Feminist film noir

Women are in charge in David Miller’s Sudden Fear, an unusual postwar crime drama which sets up as a vehicle for Joan Crawford but dénoues in a wild night chase in San Francisco. 

Crawford plays Myra Hudson, a San Francisco heiress who has become a successful Broadway playwright. Myra, like Crawford, is an active professional in charge of her world. Her manner leaves little doubt that she has been in charge all her life. She sits in on a rehearsal of her latest play with the producer and director as they watch their rangy male lead Lester Blaine (Jack Palance) tread heavily on the boards. She tells her producer and director that Blaine is all wrong as a romantic lead and asks that they replace him. This narrative trope reliably brings Myra and Blaine together. Ultimately they marry.

A reliable narrative trope brings Myra (Joan Crawford) and

 Lester (Jack Palance) together in Sudden Fear (1952).

So, a rich, powerful, driven woman finds a tall, dark, handsome—and younger—stranger, a struggling actor (this film was Palance’s break-out role); she makes this rough diamond her husband and softens ecstatically into the fairytale glow. But this is a crime drama. It is no plot spoiler to say that Irene Neves (Gloria Grahame), an attractive New Yorker who suddenly turns up in San Francisco, has an unsavory history with Blaine. The two have trouble keeping their hands off each other; they are the keener yet to get them on Myra’s fortune.

Three’s a crowd: Gloria Grahame, Jack Palance and

Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear (1952).

Introducing her home life to the dutifully attentive Blaine, Myra says that she “writes” with a voice-activated Dictaphone which records her thoughts as she speaks them pacing her study. She demonstrates how it works. This makes for another reliable narrative trope: Blaine and Irene plot Myra’s demise in whispers her study, unaware that the machine is on. Myra, rosy with connubial contentment, is stricken when she discovers the recording. Her fairytale romance becomes a paranoid nightmare.

Shadows and whispers: Myra’s (Joan Crawford) fairytale

becomes a paranoid nightmare in Sudden Fear (1952).

But here the crime drama kicks into motion with superb acting and some of film noir’s most memorable shots. Where a well-connected person like Myra might simply have passed on the inadvertent recording to a law enforcement official, Myra first recoils in paranoia; then she goes gothic; and then she coolly counterplots against her would-be killers. Her transformation takes place through a camera that loves Crawford’s unique face. Incidental objects such as a pendulum desk clock and a mechanical dog take on surreal properties. Elmer Bernstein’s musical score helps itself to Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”.

Incidental objects take on surreal properties 

in David Miller’s Sudden Fear (1952).

Like many organized people, Myra begins with a list. She visualizes each step. Blaine and Irene are common grifters clearly out of their depth here. Myra mentally debates like Hamlet: Will her love for Lester save him? And then she screws her courage to the sticking place. She pulls on a scarf and coat and dashes to the dénouement from her home in Pacific Heights to Russian Hill.

Joan Crawford’s Myra Hudson dashes from her home in Pacific Heights 
to Russian Hill to outmaneuver would-be killers in Sudden Fear (1952).

This film enchanted the young François Truffaut. His review Les extrêmes me touchent (Number 21, March 1953) was his first for Cahiers de cinema.

As executive director, Crawford exercised influence in selecting the material, hiring a writer, picking the crew, and casting the roles. The film was made in the twilight of the studio system after she was released from a long-term contract with Warner Brothers. It was a financial success and earned Academy Award nominations for Crawford, Palance, cinematographer Charles Lang, and costumer designer Sheila O’Brien.

Hollywood legend Charles Lang’s camera loves Joan 
Crawford’s unique face in Sudden Fear (1952).

The studio system which dominated the production, distribution, and exhibition of films since the 1920s, credited for Hollywood’s “Golden Age”, was led by a monopoly of film conglomerates known as the Big Five. This ended after the US Supreme Court separated film production from distribution and exhibition in its landmark 1948 Paramount decision.

Sudden Fear (1952) US (112 minutes) RKO Radio Pictures. directed by David Miller; screenplay by Lenore Coffee and Robert Smith, based on the novel by Edna Sherry, with Joan Crawford as an uncredited collaborating writer; cinematography by Charles Lang; editing by Leon Barsha; music director Elmer Bernstein; produced by Joe Kaufman and Joan Crawford.