From RKO Radio Pictures
Directed by David Miller
Starring
Joan Crawford
Jack Palance
Gloria Grahame
Bruce Bennett
Mike Connors
Virginia Huston
There have been numerous movies about men who marry women they hardly know with the intention of murdering them for their fortunes. But I'm not sure there's ever been one as good as Sudden Fear. It came out in the year I discovered movies and those that were released in 1952 have always held a special place in my affection.
It is likely this is the first film noir I ever saw and so taken was I of the genre that I saw virtually everyone ever made. It was also the year that I discovered one of my favorite actresses ever, Gloria Grahame. The year was her best with The Bad and the Beautiful (which won her an undeserved supporting Oscar), The Greatest Show on Earth (a movie I still adore but most undeserving of its Oscar for best picture) and Macao (which had actually been made a couple of years earlier and dumped into 1952 after Howard Hughes stopped tinkering with it).
I always found Joan Crawford to be an acquired taste and usually I had little interest in acquiring it. I always found her to be overly dramatic and relying too much on affectations (include hair, makeup and costumes) to be considered a truly good actress. That she was often mentioned in the same company as Hepburn, Davis and Stanwyck was a joke. But now and then she turned in wonderful performances (the best being her Oscar-winning turn as Mildred Pierce five years earlier). Sudden Fear is one of them as well.
Jack Palance always claimed this is the film that made him a star. He would nab his first Oscar nomination (oddly as best supporting actor) for it and would follow up with a true supporting performance as a vicious gunslinger in the superb western, Shane, for which he would get another nomination from the Academy.
One unusual thing about the film is it showcased Crawford as an honest-to-God heroine. That was rare. She, of course, played many a bad girl but even her good girl roles were smudged with dirt but not this time. She plays Myra Hudson (who knows another even more famous Crawford film where she had that last name?), a wealthy playwright who nixes Lester Blaine (Palance) as the leading man in New York tryouts for her newest play. She feels he hasn't the right look to be a romantic leading man. He tells her off before he leaves the theater in a huff.
As Myra is taking the train back to her San Francisco home, Lester suddenly appears and she extends herself rather broadly to make amends to him. As the train stops for a layover in Chicago, Lester secretly tells a conductor that his ticket is only good to The Windy City and he would like to get to San Francisco. Of course he would. Without seeing anything definitive, we suspect no-goodness is afoot... perhaps for no other reason at this point other than this is, after all, Jack Palance.
Audiences are provided with a tour of the Bay City because Myra wants to show it to Lester. We see her beautiful home on one of the city's hills and her waterfront get-a-way estate. Lester points out that the stairs to the water are rocky, steep, uneven and since they are without railings, very dangerous.
I don't belong in your world, Lester suddenly tells a crushed Myra one day. You have so much and I have nothing.
Without you, I am nothing, she counters.
Bam, they are married. He's enormously attentive and affectionate and she's so taken in because obviously it's been awhile since Myra's been in love.
The newlyweds throw a party so Myra's friends can meet her beaming husband. Her trusted attorney (Bennett) arrives with his brother (Connors) and the latter's date, the kittenish Irene (Grahame). Soon she and Lester are in the clinches and we discover she is his ex-girlfriend who wants him back. She tells him she wants them to get rid of Myra. They will plot how to accomplish that.
At another gathering at Myra's, Lester and Irene secretly dash off Myra's office and unknown to them, Myra's dictaphone is left on and Myra ends up hearing all. He blurts out that he's never loved Myra and loathes her touch. They discuss that Myra is planning on leaving him a paltry sum in her new will (not true) and if they get rid of her before she signs it in three days, all her loot will go to Lester under California law.
Especially memorable for me all these years later is watching Crawford's silent, anguished face as she hears all she does. The actress runs the gamut of physical emotions and she circles her office barely breathing in the horror and the betrayal. It's a wonderful scene.
Of course, now the story changes focus. The tensions that are created at this point become so exciting, thanks, of course, in large part to Palance. Crawford becomes a woman in peril and Grahame is shown to be even more treacherous than we previously knew.
Myra feigns illness, takes to her bed for a day and comes up with a plot of her own. After all, she's not a playwright for no reason. Lester wants to take her to the beach house and she mightily resists, no doubt thinking of those stairs without the railings. She concocts a plot where she will shoot Lester in Irene's apartment and Irene will be convicted of the murder. I have always applauded the film for how clever this segment is written.
Myra, while hiding in Irene's closet, gun in hand, realizes she can not go through with the killing even while Lester is maniacally running through the apartment looking for the absent Irene. Myra uses this opportunity to bolt but when Lester runs to the open front door, he sees Myra running down the street.
Now the film moves into its thrill-a-minute ending, dripping in nighttime noir, involving all three leads. It's the part that those who've seen it could never forget and those who have not seen it are not going to hear about it from me. I couldn't... really, I just couldn't. It reminds me of the brilliance that Hitchcock would have given it... a chase scene that all noir lovers cherish.
Crawford had just ended her contract with Warner Bros by mutual consent. Her pictures had limped along for a few years and no one was happy about that. She was constantly on the lookout for new material and when she came across Sudden Fear she was so happy she was nice to her kids. It was a juicy part and just as important was that Myra was a good person. Crawford would have to do some real acting to pull that off.
The director David Miller, whose work in the coming years completely charmed me, helmed some good thrillers and worked on women's stories and I expect he got his feet wet in both categories on this film. All directors knew that Crawford slept with most of her directors and took over film sets. He wasn't having any of it and they had a good working relationship which would happen again in the future.
Miller wanted an actor who could intimidate Crawford, vital for the story but not easy to accomplish in real life. Many of her costars... Gable excepted... were wimpish types. Hmmm, I wonder why that was. It couldn't happen on this film. Miller had seen Palance in Panic in the Streets and wanted Crawford to see it and then Miller would tell her that's their Lester Blaine. Crawford, who thought Miller was referring to Richard Widmark, Panic's star, was horrified when she realized it was Palance who was the focus. She's been said to scream he's so ugly.
Obviously she overcame her objections and then, interestingly, as outlined above, their first scene is about his looks and not being a romantic leading man type. Soon she was using all her wiles to get to know him much better and he was having none of it. Then she became incensed when she heard he and Grahame were doing the deed.
For his part, Palance was always a snob. He was never bowled over by those who were bigger names than he was. He bristled that Crawford had such clout and that she was a far inferior actor than he was. He always said that to top it all off, she wasn't even a nice person, although he had some kind of nerve on that claim. In no time at all, they were engaged in a quiet war. They stopped speaking to one another when the cameras weren't rolling. They must have found comfort in the filming the second half of the script when all turns ugly.
When Crawford felt she couldn't really get to Palance, she turned her rage on Grahame, although the older actress was known for being mean to younger actresses in her films. Hollywood urban legend has sounded off that the two got into a slapping match on the set but it is likely not true. Crawford, however, did what she could to sabotage Grahame's happiness on the job. She banned Grahame from sound stages in which she had no scenes (Grahame wanted to watch Palance work) and she ordered some of Grahame's costumes to be less glamorous. To be fair, Grahame was not always popular with coworkers on her movie sets.
The acting all around is superb. One of Miller's great tricks was making a victim out of Crawford. Myra was a victim and Crawford had to nail that. Miller told her that this time she was just going to play the female lead instead of the female lead and the male lead. She was wounded, but she got it. She must have known that her own powerful presence would throw the movie off-kilter if the man was less powerful. A number of scenes show Palance standing over her. She is never seen as being angry but is frequently seen being afraid... call it sudden fear if you're so disposed. She certainly does more crying than usual. She is blessed with having quite a number of reaction shots, all done expressing terror and in silence. She earned her final Oscar nomination for best actress and it was very deserved.
He was the perfect Lester. I gotta say I never found him to be ugly. Perhaps I am in the minority but then I rarely think of anyone as ugly. He did look menacing, moody and dangerous. He adopted that monolithic stance, was rigid, unforgiving, self-absorbed. You were never quite sure what he was going to do but you were confident that you would not like it. That was a face that looked as if it would crack if he smiled... although, honestly, his rare smile or laugh was pretty fine indeed.
One of the ironies of the film's beginning where Crawford doesn't like his looks on stage, Miller had makeup transform Palance into a more average-looking guy. They lit him differently, lightened his hair and added a bridge to his nose. Then as Lester's true nature is revealed, Palance's face is restored to its natural look. Now what does that say about the man's face?
Sudden Fear is the first film I'd ever seen Palance in and he mesmerized me, hooking me for all time. He belonged in the Brando-Clift-Dean Moody Club. I always liked the silent, dangerous, rebellious, non-traditionalist type of acting club in which Palance could have been president. He is an actor who was frightening on screen and I expect some of that would have spilled over off screen as well. In a way, he certainly played himself and when done well, I think that's the greatest kind of acting.
All Grahame fans know that she made a cottage industry out of playing bad girls. Perhaps no one did it better. She knew she had the bad girl in her veins. She certainly had moments of living it. Her best characters were horny, deceptive, conceited and smart-mouthed. I loved her pouty mouth, her seductiveness, the easy way she moved and boy oh boy could she arrange words in a sentence for optimum effect.
The small supporting cast did the jobs they were supposed to do. Connors, in his film debut, was eager and attentive as Grahame's supposed boyfriend. Virginia Huston, as Crawford's assistant, in her brief career made two other notable noirs, Out of the Past and The Racket and appeared in a third one, Flamingo Road, again with Crawford. Bennett, as her trusted lawyer and one who aids in getting the plot moving along, had played Crawford's errant husband in Mildred Pierce.
Quick shout-outs to Elmer Bernstein whose music is perfectly in sync with the dark, sexy, criminal moods of film noir and for Miller's fantastic use of L.A.'s Bunker Hill district for the film's final location.
Not all of the pieces that fit a noir description are always in noir films. One that does seem to always be present is the great black and white lightning, especially the use of shadows and the eternal look of blinds illuminated on walls. The overall mystery is here with respect to minimal back stories on the characters. We know very little about any of them. Oddly, for a noir, there's not a cop to be found.
Like most noirs, not everything is totally sensible or understood and in this one, at least, there's a couple of things that are just downright lacking in common sense. One, unfortunately, occurs in that delicious ending. I've overlooked them. You do the same... for greater effect.
Sudden Fear was a box-office and critical success. Some parts of it are as clear today as they were when I first saw it. It is a gorgeous thriller, backed up by incisive writing, a suspenseful finale and spot-on acting. If you haven't seen it, you really should. It's more available than you may think.
Here, take a look at the trailer:
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10 Iconic Performances
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