This Woman Is Dangerous (1952)

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

And she's about as dangerous as a house cat. Yes, she is once again a gangster's moll, and once again, that gangster is David Brian. They run a racket where they pose as police officers invading supposedly legal gambling joints, and Joan poses as a customer getting access somehow to the money room. She's an ex-con, as it is revealed, having served six months of a year sentence. I look at this as the David Brian of "The Damned Don't Cry" going up against a twin who invades his world, where a twin Joan Crawford is being used in a scheme where she might even run into the JC of that 1950 melodrama. While "The Damned Don't Cry" is far from a perfect film, it's better than this, and even with that film's unbelievable script, it at least had decent direction. All this has is Joan decked out while suffering to maintain her sight and a B grade director, Felix Fiest, who to me was only known as the director of a 1936 Judy Garland/Deanna Durbin short, "Every Sunday Afternoon", and the 1945 Joan Davis/Jack Haley musical comedy, "George White's Scandals".When the audience first sees Joan, she is being told that her sight is in danger of being lost unless she goes to a special clinic near Indianapolis where eye expert Dennis Morgan can perform a risky surgery that might prevent her from going blind. She pulls one last job, has a last minute confrontation with the seemingly violent David Brian, and heads to Missouri where she is prepared to be operated on and ends up falling in love with her widowed doctor who has a young daughter. Meanwhile, Brian and the rest of the gang (Philip Carey and Mari Aldon) flee from the FBI, kill a motorcycle cop, and hire a private investigator to make sure that while Crawford is fighting for her health, she's also keeping her virtue. It's a silly set-up that only Joan Crawford in all her glamour can succeed in making palatable. Of course, like all mob related movies, it ends with a dramatic shoot-out, with poor Joan cowering in the background, desperate for being reformed. The sight of fur clad Joan sitting in Morgan's car while he attends a female prison patient is hysterical, especially when newly arrived female cons get off a prison truck and check out that fancy dame in the fur, never realizing that she's one of them. I half expected one of the women to recognize Crawford from her previous incarceration, but that did not happen. Picturing Joan as "Caged" in itself is a visual for unintentional laughs, and this film has plenty of them.

Joan Crawford plays the leader of a criminal gang who finds out she's going blind. Kindly doctor Dennis Morgan performs the operation that saves her sight and the two fall in love. Joan's insanely jealous boyfriend David Brian is none too pleased. Despite the title, Joan's character is pretty tame. Crawford and Morgan go through the motions here. Both were on their way out at WB. They have no chemistry together at all. David Brian is an actor I've never been too impressed with. He has a weak screen presence and seems more suited to supporting parts. Due to his friendship with Joan he was given big parts in three movies of hers. Most positive reviews of this film I've read seem to praise his performance. Guess we see things differently as I thought he was just hamming his way through a poor man's impersonation of a WB gangster. This is a forgettable potboiler that's only of note as the last film Joan Crawford did on her Warner Bros. contract. The whole thing feels like a leftover B picture from the '40s. Joan later said this was her worst film. I'm guessing she blacked out the '60s.

This film begins with Crawford a gangster's girlfriend...and this gangster (David Brian) is insanely jealous of her. When it turns out she's going blind, the nutty boyfriend thinks that she is just plotting to run away from him. When the surgery occurs and she is cured, he assumes that she and the doctor are having an affair! In fact, she and the doctor are interested but Crawford puts him off because she loves him and knows that Brian will ultimately kill him if she reciprocates. It's like a soap opera and film noir combined.I think that either Joan Crawford's statement on IMDb that this was "her worst film" must either be taken out of context or Ms. Crawford had recently suffered a blow to the head, as THIS WOMAN IS DANGEROUS is a very good film. Additionally, late in her career she made some embarrassingly bad films (such as TROG and BERSERK). So how could this be the worst?! Perhaps Crawford was talking about being a bad time in her life or it was tough because after this film her contract with Warner Brothers was expired--but this surely is far from a bad film.Now I am not saying that this is a great or perfect film--it has a couple knocks against it. First, Dennis Morgan is just too young for her. I am not trying to be mean, but Crawford had been around Hollywood for almost 30 years--Morgan was simply too young and handsome to believe as a doctor who falls for this patient. Second, the plot about a woman going blind and needing this surgery does seem a tad contrived--though I found it pretty easy to accept it for what it was.The film excels in several ways. First, it was nice to see Crawford in a more vulnerable role. Too often, she played manish roles that almost seemed like caricatures (such as in JOHNNY GUITAR). Second, the ending is quite suspenseful and I loved the character of Crawford's antisocial/paranoid boyfriend. Thing about it--the doctor just restored Joan's sight and yet the crazed boyfriend wants to kill the doctor because he KNOWS that every man wants his girl! Good writing, very good acting--this film is one of Crawford's best from the 1950s.

Joan Crawford's only reason for making "This Woman Is Dangerous," (a script that she thought was terrible) was that it would complete her contract to Warner Brothers Studios and she would then be free to go over to RKO and begin production on "Sudden Fear," (which would earn her an Academy Award nomination).