Strait-Jacket [HD]

SWING ALONG WITH JOAN.....
I gave this movie 5 stars for two reasons: William Castle and Joan Crawford. What a combo! And the movie's pretty good too. 20 years ago, Lucy Harbin caught her husband with another woman and chopped them up with an axe. She gets committed to an asylum for the criminally insane. Now, she's released in her daughter's (Diane Baker) care on a farm with other relatives and wouldn't you just know it---someone's at it again, chopping up the extra characters. Poor Joan tries to please her daughter in every way to make up for lost time---but daughter dearest still wants her to look like she did 20 yrs ago---like Sadie Thompson! Well things just get downright messy and there's more murders and screaming and then it all blows open. Someone's crazy alright but it's not our Joan. The extras on this DVD are great. There's a telling interview with Diane Baker and a costume test for Crawford that's hysterical. But wait till you see the "axe test"!..."Strait-Jacket" is a must have for fans. Joan (as...

Whatever Happened to Mildred Pierce?
Joan Crawford plays Lucy Harbin, a woman who has been institutionalized for 20 years, after having hacked her unfaithful husband and his girlfriend to pieces with an axe. She is reunited with her estranged daughter, Carol (played by Diane Baker, who specialized in playing devious females at the time). Carol encourages her mother to dress like she did 20 years earlier,i.e. flower-printed dresses, jingly charm bracelets, and a black, 40s-style wig. Lucy does, and watch out! In what is my favorite scene in the film, Joan, looking like the world's oldest hooker, comes on to her daughter's handsome YOUNG fiance. It is almost obscene to watch this, but try and take your eyes off the screen! Mysterious axe-murders begin to take place. Joan's psychiatrist, (played by Mitchell Cox, Vice-President of Pepsi!)sleazy farmhand Leonard Kraus, played by George Kennedy, and then Carol's future father-in-law, played by Howard St. John. Naturally, we assume it's Joan, right? Wrong! I won't tell who the...

Hack Hack Sweet Has-Been
This is a stunner. From the opening when we see Joan's Lucy "all woman, and very much aware of the fact" Hardin hacks up her two-timing hubby (Lee Majors!) and his girlfriend, to the very end where we find out who is committing all of those pesky axe murders after Joan gets sprung from the institution, this is a Crawford tour-de-force. She looks as if she crancked her own personal acting switch up to 11, and let 'er rip. She also alternates between wearing a grey wig and a frumpy muu-muu to a tight dress, black wig and about forty pounds of bangle bracelets (How could she have snuck up on anyone who was not in a coma making all that noise?), all of which succeeds in making her look twenty years older than she looks as an old woman!

Wildly inappropriate line readings were a hallmark of Joan's performances in later years- but these are the best. The scene where she tells her prospective son-in-law's parents about her incarceration is a corker- she alternates between mewling...

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