Flamingo Road (1949) and The Damned Don’t Cry (1950)

by Elena Lazic

Flamingo Road (1949) is a film noir / melodrama starring Joan Crawford as a woman who, through factors largely outside of her control, finds herself climbing the echelons of social life until she becomes what Joan Crawford always becomes: rich. But there is a price to pay, and this is a tragedy: all the characters present are pawns in the cruel game of life, hurtling blind towards a fate that was always already inscribed in their DNA. Though their paths often pivot on big events and momentous decisions, the places they end up are no surprise.

Flamingo Road is the film that was most often evoked by contemporary critics in their negative reviews of another, later Crawford vehicle: The Damned Don’t Cry (1950). But the latter is to my mind an infinitely better, more sophisticated and moving film precisely because it plays with the deterministic quality of the melodrama: its characters find their entire perspectives on the world brutally undermined as they lurch from crisis to crisis.