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      Female on the Beach

      1955 1h 37m Crime Drama List
      Reviews 45% Audience Score 250+ Ratings A woman (Joan Crawford) living on the California coast suspects her beach-bum husband (Jeff Chandler) plans to kill her. Read More Read Less

      Audience Reviews

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      Steve D Keeps you guessing and has a satisfying end. Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/24/24 Full Review Audience Member Crawford plays Crawford in self-referential cautionary tale--Crawford Camp Classic Caca!! Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/22/23 Full Review Audience Member Classic Joan Crawford full of drama and classic one liners. Worth watching. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/18/23 Full Review Audience Member god campy fun-high drama sirk-style Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/21/23 Full Review Audience Member It is the autumn of Joan Crawford's career. Increasingly she's taking the kind of films that were melodramatic, soapy B-movies in their time and probably very quickly afterwards became classic camp. Here, she shines for the first 30 minutes as an apparent superbitch who drops bitchy barbs around her beach side homestead like Shake N Vac. But just when you're getting used to how much of a shit-kicker she is, apparently she goes to pieces over a man she knows is 'dangerous' apparently overnight. With tragihilarious consequences. Jeff Chandler tries to smoulder but never quite convinces. In fact as the film goes on he convinces less and less. The idea that he could actually fall for a woman 13 years his senior, who looks like a man in drag is quite ridiculous. And then you have that ending. It's so crudely signposted early on that if you find yourself surprised I should go to the doctor and check for head trauma. Despite all this however, unlike a lot of the films in her winter (post-Baby Jane) period this film's almost art house cinematography (I say almost because it's inconsistent. Sometimes it looks like that and sometimes it looks like an old soap) combined with the quirky, amoral storyline AND of course, the obvious parallels with Joan's own history around this time make this fun to watch. You're never bored. You might find yourself exasperated at what horribly dated sexist trash it is, but in the end there's more than enough laughs (intentional or otherwise) to keep you entertained. Jan Sterling, for instance, is absolutely horrible in this picture. Her acting is one of the things that keeps pulling the picture back into the realm of a silly soap. I'm not familiar with her career so don't know if she always stank this much, but here she is so campy it's untrue. She outcamps Crawford which is quite some achievement. So yeah, not brilliant, not terrible. But all in all there's a more than adequate supply of entertainment here to make it worth your time as long as you're a fan of camp. Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/17/23 Full Review Audience Member ★★ (out of four) One of the best of Joan Crawford's bad pictures. Joan is at her most Crawford-ish in this silly, laughable and mildly entertaining vehicle for the superstar. Crawford moves into a beach house she hopes to sell, but the previous tenant met a very unpleasant death. Joan falls for the manly boat operator, played by Jeff Chandler. But is he responsible for the former resident's death? It's fun to watch Joan preen in front of the camera. She is a sight to behold. Chandler holds his own, but no one can come close to scene chewing like Joan. No matter how you look at it, the film is a mess, but a somewhat fun mess. [IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v48/Zeppo1/Female.jpg[/IMG] Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/09/23 Full Review Read all reviews Post a rating

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      Female on the Beach

      Female on the Beach (1955) Female on the Beach (1955) Female on the Beach (1955) Female on the Beach (1955) View more photos

      Movie Info

      Synopsis A woman (Joan Crawford) living on the California coast suspects her beach-bum husband (Jeff Chandler) plans to kill her.
      Director
      Joseph Pevney
      Genre
      Crime, Drama
      Original Language
      English
      Release Date (DVD)
      Nov 30, 2012
      Runtime
      1h 37m