony, off my rocker, out of my head?" prisoners approach to acting and total Fred Mertz: "Well, that covers it pretty well... ." disregard for the performance rhythms of her co-stars sets the screen ablaze with the fiery passions of a woman’s dangerous desires! You’ll never convince me that a director as uninspired as William Castle had anything to do with Joan Crawford’s performance in Strait-Jacket. Hers is a performance culled from hours of self-directed rehearsals and meticulous attention paid to doing “something” every single moment the camera is pointed at her. In fact, to hear co-star Diane Baker tell it, Crawford was, for all intents and purposes, the director of StraitJacket; everything she wanted, she got. And for that you won’t hear me complaining. Without Crawford, Strait-Jacket would be as Smokin' sluggish as most of Castle’s other films, and indeed, all scenes in this film that don't include Crawford prove to be inert, exposition-heavy sequences of inexpressive talking heads. Maybe it was the contractually-mandated ice-cold sets she insisted upon (biographers have stated this was as much for makeup and skin concerns as keeping energy up) or the vodka she laced her Pepsis with, but Crawford’s scenes are substantially more “spirited” than anything else in the film. No wonder that, outside of promotional cardboard axes handed out to patrons, StraitJacket is one of the few William Castle productions released without one of his trademark gimmicks. Who needs gimmicks when you have Joan Crawford? Pepsi-Cola Vice-President, Mitchell Cox as Dr. Anderson PERFORMANCES 6/12
Evoking Charles Dickens' antithetical quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Strait-Jacket is one of Joan Crawford's worst films, yet strangely, also one of her best. Joan Crawford is one of my favorite actresses, and with each new (old) film I discover, my appreciation and admiration for her grows. There's not another actor I can think of who is so good when they are being so bad. The joys to be had in watching Strait-Jacket is seeing Joan the terrific actress going mano-a-mano against Joan the free-range ham.
Now, how did that get there?
Crawford is rather remarkable in being able to wrest genuine sympathy and pathos out of the sketchily-drawn character of Lucy Harbin. She does some of the finest acting of her career in the sequence in which she gazes at the youthful image of herself sculpted by her daughter (actually sculpted by artist Yucca Salamunich on the set of A Woman's Face in 1941). She's so good and rather touching in making you feel the character's melancholy over the years lost and beauty faded. She totally outclasses the film in the sequence. As many have pointed out over the years, had Strait-Jacket not been such an obvious Z-grade exploitationer, the more quiet aspects of Crawford's performance (the early, post-asylum scenes are wonderful) would surely have been looked upon more favorably by critics.
On the polar-opposite end of the subtlety spectrum is the sequence that fans of over-the-top camp have made into 7/12
Strait-Jacket's setpiece. In it, Joan's character undergoes a transformation akin to demonic possession when dressed in clothes similar to those she wore 20-years earlier. Shy and hesitant before, Lucy reverts (presumably) to her old ways and turns a polite meet-and-greet with her daughter's handsome fiance into the 1964 equivalent of a lap dance.
The sight of a grotesquely-made-up Joan Crawford turning her man-trap wiles on a man young enough to be her son is more terrifying than anything Castle was able to accomplish with his fake-looking axe murders. In the 2002 book Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography, the authors state that Joan was quite taken with the good looks of actor John Anthony Hayes, and in response to an admiring comment made by someone alluding to Hayes acting mostly with his lips, Crawford is quoted as replying, "Yes, and such sexy lips, too!" All of which goes to set up, if not exactly explain, why Crawford's unique method of (wholly improvised) seduction during this sequence involves feeling about the actor's mouth like a Braille student, and practically shoving her entire hand down his throat. Sexy. THE STUFF OF FANTASY "Spot the Real-Life Parallels" is a game that gives zest to the viewing of any Joan Crawford film. THE STUFF OF DREAMS I've never fully understood why it is so many "bad" movies outdistance more accomplished films when it comes to sheer entertainment value, so perhaps that's why I treasure them so much. With boring and banal being the most frequent by-product of professional ineptitude, there's something serendipitous about discovering...what can you call it...the perfect "hot mess" that is an enjoyably bad movie. Strait-Jacket is a veritable laundry list of filmmaking flaws: a terrible, ill-used music The Neatness Thing score; bland performances (although I really like Diane Baker and George Kennedy); unsure pacing; flat cinematography and editing that appears calculated to enhance the artificiality of the violence; a cliche-filled script; and no distinct visual style beyond "Make sure they can see it" and "Make sure it's in focus." Yet it's a movie I can watch over and over and still find new things to enjoy. The breeziest 93 minutes of film you're likely to see. Of course, the one-of-a-kind force of nature known as Joan Crawford accounts for 90% of this. But whether you watch Strait-Jacket for the talent or the travesty, it remains a movie that doesn't disappoint. If nothing else, it's a marvelous example of the kind of movies being offered big-time stars as the pictures started to get smaller. 8/12
BONUS MATERIAL The absolutely delightful "How to Plan a Movie Murder" featurette for Strait-Jacket with Joan Crawford, William Castle, and screenwriter Robert Bloch: HERE Diane Baker enjoyed a good relationship with Joan Crawford and appeared with the actress in The Best of Everything and Strait-Jacket, but according to Baker, that relationship soured during the making of Della (originally titled Fatal Confinement) an unsold 1964 pilot for a Paul Burke TV series called Royal Bay. See the episode in its entirety on YouTube HERE Joan Crawford's wardrobe & makeup tests for Strait-Jacket HERE 1964 audio only interview with Joan Crawford in which she speaks of StraitJacket HERE 1970 David Frost Interview with Joan Crawford HERE 1982 Interview with Steven Spielberg on working with Joan on Night Gallery HERE Copyright Š Ken Anderson
"Is that the way you're going to do it?" Judgmental Joan: No matter how hard you try, you know you'll never quite measure up
Daughter Issues
9/12
Joan always knew where to find the boys AND the booze
"Tina!! Bring me the axe!!"
10/12
Meeting the In-Laws Edith Atwater and Howard St. John as Alison &Raymond Fields
Watch Your Step, indeed!
11/12
Pure William Castle The Columbia Lady loses her head
12/12