Or, as it screeches on the box in lipstick red cursive: "The damned don't cry [EXCLAMATION POINT!]" Just the right tone of batshit! Hugely enjoyable women's melodrama with enough mobster action to keep your date happy too. Joan Crawford shakes off her dusty, hardscrabble life and cheap husband (cripes, even her parents are packed into their tarpaper dump) and decides that she deserves more. Making a series of moral missteps in her quest for dough she becomes entangled in the affections of the stone cold head of a crime syndicate. Crawford -who was forty five at the time of filming (!)- almost plays several different characters: the naive housewife, a gum-smacking model, an elegant society heiress and she waltzes through endless divine sets. I love the story of the American nobody who apes the better classes in an unrelenting, nail-breaking climb upwards. Is she wrong to want MORE? Is the only way for a divorced woman to get more to sell out? We can't help but cheer her on as she uses and dumps every sleaze-bag and chump that come her way. She meets her match in David Brian or "George Castleman," the man at the centre of power. Their first discussion sees him crack a window and ask in a snide voice what kind of perfume she's drenched in (must have been some kind of Axe Body Spray for angry 50s chicks). Priceless!
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