★ 7 / 10
There are times in this film when I
CinemaSerf
There are times in this film when I could quite cheerfully have hung Walter Huston's "Davidson" from the yardarm... Joan Crawford is "Sadie Thompson" - a…
There are times in this film when I could quite cheerfully have hung Walter Huston's "Davidson" from the yardarm... Joan Crawford is "Sadie Thompson" - a prostitute merrily plying her trades on a South Pacific island with the visiting American troops. The arrival of the seriously puritanical "Davidson" couple - Huston and wife Beulah Bondi - soon puts a cramp in her style, though. Their shock and disgust at this slatternly behaviour leads them to try to get her deported back to America (where she has a bit of a wicked past), ostensibly in a bid to save her moral soul. Crawford is super as the working girl, but not quite so effective as the truly odious Huston, who features sparingly but oh so potently as he starts spouting scripture. Rarely can the Lord's Prayer ever have had such a menacing effect on film (or anywhere else). The rain, the interminable rain, adds heaps to the gradually smouldering angst between the two as their battle of wills ebbs one way, then the other - before a denouement that leaves us with a couple of imponderables. Lewis Milestone knew how to get the best from both his principals here, and with some wonderfully eerie cinematography he just lets them do their stuff. As usual, Alfred Newman uses his skill with the orchestra to heighten the tension too. It's hasn't quite the intensity of the silent Swanson in "Sadie Thompson" (1928) but it's still an enjoyable, if at times quite stressful, watch.
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★ 8 / 10
In this awkward early talkie, a beautiful, young Joan Crawford leaps off the screen with a vivid and charismatic performance that anticipates her later award-winning career.
Steve3
Try to see this on as big a viewing screen as you can, as the film is often quite dark, and Crawford is so beautiful in it you'll want a good look. I loved it!…
Try to see this on as big a viewing screen as you can, as the film is often quite dark, and Crawford is so beautiful in it you'll want a good look. I loved it!
In this second screen version of W. Somerset Maugham's morality tale, "Rain", Joan Crawford gives a performance that knocks the rest of the cast off the screen.
First made as a silent with Gloria Swanson, the stageplay "Miss Sadie Thompson" had been a controversial broadway hit, and young Joan Crawford fought hard to get the coveted role of Sadie. She shed her drawing room manners and designer gowns, researching the part by visiting the red-light district of San Diego to see what the street-walkers of the day looked and sounded like. Her appearance in the film was considered offensive for it's realism, and the film stiffed at the box office. Sadly, it's financial failure relegated Crawford to years of popular but light-weight "respectable" roles, before her Oscar-calibre performances of the 1940's and 50's.
But for audiences of today, the film is worth reconsidering. The other performers are wooden and stilted but Crawford's performance, embarrassingly natural in 1932, leaps off the screen. The topic matter that was so controversial, even offensive, in the early 1930's is not a hard sell to modern audiences: that bible-thumpers aren't always the good guys, and "sinners" aren't always so bad.
Further, the feminist aspect of the film is clearer today. As Sadie makes her way around the Pacific, a fun-loving free-spirit often one step ahead of the law, it's the fact that she's a female that draws the ire of the puritanical fire-and-brimstone missionaries: a young man would have gotten away with it.
And for us post-Woodstock viewers this touching story strikes a familiar chord: of the harmless, light-hearted kid who hurts no-one but whose very existence is offensive to the powers that be.
And it must fairly be said that when she was a young (I think she's about 25 when she made this) she is a strikingly beautiful babe, heavy make-up or not.
If you've ever written Crawford off as "man-ish" or "bitchy" because of roles she did later in her life, check out this movie and take a look at the sexy, vivacious girl who was once described by F. Scott Fitzgerald as "the personification of the American flapper"!
I found the film fascinating (that's why I went on to look up all the above information).
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