Flamingo Road (Michael Curtiz Productions, Warner Bros., 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that I watched Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies of a 1949 Warner Bros. melodrama called Flamingo Road, starring Joan Crawford in one of the many films she did for Warners following the stunning success of her 1945 comeback film, Mildred Pierce. (Years ago, when my husband Charles and I watched the film Above Suspicion, a 1943 wartime vehicle co-starring Crawford and Fred MacMurray, I noted that both of them were considered over-the-hill then but they both made major comebacks within two years in films based on novels by James M. Cain: MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Crawford in Mildred Pierce.) This one cast her as Lane Bellamy, a carnival dancer who’s stranded in the fictional Southern town of “Boldon” when the carnival she’s working for has to flee an attachment from the local sheriff and leaves her behind. The local sheriff is Titus Semple (Sidney Greenstreet in one of her all-out villain roles – he even gets a speech about how fat men are supposed to be jolly and fun, and he’s working his whole life to keep people from seeing him that way), and his principal deputy is Fielding Carlisle (Zachary Scott, the villain of Mildred Pierce here cast as a sympathetic, though weak, character), who lives in his family’s ancestral home on Flamingo Road in the upper-class district of Boldon. Field (to use the nickname by which everyone calls him) starts dating Lane and ultimately arranges for her to get a job as a waitress at a local café.

Only Field already has an upper-class girlfriend, Annabelle Weldon (Virginia Huston), whom Titus Semple wants him to marry as part of Titus’s plan to build Field’s political career and get him elected first to the State Senate and then to the governorship. There’s a marvelous scene in which the political bosses of the unnamed state (there are hints it’s supposed to be Texas, the real native state of Joan Crawford, but its capital is the fictitious “Olympic City” instead of Austin; in the early 1980’s, after the success of Dallas and Dynasty, Flamingo Road became a short-lived TV series set in Truro, Florida) get together and decide among themselves who the people will be allowed to vote for in the legislative election – a scene that is all too current today in the age of unrestrained partisan gerrymandering that has allowed officeholders to pick their voters instead of the other way around. Dumped by Field, Lane Bellamy hooks up with and ultimately marries contractor Dan Reynolds (Crawford protégé David Brian), Titus Semple’s leading rival for control of the state’s political apparatus. Meanwhile, Field becomes a hopeless alcoholic and ultimately commits suicide after Titus Semple abandons him. Titus institutes an elaborate frame-up to destroy his political rivals in general and Dan Reynolds in particular so he can run for governor himself. Only there’s a big final confrontation between Titus and Lane Bellamy in which they both reach for a gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his fifth BMW) and she more or less accidentally shoots and kills him. The film ends with her visiting Dan Reynolds in prison and pledging that through her efforts he will soon be freed of the charge on which Titus framed him, thereby reuniting with a husband he’d come to suspect she’d only married him for money, position and protection against Titus’s attempts to destroy her.

Flamingo Road began life as a 1942 novel by Robert Wilder, which he later turned into a stage play with his wife Sally, and according to Eddie Muller, Wilder’s deal with Warners for the rights included a guarantee that he’d be credited with the screenplay whether or not he actually adapted the story himself. Producer Jerry Wald, who’d been responsible for bringing Crawford to Warners after MGM fired her and making Mildred Pierce, actually hired two different writers, Edmund H. North and Richard Brooks, to do screenplays for the film, then gave both scripts to Joan Crawford and asked her to choose which one they’d use. Crawford chose North’s, but because of Robert Wilder’s contract North could only be credited with “additional dialogue.” Wald also wanted his Mildred Pierce director, Michael Curtiz, to make Flamingo Road, but by this time Curtiz had left Warners to start a short-lived production company of his own and agreed to return to direct Flamingo Road only if it were a co-production of Curtiz’s own company with Warners. I don’t recall if I’d seen Flamingo Road before – I dimly remember viewing it on an over-the-air broadcast in poor quality, and the only scene I recalled at all was Crawford shooting Greenstreet at the end – though Charles thought we’d seen it together at some point. He might have got it confused with another of Crawford’s Warners vehicles, which aside from Goodbye, My Fancy (in which she gave a surprisingly restrained, at least by Crawford standards, performance as an aging college professor facing retirement) followed pretty much the same pattern as Mildred Pierce: noir-ish melodramas featuring Crawford as a woman on the thin edge of normal morality doing what she has to do to survive in a world stacked against her.

After Flamingo Road – a major hit despite all the angst that went into making it – Crawford did two more movies like it, The Damned Don’t Cry and This Woman Is Dangerous. Eddie Muller in his outro said This Woman Is Dangerous was a deliberately terrible script Jack Warner offered Crawford in hopes she’d turn it down and he could cancel her contract and not have to pay her for her final film under it, but she double-crossed him and made the film – much like Lucille Ball with her Arabian Nights film The Magic Carpet – before hot-footing it to RKO for an independent production, Sudden Fear, that was a huge hit and kicked off the third phase of Crawford’s career. Flamingo Road was photographed by Ted McCord (who did a superb job of evoking the noir look even though much of the film takes place outdoors in daylight) and the musical score was by Max Steiner, who (as he’d done with “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca, also directed by Curtiz) based much of his score on a pre-existing pop song. In this case it was “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight,” the late-1920’s jazz standard by James P. Johnson, and we get to hear Crawford sing along with an instrumental version on the radio in an early scene. (Crawford had a quite acceptable torch-singer’s voice and there are a number of movies, including the early talkie Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which she sings with her own voice – though by 1953, when she made Torch Song for her alma mater, MGM, they used India Adams to dub her.) It’s also a film that reunites two cast members from the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon: Greenstreet and Gladys George, who plays Lute Mae Sanders, owner of the local roadhouse (it’s pretty obviously a whorehouse, though subject to the usual Production Code-mandated veiling, and it’s where Lane Bellamy goes to work after Titus Semple forces her out of her waitressing job and tells her he won’t let anyone else in town hire her), whose real-life descent into alcoholic seediness oddly fits this role quite well.