Whether or not Joan had fallen in love with Clark Gable, her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was probably doomed from the start. In many ways Doug was a spoiled, isolated child of privilege who had married a comparatively sophisticated older woman who had pulled herself up by her bootstraps. For all his charm and levity, Fairbanks was, emotionally speaking, a boy who’d had everything handed to him at birth —by contrast, Joan had had to struggle for the same things. “Looking back,” Joan remembered, “it would probably be unfair of me to say Doug was superficial and I was so worldweary." Doug was old-fashioned, suggesting that Joan give up her career and let him be the sole bread-winner —a sure sign that he never really understood his wife at all. Then there was the lack of children. “I didn’t need another child,” Joan said, “I already had one in Doug.” In her autobiography, Joan mentioned several miscarriages; privately she admitted that on at least one occasion she had had an abortion. She hid this fact from Doug, just as she hid her affair with Gable.
Joan’s performance in A Woman’s Face (along with her Oscar-winning turn in the later Mildred Pierce) has stuck even in the minds of people who weren’t necessarily big fans of hers —and in strange ways. Premier special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen was thinking of Joan in A Woman’s Face when he created his Medusa for the fantasy film Clash of the Titans in 1981.
Joan wanted to star in the film version of Mildred Pierce very badly. Warner Bros. queen Bette Davis had turned it down, and the front-runner for the role was Barbara Stanwyck (who had already triumphed in another James M. Cain adaptation, Double Indemnity).
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Mildred Pierce was the first film Joan did for producer Jerry Wald, who would produce six more films with Joan from 1946 to 1959. “Jerry always had faith in me,” Joan was to say years later. Mildred Pierce is almost perfect moviemaking. The picture is imbued with real cinematic knowhow (albeit in a style not as showy as Hitchcock’s), and the dialogue is often priceless. Michael Curtiz’s direction is crisp, smooth and highly efficient, his handling of both players and props taut and assured. Curtiz and the brilliant cinematographer Ernest Haller ensure that Mildred Pierce is filled with expert camerawork, interesting angles, and evocative lighting schemes. Max Steiner may have recycled some music from his score for Now, Voyager but his opening theme for Mildred Pierce is excellent.
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Joan is wonderful in Mildred Pierce, although there were critics of the time who suggested that she didn’t have the requisite emotion in certain sequences. Joan does seem to hold back a bit after the death of Mildred’s other, younger daughter; she was afraid that if she overplayed the hysteria and abject grief most mothers would feel at such a moment, she would be accused of chewing the scenery. Curtiz felt strongly that she should underplay the scene to emphasize her character’s obsession with Veda. “Please, God, don’t let anything happen to Veda,” Mildred says significantly at the end of the scene.
Henry Hart of Films in Review wasn’t the only one to suggest that there were many elements of Joan in Mildred Pierce. “Crawford gave Mildred Pierce a reality it might have otherwise lacked,” said Hart, “because it was her own life in some ways, a strong woman struggling against misfortune and the wrong men.” Because of this, Joan made her Mildred Pierce seem real despite the melodramatic and even farfetched aspects of the plot (one suspects that the more “naturalistic” approach of a 21st century actress wouldn’t be nearly as interesting). -"Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography" (2002) by Lawrence J. Quirk and William Schoell
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