Author: Kendahl Cruver
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Joan Crawford: Film Noir's Grand Dame
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 suspen...
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Dark Cinema: Lawrence Tierney - The Perfect Creature of Noir
Lawrence Tierney has frightened me since the first moment I laid eyes on him in the gritty film noir, Born to Kill (1947). I found him unpleasant in that first glimpse. I watched it to see one of my favorite actresses, Claire Trevor, but ended up being uncomfortably riveted by Tierney as her leading man. He seemed to soil everything around him, bringing out the worst in the flinty Ms. Trevor and destroying the innocence of her foster sister, played by Audrey Long. However, he also m...
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