Over the course of her decades-long career, Joan Crawford would inhabit and shed many different personas. In her silent days, she was the sassy, Charleston stomping flapper girl. When life got gritty during the Depression, she charmed audiences as an ambitious working girl always striving for a life of glamour. By the forties, when her hairstyles coiled higher and shinier and shoulder pads loomed over her tiny frame, she fell into a strange hodgepodge of so-called women's pictures, and suspense dramas. By the end of her career, she had found a home as the uneasy heroine of several horror films.

I have a special fondness for the scrappy pre-code Joan; she was so good as a kind-hearted small town girl yearning to don sparkling diamonds and swath herself in mink. She always made the pursuit of wealth look so noble. And yet, I think Crawford was at her best in the late forties and early fifties, when she made a series of remarkable films noir. Here she is at her most complex, tough, but emotionally fragile. She's that pre-code dame facing the consequences of her unfettered ambition which makes for an infinitely richer performance.

Here are some of the best movies from this fascinating period in Crawford's career:

Mildred Pierce (1945)

This is the film that brought back Crawford's career after it flatlined for a time in the forties. She won the Academy Award as the titular heroine of this must-see noir. It is a powerfully feminine movie, its female perspective quickly established with a melancholy voiceover by Joan. Rather than traversing the male-dominated world of crime, it focuses on motherhood, its heroine finding her power in the kitchen, the female domain of the day. While Zachary Scott looks the part of the dangerous lover, it is Mildred's daughter Veda who is the femme fatale here. Ann Blyth plays Pierce's vicious offspring with sociopathic bite. You can only nod your head with Crawford's gal pal Eve Arden as she sighs, 'Personally, Veda's convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.'

Possessed (1947)

Crawford played vulnerable so often and well that it's easy to believe the unease she exuded on screen came from something real. No one suffers like Joan. She's not afraid to get ugly about it either. In this bleak psychiatry noir, she gives one of her best performances as a mentally ill woman who is painfully, deliriously, in love with a man who does not love her back. He also underestimates the fury of her response to his rejection. This film comes from a period in the 1940s when Hollywood was obsessed with psychiatry, finding plenty of dramatic meat in the science of feeling crazy. While the doctors drone on about Crawford's diagnosis, she breaks your heart without saying a word, communicating the depth of her pain with little more than a glance.

Flamingo Road (1949)

Crawford and Zachary Scott are reunited in this small town drama, and they are just as star-crossed as ever. As corrupt sheriff Titus Semple, Sydney Greenstreet gives Joan's traveling carnival dancer Lane Bellamy plenty of trouble. He isn't pleased she's taken an interest in Scott, whom he is grooming to be his political puppet. But just like the rest of Crawford's opponents, Semple seriously underestimates her power. While your typical noir is most menacing at night, Greenstreet's evil is so potent, dread hovers heavily over daytime scenes set in seemingly innocuous locations like an expansive porch and a bustling cafe. Ominous shadows seem to always sneak into view, and particularly around Semple. Crawford is as alert to that doom as a wild animal, and she relies on instinct sharpened by life in the gritty carney world to survive.

The Damned Don't Cry (1950)

Though set in the criminal rather than the domestic world, there are a lot of similarities to Mildred Pierce in this sleek drama. Joan is once again a housewife who fights to give luxuries to her child over the objections of her husband. She also similarly separates from her spouse to chase a richer life. Here Joan is tougher and more street smart than in her typical noir roles, particularly when she becomes gangster's moll, though she begins to wish she'd stayed on the wrong side of the tracks. It is one of many of Crawford's fifties roles in which she is clearly playing a part meant for a much younger actress, but she is so vivid and passionate that the star is ultimately believable as a woman desirable enough to lead a man to his doom.

Sudden Fear (1952)

With a line like, 'lingerie and hostess gowns by Tula' in the credits, you'd never believe how down and dirty Crawford gets in this suspenseful flick. As Myra Hudson, a rich heiress and successful playwright who finds herself the object of a murder plot, she sweats, trips, fumbles and even forces a fall down a flight of stairs. Her intense panic is visceral; you can almost feel her heart beating. After she learns her supposedly adoring husband (Jack Palance) and an old flame (Gloria Grahame) are plotting her murder, her performance is, not inappropriately, slightly over the top. Still, she has a remarkable way of drawing you into her thoughts so you sense her fear and a keen writer's skill for plotting at work.

Female on the Beach (1955)

As wealthy widow Lynn Markham, Crawford is especially vulnerable in this suspense drama set on the shore. Markham takes possession of her dead husband's beach house, where the previous female tenant died under mysterious circumstances. Presumptuous beach bum Drumond 'Drummy' Hall (Jeff Chandler) lets himself into the house one morning without invitation and he seems to have an unsavory connection to the dead woman. Instead of calling the police and changing the locks, Crawford falls for Drummy. She even stays with him after she reads the former tenant's diary and learns that the gamblers (Cecil Kellaway and Natalie Schaefer, aka Lovey Howell from Gilligan's Island) in the house next door are in cahoots with him to find a rich widow to scam. She knows he isn't noble, but is he a killer?

Kendahl Cruver is a writer and editor. She writes about classic movies at the aptly-named A Classic Movie Blog.