Reunited: I've Got My "Eyes" on You!

In 1955, Miss Joan Crawford was still in a position to headline a movie above the title (something she, in fact, clung to as a status symbol for the better part of her career), but her time atop Hollywood's highest heights (in the wake of her Oscar win for Mildred Pierce, 1945) was ticking slightly. Nevertheless, as an enduring, still-popular star, she continued to work on projects that highlighted her most famous assets. These include - among other things - her iron-willed, yet paradoxically tender, persona, her flair for eye-popping costumes and styling and those incredible eyes. In Queen Bee, which has been paid tribute in full here, she buzzes around a clatch of family and friends, handing out little stings whenever possible. Her husband in the movie was played by the rugged-faced Barry Sullivan (while her sister-in-law's fiance was portrayed by John Ireland, a man JC was having an actual romance with during the filming.)

Crawford enters a virtual hive of activity.

She borrows a bit of hubby Sullivan's nectar.

Sullivan and Crawford are locked in a loveless marriage, something that somehow takes on new focus upon the arrival of Crawford's young relation.

Here Joan is trying to make a point (or two!)

Squaring off yet again...

She enjoys taunting and toying with her alcoholic hubby.

Yet enjoys an iron-clad grip on him.

Misery loves company and Crawford loves misery (for everyone else!) Note this piece of jewelry for later.

A tall costar is crucial to leading ladies of a certain age as it extends the jawline when looking up at them. Though she appeared to be towering on screen, Miss C. was in actuality merely 5'3"!

About fourteen years after having played battling spouses in Queen Bee, Crawford and Sullivan were reunited. The occasion was the 1969 pilot movie for Rod Serling's latest series offering Night Gallery. In it, he would appear before a framed piece of artwork and offer a brief introduction to a macabre or mysterious story with different stars each time. For this pilot, Crawford starred in the second of three tales. Hers was (aptly!) titled "Eyes." (This part had first been offered to Bette Davis, the possessor of even more famous eyes, who turned it down for some reason.)

Crawford never approached any project halfway and upon being cast began practicing blindness at home (she had had brush with this sort of thing in 1952's This Woman is Dangerous as well.) As relayed by novice, 21 year-old director Steven Spielberg, in his very first professional assignment, he had the task of revealing to her that her latest project was to be helmed not by a seasoned veteran, but by a wet-behind-the-ears newcomer than no one had ever heard of! And it happened in the craziest way possible according to him. He went to her home where she was blindfolded and she had her first glimpse of him upon removing it! Despite some initial misgivings, the two wound up getting along famously and she turned in one of her very best latter-day performances.

In "Eyes," Crawford plays a commandeering, very embittered and selfish woman who has been blind from birth. (In the piece, she announces her age, which is shorn of a good ten years from actual!) Sullivan plays her longtime physician.

In her penthouse palace filled to the brim with priceless art and sculpture, she longs to be able to see, even if for a brief while.

Sullivan is horrified to learn that she has located someone who will serve as a donor for an experimental operation on her eyes. She will be able to see for about a dozen hours, but the donor will be permanently blind. He flatly refuses to perform the surgery.

There's no way she's going to allow his refusal to stand...

She has in her possession a dossier on him, which includes a damning personal incident which resulted in the death of a woman he was seeing apart from his wife.

Everyone has his price...

Having a familiar actor such as Sullivan to play opposite surely helped bolster Crawford's security in these changing times on the acting landscape. Spielberg was making many daring camera moves and, while she supported him fully, it was still a far cry from what she was used to.

He did have the good sense, however, to turn his lens onto that unforgettable face, upon which decades of movie heroines had been demonstrated.

Miss Crawford knocked this one out of the park with the aid of the neophyte director. His set-ups and editing choices (some of which were diffused or changed by the network) keep this vintage piece of television thrilling and unusual even now.

Many think it ought to have remained her acting swan song (she only did three things afterwards.) Though I won't go quite that far (I can watch her do anything), I do think it ranks as her best from this stage in her career.

Once the surgery is complete, Crawford awaits the moment when her bandages may be removed.

She has surrounded herself with many of her favorite pieces of sculpture so that they will be readily available to witness once she opens her eyes.

Stubborn gorgon that she is, she insists on being left alone for the big reveal.

Then again, can you imagine opening your eyelids after more than a half-century, finally with functioning vision, and having the very first human face you see belong to craggy Barry Sullivan!?! This story does not have a very happy ending, but it is a must see for the work that its star turns in.

The man playing the optic nerve donor happened to be Tom Bosley (later a household name from Happy Days and later Father Dowling Mysteries.) While he and Crawford share no scenes here, they had been linked previously as well.

Both Bosley and Crawford had appeared in a 1963 episode of Route 66. They shared no screen time, however. His story line as the protective father of a young daughter was concurrent with, but separate from, hers in which she fretted about her allegedly deceased husband while in the arms of humpy Glenn Corbett. Can ya blame her?!

Incidentally, Crawford also met up with another of her Queen Bee costars, John Ireland, when the two of them were cast in I Saw What You Did (1965.) This time, instead of her calling all the shots, she's rather desperately in love with him, not knowing that he's just stabbed his wife to death!

In this one, she sports my all-time favorite movie necklace and has hair piled high much as it was intended to look in Hush, Hush... Sweet Charlotte (1964), from which she withdrew after filming began.

Even in low-grade projects like this, the eyes do their thing...

As I say... tall leading men definitely have their uses!

The first time I ever saw this - way back when - and the purportedly recent portrait from the show, I thought to myself, "Jesus, that looks nothing like her!" Clearly, the piece of art is intentionally flattering...

...but it's not as far afield as I used to think. It is, like many such portraits (and heavily doctored & photoshopped pics of stars today!), just a very idealized version of the subject.

Such things were important to Miss Crawford, who never left the house for any reason without dressing as a STAR. Note the brooch she has on in this snapshot. It's the one she wore in Queen Bee!

Though she appreciated and strove for the familiar (i.e. Sullivan), she was keen enough to recognize the potential of the unfamiliar (Spielberg) and the result was a great little piece of film. She and the director remained friends until her death in 1977 and she enjoyed watching his career develop. Of her experience with him she said, "When I began to work with Steven, I understood everything. It was immediately obvious to me, and probably everyone else, that here was a young genius. I thought maybe more experience was important, but then I thought of all of those experienced directors who didn't have Steven's intuitive inspiration and who just kept repeating the same old routine performances. That was called "experience." I knew then that Steven Spielberg had a brilliant future ahead of him. Hollywood doesn't always recognize talent, but Steven's was not going to be overlooked. I told him so in a note I wrote him. I wrote to Rod Serling, too. I was so grateful that he had approved Steven as the director. I told him he had been totally right." She was gone before his most considerable potential had been reached.

Costumes, She Wore

This is a frivolous, random and rather brief post that has hardly any point to it, but you may find some of it interesting. I have to preface it by saying that most of the content didn't stem from my own imagination. It came to me after reading a post at one of my own favorite blogs, Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For. One of the movies profiled there not too long ago was The World of Henry Orient (1964), a comedy featuring Peter Sellers that I had long avoided until reading about it there (and then seeing it several weeks later on one of my hi-def movie channels.)

I thought the film was captivating, gently amusing and tenderly touching, much to my surprise, but one thing that definitely stood out for me was the appearance and performance of Miss Angela Lansbury. She plays a wealthy, snooty, dissatisfied wife and mother who tries to have her cake and eat it, too, but risks winding up with just an empty plate.

Lansbury got an early start in the movies, playing a tarty housemaid in 1944's Gaslight at the age of nineteen and copping an Oscar nomination for her very first cinematic performance! (Ethel Barrymore took the statuette home for None But the Lonely Heart.) Within a year, she'd been nominated again for The Picture of Dorian Gray (this time losing to Anne Revere of National Velvet, a film which also featured Lansbury.) With apologies to the amazing Miss Angela, I always thought that she had highly unusual looks, sort of like a very beautiful sculpture that had somehow been allowed to melt a bit, with her large, but slighty droopy, eyes and a mouth with a curious down-turned quality.

"Cuz I'm 50 and I can kick!"

Though a veteran of many movies (often playing mothers of performers not all that much younger than she - and in many cases outliving those people by decades in real life!), Lansbury's most tremendous successes came on the Broadway stage from the mid-1950s on. She scooped up five Tonys along the way for shows such as Mame, Dear World, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and Blithe Spirit. She also continued to make a mark in movies, gleaning another Oscar nom for her chilling work in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), losing to Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker.

In Mame mode.

At the time of Henry Orient, Lansbury was coming off her Candidate triumph and was busily accepting colorful supporting roles in movies like In the Cool of the Day (1963), as a neurotic, scarred wife of an adulterous husband, and Dear Heart (1964), as a woman in danger of losing her fiance to a plain postmistress. Though her role in Orient couldn't be any further from that of the free-wheeling, fanciful and fun-loving Mame, the way she looks in the movie sometimes gives us an idea of what she might have looked like had she been permitted to star in the film Mame (1974), which was instead played by Lucille Ball. All the pics beginning below are from Orient, with Mame-ish quotes sprinkled in at times.

"Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

"Missy Dennis, stockbroker want to say hello before he jump out of window."

"Light the candles, get the ice out, roll the rug up... It's today!"

Look at this sensational dress and Angie's fab up-do.

She's even sporting some hefty cleavage as she introduces down-to earth Phyllis Thaxter and Bibi Osterwald to her other guests.

Her married character has a little side thing going with pianist Peter Duchin.

"You're my best girl..." Duchin was the son of celebrated pianist-bandleader Eddy Duchin and became a successful tinkler of the ivories in his own right, with positions at top hotels and performances at The White House.

"Oh, Patrick, your Auntie Mame's hung..."

Lansbury's husband in the film was played by Tom Bosley, later of Happy Days.

Of course, Bosley also had a recurring part on a certain little television show of Lansbury's called Murder, She Wrote!

"Would I make the same mistakes, if he walked into my life today...?" I loooovvve this fur coat and hat ensemble.

There was only about a half-inch height differential between Peter Sellers and Lansbury.

Check out those luminous eyes, capable of everything from immense joyfulness to steely evil.

Red is an awesome color on Lansbury and I love her hair this way, too.

"Haul out the holly..." You know, just once I want to descend a staircase while my voluminous gown trails behind me.

Lansbury was only thirty-nine at this point and still had well over fifty years of career left to go! She's still at it now, having a cameo and a song at the end of Mary Poppins Returns (2018.)

As mentioned earlier, Lansbury and Bosley (who are both excellent in Henry Orient) play a married couple with palpable strain between them.

Thirty years later they were reunited on Murder, She Wrote with Lansbury as a resourceful and dogged amatuer sleuth and Bosley as the sheriff in her hometown of Cabot Cove.

It's fascinating to watch them face various domestic issues as man and wife...

...when you're used to seeing them pair up to solve crimes in their oceanside community.

Though she was cleanly casual and occasionally dressed even nicer, Jessica Fletcher was generally an unglamorous type. In one of those things that one hears once and can never forget, I recall her mentioning in interviews that Lansbury always cut her own hair! (A relative of mine at that time snarkily said, "Well, it looks like it!")

But when the occasion called for it, she could always still ratchet up the glitz as in this glorious appearance at the Tony Awards.

Angela Lansbury wanted very much to land that one meaty film role that would win her an Oscar and that didn't happen, but thank God in 2014 she was presented with an Honorary Oscar for her considerable body of work. I encourage you to check out this recent interview with her (in which the ninety-two year-old legend is still perfectly charming, lucid and able to walk around on her own steam.) Someone ought to cast her in something with Betty White!