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DVD (17)
It's rich, stimulating thought in spite of itself.
Director Frank Perry, who collaborated with three others (including producer Frank Yablans) on the script, gives it all a certain crazed conviction.
Dunaway does not chew scenery. Dunaway starts neatly at each corner of the set in every scene and swallows it whole, costars and all.
I can't imagine who would want to subject themselves to this movie.
There is nothing to string the episodes together into a coherent drama, and no insight into Miss Crawford herself.
Director Frank Perry simply sits back and lets Dunaway rip. He was either supremely untalented or he purposefully intended to sabotage her.
Dunaway creates the benchmark for harridans the world over but never entirely loses sympathy for her subject. It's a constant blast of high melodrama and camp.
'No wire hangers -- ever!' That this apparently banal phrase has now achieved something like immortality is a reflection of the unbridled extravagance of Faye Dunaway's performance.
...relies almost entirely on Dunaway's histrionics to propel the story forward - resulting in a movie that's good for a few unintentional laughs but little else.
Really no dafter, perhaps, than some of Joanie's own Warner Bros melodramas; the trouble is, it thinks it's Art.
A peculiar hybrid: a high-camp Hollywood bio flick about child abuse, elevated substantially above its sordid material by Faye Dunaway's obsessively committed interpretation of legndary star Joan Crawford.
Cult underground director John Waters (Pink Flamingos) is the perfect commentator on this high-camp biopic of legendary star Joan Crawford and on Faye Dunaway's ferociously brilliant performance.
You've gotta give Paramount credit for resisting the urge to call it the "No Wire Hangers Ever! Edition." They're aces. True class.
Perry and Yablans fuse this formal schizophrenia with the cruelly episodic structure and fetishized period details of Hollywood biopics.
Deliciously entertaining trash.
High camp about child abuse... oy Faye!
Both sadly terrifying (child abuse to the max) and a cult classic laughfest.
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