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Joan Crawford would’ve celebrated her 113th birthday on March 23, 2019. Though she’s probably best remembered for the portrayals of her by other actresses, the Oscar-winning performer starred in a number of classics before her death in 1977 at the age of 71. In honor of her birthday, let’s take a look back at 15 of her greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1906, Crawford made her debut as a body double for Norma Shearer in “Ladies of the Night” (1925). She worked her way up into starring roles in several MGM titles, most notably the ensemble drama “Grand Hotel” (1932). Yet a dip in audience enthusiasm led to her being labeled “box office poison,” which would haunt her for several years.

SEEOscar Best Actress Gallery: Every Winner in Academy Award History

Crawford moved to Warner Bros. in 1943, and just two years later, she was re-igniting the box office and scooping up a...

Members of Metallica, Exodus, Testament and other San Francisco–area thrash-metal groups reflect on how wild the scene was when it exploded in the early Eighties in the trailer for the upcoming documentary Murder in the Front Row: The San Francisco Bay Area Thrash Metal Story.

“It was scary, and it was dark,” Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick says. “It was this outlet for angst.”

“Poseurs must die!” Kirk Hammett exclaims with his hands in the air.

The film, which was directed by Adam Dubin (Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right to Party” video,...

ITV-backed production company Twofour has scored a bumper two season order for its Channel 5 social experiment Undercover Girlfriends as parent company ITV Studios touted its non-scripted formats to international buyers.

The British producer is also planning to launch an international production hub for the series. The news emerged at ITV Studios Formats Festival, which was held in London for over 200 international buyers and commissioners.

Melanie Leach and Andrew Mackenzie, who run Twofour, revealed that C5 has ordered seasons two and three of Undercover Girlfriends, which follows five girls as they spy on their boyfriends’ holiday. Stripped across one week, the boys are whisked away on a VIP trip to sun-soaked Marbella under the impression they are filming a TV show about being on a mates’ holiday. What they don’t know is that their girlfriends are in the villa right next door watching their every move.

The show,...

Exclusive: Aaron Kaplan’s Kapital Entertainment has forged a production partnership with The Vampire Diaries alum Paul Wesley and his company Citizen Media.

The first two series projects Kapital and Citizen are rolling out together are a drama based on Jason Smith’s non-fiction article Confessions Of a Drug-Addicted High School Teacher, with Wesley attached to star and David Slade (Black Mirror) to direct, and supernatural crime drama Possessed, based on a Korean format.

Under the pact, Kapital will work with Wesley to build his company and its footprint in the market. The Kapital team and Wesley will jointly develop content for Wesley to produce. It will be aimed at broadcast, cable and streaming. Some — but not all — of the projects will be intended as starring vehicles for Wesley who recently co-starred on Kapital’s CBS All Access series Tell Me a Story.

“Paul and I found ourselves aligned in...

Had Ruby Gentry been penned several years earlier, it would have most likely been swooped up as a star vehicle for Joan Crawford, especially as this screenplay was penned by Silvia Richards, whose script for 1947’s Possessed gave the larger-than-life star one of her three Academy Award nominations. Instead, this luridly tinged tale of backwoods swamp lust serves as a proto-type for the hysterical class issues later sharpened in the theatrical melodrama of Tennessee Williams’ adaptations, and while too tawdry for 1950s sensibilities, this late period King Vidor doesn’t have the same camp value as the ill-fated Beyond the Forest…...

Eight films selected for the festival’s top award.

Source: Iffr

‘Piercing’, ‘Sultry’, ‘I Have A Date With Spring’, ‘Left The Reports On Sarah And Saleem’

The 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam (24 Jan – 4 Feb) has revealed the eight films that will compete in its 2018 Hivos Tiger Competition.

Scroll down for the full line-up

The award includes a cash prize of €40,000, to be divided between filmmaker and producer. There is also a special jury award worth €10,000. Both will handed out on 2 February.

This year’s selection includes new feature films by directors including Baek Seungbin, Marina Meliande, Shireen Seno and Nicolas Pesce. There are seven world premieres and one international premiere.

This year’s jury will comprise of Anthea Kennedy, Paula Astorga, Job ter Burg Valeska Grisebach and Kim Kyung-Mook.

Festival director Bero Beyer commented: “This year’s Tiger line-up features daring filmmakers who boldly venture into new territories. All of them combine relevant stories and themes – like Israeli...

Hell hath no fury like two Hollywood actresses scorned!

That's the exact premise behind season one of FX's newest anthology series, Feud: Bette and Joan, which premieres this Sunday, March 5. The limited series, which heralds from the mind of executive producer Ryan Murphy, stars A-list actresses Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, respectively, and fixates on the bitter, lifelong rivalry between them.

But before you tune in, we've crafted the ultimate Feud cheat sheet to break down all the real-life drama!

Watch: Susan Sarandon & Jessica Lange in Character as Bette Davis & Joan Crawford

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Who Is Joan Crawford? Born Lucille Fay LeSueur in 1904, Crawford (Lange) became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s. However, by the end of the 1930s, her films began losing money and she was labeled "Box Office Poison." She made...

The 2015 St. Louis International Film Festival, also known as Sliff, has begun. Even though Alex Winter couldn’t bring Freaked in town, he did bring his two great tech documentaries, Downloaded and Deep Web – in addition to being awesome to us and presenting Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Sliff has a robust schedule full of independent and foreign cinema along with some mainstream affair like Legend starring Tom Hardy and some possible future Oscar contenders like Carol. However, since we are a horror website, we are going to highlight some films that should definitely be on your radar!

Feature Films

The Nameless

Filmed in “The Exorcist House” here in St. Louis, which most of you might have seen last weekend during Discovery Channel’s laughable Exorcism: Live!, this thriller borrows from the premise that The Exorcist was based out of by having a main character, Amy, return to the house...

Joan Crawford Movie Star Joan Crawford movies on TCM: Underrated actress, top star in several of her greatest roles If there was ever a professional who was utterly, completely, wholeheartedly dedicated to her work, Joan Crawford was it. Ambitious, driven, talented, smart, obsessive, calculating, she had whatever it took – and more – to reach the top and stay there. Nearly four decades after her death, Crawford, the star to end all stars, remains one of the iconic performers of the 20th century. Deservedly so, once you choose to bypass the Mommie Dearest inanity and focus on her film work. From the get-go, she was a capable actress; look for the hard-to-find silents The Understanding Heart (1927) and The Taxi Dancer (1927), and check her out in the more easily accessible The Unknown (1927) and Our Dancing Daughters (1928). By the early '30s, Joan Crawford had become a first-rate film actress, far more naturalistic than...

During the editing (which is when I really start to see the film), I saw that it was Hitchcock who had guided us through the writing and Lang who guided us through the shooting: especially his last films, the ones where he leads the spectator in one direction before he pushes them in another completely different direction, in a very brutal, abrupt way.

—Jacques Rivette on his Secret défense (1998), fro http://www.jacques-rivette.com/

Long before the much-vaunted, high-concept ‘mind-game movies’ like Memento (2000), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Inception (2010), there was Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1947). The film is like a broken puzzle at every level, virtually begging us to rearrange its pieces and find its key. Indeed, one almost needs to formulate a ‘hypothesis of the stolen film,’ Ruiz-style, since the movie we have before us is not quite the one Lang and his talented writer Silvia Richards (Possessed,...

Fred MacMurray movies: ‘Double Indemnity,’ ‘There’s Always Tomorrow’ Fred MacMurray is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" today, Thursday, August 7, 2013. Although perhaps best remembered as the insufferable All-American Dad on the long-running TV show My Three Sons and in several highly popular Disney movies from 1959 to 1967, e.g., The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, Boy Voyage!, MacMurray was immeasurably more interesting as the All-American Jerk. (Photo: Fred MacMurray ca. 1940.) Someone once wrote that Fred MacMurray would have been an ideal choice to star in a biopic of disgraced Republican president Richard Nixon. Who knows, the (coincidentally Republican) MacMurray might have given Anthony Hopkins a run for his Best Actor Academy Award nomination. After all, MacMurray’s most admired movie performances are those in which he plays a scheming, conniving asshole: Billy Wilder’s classic film noir Double Indemnity (1944), in which he’s seduced by Barbara Stanwyck, and Wilder...

We return to Season Three of the collaborative series Hit Me With Your Best Shot with not one but two tales of love-madness. I hadn't meant to pair them but I was so late with Possessed and it was time to bring the series back with The Story of Adele H. So there they were, two brunette screen goddesses Joan Crawford and (today's birthday girl) Isabelle Adjani, double-teaming me with their crazy-making sob stories of unrequited love. We'll cover Adele H tomorrow (yes, I'm running behind) but tonight, the first of these two Best Actress Nominated pictures.

Possessed (1947)

This 1947 noir stars the inimitable Joan Crawford as Louise, a woman who we meet after the events of the picture have taken place, wandering around in a daze looking for a man named "David". She is soon in a mental hospital and her back story, the story, begins to emerge. David (the...

 

"Hit Me With Your Best Shot" returns from its month-long hiatus in two weeks. Will you join us? I'll try to catch up soon with Possessed (1947) which had terrible timing given my father's passing. Other than a short upcoming moment with Joan Crawford, what's next?

 Wednesday June 27th - The Story Of Adele H. (1975)

For Isabelle Adjani's birthday (and considering that Victor Hugo madness will be heading our way at Christmas time) we'll look back at François Truffaut's Oscar nominated tale of obsessive love. Trivia: Adjani held the "youngest Best Actress nominee" record for three decades until a certain Whale Rider teared up.

*Thursday* July 5th -Picnic (1955)

Technically this is a Labor Day movie as opposed to 4th of July but the point is who wants to sit at home blogging on Independence Day? I've never seen this - hence the choice - but I hear it's...

Since we're celebrating twins until the stars move on from Gemini, I wanted to give a shout out to the figurative kind as well.

Due to sad circumstances offline I'm way behind on "Hit Me With Your Best Shot"  though I did watch Joan Crawford in Possessed recently to catch up. Crawford's camp icon status got me to thinking about the best camp masterpiece in the past 25 years, one that we already covered in the first season of the best shot series. (Showgirls is hard-wired into my neural pathways so it's very easy to access). The legendary so-bad-it's-good movie pits "Goddess" superstar Cristal Connors (Oscar-worthy Gina Gershon... and I'm 100% sincere) against naive crazyperson Nomi Malone (Razzie winner Elizabeth Berkley). Cristal insists repeatedly that they're one and the same, virtually identical. Nomi vehemently disagrees but the movie itself is in Cristal's headspace through and through.

The best shot from the movie?...

If you keep meaning to join in on the Hit Me With Your Best Shot fun, but haven't yet made the plunge do it with the last episode of the first half of season 3 (we'll take a few weeks off and start again before wrapping season 3). We'll be discussing Possessed (1947) with Joan Crawford. She made another film by the same name in the 30s so extra credit points if you wanna do both (otherwise unrelated) films.

If looks could kill many of Joan Crawford's co-stars would have died of unnatural causes. But just in case she also carries a gun.

P.S. Since I'm late with Edward Scissorhands, I'll still accept submissions so join in the fun! I'll wrap Edward on Monday and Joan on Wednesday and then we'll break until late June.

P.P.S. Any suggestions for the series are welcome. I do read them all and...

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot Series we look at pre-selected films from all decades, genres and countries and choose the shots that mean the most to us. Today, Zhang Yimou's Oscar nominated masterpiece Raise the Red Lantern (1991) starring the exquisite Gong Li. You could stare at her face for hours and Zhang Yimou knows it, framing his sensational then muse dead center close-up in an unbroken shot for the film's very first moment, a conversation that's more like a self-annihilating monologue.

Introducing Songlian (Gong Li), the The Fourth Mistress...

Songlian: Mother, stop! You've been talking for three days. I've thought it over. All right, I'll get married.

Mother: Good! To what sort of man?

Songlian: What sort of man? Is it up to me? You always speak of money. Why shouldn't I marry a rich man?

Songlian's Mother: Marry a rich man and you'll only be his concubine.

Have you been following along with season three of "Hit Me With Your Best Shot"? This series thrives on your comments and/or visual participation and dies without them. So don't leave us in solitary confinement staring at the movies obsessively. In season three we've already covered Snow White (30s Disney), Easter Parade (40s musical), Bonnie & Clyde (60s landmark) and Ladyhawke (80s fantasy). Because we aim for a true variety of genre and time periods in this series, here's the next six weeks of the movie schedule.

Please consider joining the fun.

Apr 18th Serenity (2007) and/or Firefly (2005)

Joss Whedon is having a huge film year (Avengers, Cabin in the Woods, Much Ado About Nothing) so we're looking back at his directorial (feature) debut. Or if you have never seen the TV series on which Serenity is based for this episode only of the cinematic series you can do "best shot" with a television pilot.

Anna Magnani in (what looks like) Luchino Visconti's Bellissima At the end of Giuseppe Tornatore's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner Cinema Paradiso, small-town projectionist Philippe Noiret has died and the Nuovo Cinema Paradiso has become a pile of rubble. The bratty Italian boy Salvatore Cascio has grown into the classy Frenchman Jacques Perrin (like Noiret, dubbed in Italian), a filmmaker who sits to watch a mysterious reel of film the deceased projectionist had left him. It turns out the reel contains clips from films censored by the prudish local parish priest, whose family values found kisses, embraces, and bare breasts and legs a danger to society. Now, who's doing all that kissing, embracing, and breast/leg-displaying in that film reel? (Please scroll down for the Cinema Paradiso clip.) Here are the ones I recognize: Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman in Giuseppe De Santis' Bitter Rice (1949); Mangano...

Watching Joan Crawford watching life go by.

In Possessed, Joan Crawford watches a train go by. In Possessed, we watch Fred Worden watching Joan Crawford watching a train go by. Or rather, we watch what Fred watches when Joan watches, an overlapping, jumping, sliding watching, splitting and resizing and ghostly reinforcement, stuttering as she spins, and the train moves, and inside artifacts of the segregated Pullman era are played out grimly, repetitively. A man shaves in silhouette, a white woman undresses, black men mix cocktails and cook dinner and set the table and black women...

On The Road Letter: Jack Kerouac Wanted Marlon Brando for Dean; Kerouac Would Play Sal [Photo: Leslie Caron.] On the Road was never made into a movie during Jack Kerouac's lifetime. However, the lesser-known The Subterraneans, which Kerouac mentions in his letter to Marlon Brando, was turned into an MGM movie in 1960. Needless to say, the final film had little in common with Kerouac's semi-autobiographical novella about an interethnic romance. In the Subterraneans movie, Kerouac's character, Leo Percepied, is played by George Peppard. The "colored" girl, Mardou Fox, minus the color but with the addition of a French accent is played by Leslie Caron. Others in the film's cast were Janice Rule, Roddy McDowall, Anne Seymour, and Jim Hutton (as the fictional Allan Ginsberg). Former screenwriter Ranald MacDougall (Mildred Pierce, Possessed, The Hasty Heart) directed from a screenplay by Robert Thom. "While none of the portrayals is distinguished," wrote A.H. Weiler in the New York Times,...

Robert Montgomery, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Forsaking All Others Joan Crawford on TCM: Mildred Pierce, Flamingo Road, When Ladies Meet Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am Forsaking All Others (1934) A woman pursues the wrong man for almost twenty years. Dir: W. S. Van Dyke. Cast: Robert Montgomery, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable. Bw-83 mins. 7:30 Am I Live My Life (1935) A flighty society girl tries to make a go of her marriage to an archaeologist. Dir: W. S. Van Dyke. Cast: Joan Crawford, Brian Aherne, Frank Morgan. Bw-97 mins. 9:15 Am Love On The Run (1936) Rival newsmen get mixed up with a runaway heiress and a ring of spies. Dir: W. S. Van Dyke. Cast: Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone. Bw-80 mins. 10:45 Am When Ladies Meet (1941) A female novelist doesn't realize her new friend is the wife whose husband she's trying to steal. Dir: Robert Z. Leonard.

Each year New York residents can look forward to two essential series programmed at the Film Forum, noirs and pre-Coders (that is, films made before the strict enforcing of the Motion Picture Production Code). These near-annual retrospective traditions are refreshed and re-varied and re-repeated for neophytes and cinephiles alike, giving all the chance to see and see again great film on film. Many titles in this year's Essential Pre-Codeseries, running an epic July 15 - August 11, are old favorites and some ache to be new discoveries; all in all there are far too many racy, slipshod, patter-filled celluloid splendors to be covered by one critic alone. Faced with such a bounty, I've enlisted the kind help of some friends and colleagues, asking them to sent in short pieces on their favorites in an incomplete but also in-progress survey and guide to one of the summer's most sought-after series. In this entry: what's playing Friday,...

Possessed (1947) Direction: Curtis Bernhardt Cast: Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Geraldine Brooks, Stanley Ridges, John Ridgely, Moroni Olsen Screenplay: Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall; from a story by Rita Weiman Oscar Movies Van Heflin, Joan Crawford, Possessed From the moment we see her shuffling across town in a comatose stupor to the homicidal climax, Possessed is Joan Crawford's picture all the way. And once you get past some of its contrived psychobabble, this Curtis Bernhardt-directed melodrama is also one of her best. [Note: Spoilers ahead.] In Possessed, Crawford plays Louise Howell, a private-duty nurse inexplicably obsessed with David Sutton, a cynical, hard-drinking mechanical engineer played by Van Heflin. That brings up my biggest objection to Possessed: the casting of the bland Heflin in a role that required an actor with a certain amount of animal magnetism. This viewer, for one, was unable to understand what made him put the...

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (right) in Baby Jane

How's this for a provocative take on Joan Crawford? Although she is one of the most-written-about women of the 20th century (and the subject of the most famous celebrity tell-all of all time, Mommie Dearest, written by her daughter Christina), much of what was written about her was ... an outright lie, or at least partially wrong.

That's the very interesting perspective behind Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford by Donald Spoto (William Morrow, $25.99).

Spoto is a long-time biography veteran with dozens of other titles to his name (about Grace Kelly, Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and many others). But he seems to have a particular affinity for Joan, and even opens the book with her very kind and detailed response to a fan letter he wrote to her when he was eleven years old.

What's been written about Joan that isn't true?...

Flow TV a structural analysis on Glee, why some episodes don't work and others do.

Examiner Would Tom Cruise's career be different today had he won the Oscar?

Pullquote You can draw a line from Prince through Laurel Canyon and on to The Kids Are All Right.

Just a Cineast looks at Olivia de Havilland's first released movie Alibi Ike, 75 years ago.

Socialite's Life I hadn't heard this rumor about Taylor Lautner taking on Hugh Jackman's role in X-Men First Class and now I want to die a little inside. See also: every post where I lament franchise actors playing in multiple franchises. Don't mix up my film worlds!

Cinematical interviews the great cinematographer Wally Pfister from Inception

Twitch Film Christopher Nolan's little seen first film Following is now available on demand.

Dear Old Hollywood visits the sites visited by one Joan Crawford in Possessed. I...

Several press releases went out today featuring some huge news coming out of Canada's Fantasia Film Festival including the first batch of films that will be populating this massive three-week long event. Pull up your chair, kids! You're gonna be here for a while!

Dig on the wealth of information below from today's releases and look for more announcements and of course full coverage soon!

Spotlight: Between Death And The Devil

Recent times and crimes have seen extraordinary levels of disillusionment with organized religion, particularly with the Catholic Church, and genre cinema has mirrored this anger with startling impact. In the face of this, we’ve put together this troubling spotlight focused on the abuse of faith, the horrors of ideology and the corruption of Godliness. Several of these films will absolutely stagger you.

Black Death (UK) Dir: Christopher Smith – North American premiere. Hosted by Director Christopher Smith

With the Black Death sweeping across England,...

When DVDs began to replace VHS tapes, many film-lovers couldn't wait to see their favorite movies in a better format - a digital format. But the studios were releasing old movies on DVD at a slow rate, sometimes waiting for an anniversary as an excuse to do so. And currently, there are still plenty of classics that have yet to be converted. But that's all about to change. Warner Bros' home entertainment division has come up with a plan to allow custom ordering of 150 films never before released on DVD. Dubbed the Warner Archive Collection, an online vault of films including 1942's "Once Upon a Honeymoon," starring Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, and 1947's "Possessed," with Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, can be tapped by consumers visiting WarnerArchive.com. Upon the selection and purchase of a title -- at $19.95 per disc -- Warners will burn, package and ship the DVD...