The Damned Don't Cry

There may have been better made movies starring Crawford (she’s working with director Vincent Sherman here, not Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz, or George Cukor), but I don’t know if she ever had a richer opportunity to click on all of her intimate, melodramatic, and camp cylinders.

Dealing tangentially with Las Vegas gambling's formative years (lots of matte work here of mountains in the desert), this crackling melodrama was inspired by Bugsy Siegel's relationship with Virginia Hill. [17 Jul 2005]

A fairly standard story for the period, about a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who ends up living the good life as a gangster's moll, but Crawford gives an astonishing performance. [17 Jun 2005, p.13H]

Vincent Sherman's tangy 1950 gangster crime-romance. [19 Jun 2005, p.C3]

The Damned Don’t Cry is an efficient, fast moving exercise in melodrama, hardly memorable and at times putrefying in its reliance on hokum, cliché, and bullshit sentimentality.

A rigid faced Joan Crawford, in a role that would make sense only if played by a ravishing young beauty. She's twice too old for it, and her acting is grim and masklike.

Vincent Sherman's direction is as specious as the script.