Sudden Fear (Joseph Kaufman Productions, RKO, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 13) my husband Charles and I watched the latest entry in Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series on Turner Classic Movies: Sudden Fear, a 1952 film which featured Joan Crawford as both executive producer (uncredited) and star. Sudden Fear was made at a key juncture in Crawford’s career because for all 27 previous years of her film career she’d had the protection of a long-term contract with a major studio: MGM from 1925 to 1942 and Warner Bros. from 1942 to 1952. When Warners fired her after the box-office failures of gone-to-the-well-too-often movies like The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) and This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), Crawford was well and truly on her own for the first time in her career. She responded by buying the rights to a story by Edna Sherry called “Sudden Fear” about a wealthy woman who realizes that her new husband is actually a money-hungry psychopath who plans to murder her for her money. Though there was a nominal producer, Joseph Kaufman, Crawford was in complete control: she hired the director, David Miller; the writers, Lenore Coffee (who’d started her film career in 1919 as writer for Clara Kimball Young) and Robert Smith; the cinematographer, Charles Lang; and the composer, Elmer Bernstein. It was his third film credit; previously he’d composed for two movies about teenage athletes, Saturday’s Hero and Boots Malone, and later he’d gone on to write for dreck like Robot Monster and Cat-Women of the Moon before making it to the “A”-list full-time with his big, expansive Academy Award-winning score for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). (I’m a bit embarrassed because I’d previously cited Cat-Women as Bernstein’s first film credit.) Crawford also picked most of the supporting cast, including the male lead (Jack Palance) and second female lead (Gloria Grahame).

Crawford cast herself as Myra Hudson, sensationally successful playwright who doesn’t need to work since her late father was fabulously rich (he got his money from oil). The opening scene takes place at a New York theatre where her latest play is in rehearsal. Lester Blaine (Jack Palance) auditions for the leading male role and thinks he has it, until Myra vetoes him and says she doesn’t consider him sexy enough for the part. Myra then takes a cross-country train to her home in San Francisco, but Lester buys a ticket on the same train and “accidentally” runs into her. The two have a fun time in Chicago (though none of it is actually shown) and Lester buys an extra ticket so he can stay on the train until it gets to San Francisco. By the time the trip is over she’s madly in love with him. The two spend a lot of time together until one night, when Myra is throwing a party to show off Lester to her old friends, Lester blows her off and she goes to his old apartment and corrals him to attend her party. While there Lester runs into an ex-girlfriend of his named Irene Neves (a marvelously hard-bitten performance by Gloria Grahame, who apparently was as amoral in real life as she was in her movies: one night director Nicholas Ray, who was then married to Grahame, caught her in flagrante delicto with Tony Ray, his son by his previous wife; and years later, long after she’d divorced Nick, she married Tony). The two plot to kill Myra, who meanwhile has married Lester, so Lester can inherit her fortune and he and Irene can live out their lives together. Part of their plot is that they have to make her death look like an accident so they won’t be suspected of knocking her off. Conveniently, one of the homes Myra inherited from her father is a beach house up a long flight of stairs from the beach, and the stairs don’t have rails or any other sort of protection.

Myra stumbles onto their plot in an intriguing way. She has her writing room wired with a dictation machine called a “SoundScriber” and has five microphones for it so she can walk anywhere in the room and her dictation will be captured by one of the mikes and end up on a record. One night Lester and Irene just happen to go into her study after Myra has inadvertently left the machine on, and when her maid alerts her to this the next morning, Myra plays back the disc and hears Lester and Irene calmly plotting her death. She takes the record off the machine, intending to hide it amidst her book collection, but she slips and drops the record, breaking it. So she’s in the quandary of knowing her husband and his lover plan to kill her but not having any evidence of that. To pump him for information about Myra’s plans, Irene starts dating Junior Kearney (Mike Connors, then still using the name “Touch Conners”), son of Myra’s attorney, Steve Kearney (Bruce Bennett, reuniting with Crawford from the cast of her 1945 comeback, Mildred Pierce), though when he tries to have sex with her she puts him off with the old “Not tonight, I have a headache” excuse. Irene learns that the next Monday, just two days later, Myra plans to sign documents transferring all the money her father left her to a foundation for heart disease (which is how the old man died). Also, Steve Kearney has drafted a will for her that gives the royalties from her plays to him, but only until he remarries after her death. Myra had actually asked Steve to redraft that clause so the royalties would go to Lester in perpetuity, but Lester and Irene don’t know that and that was part of the record that Myra accidentally broke when she heard them plotting against her on it. So Lester and Irene have to kill Myra that weekend before the transfer goes through. There’s a great dream sequence, which for some reason was cut from some prints of the film but blessedly restored by the Cohen Media Group, current owners of the rights, in which Myra dreams of various ways Lester could kill her, including pushing her out of the window of a tall building and him strangling her.

Sudden Fear ends with a nearly half-hour long stalking sequence, taking place at night through the San Francisco streets and looking very much like Crawford, David Miller and those involved had learned from the great nocturnal climaxes of Val Lewton’s horror films. Myra realizes that Lester means to kill her that very evening, and so she walks down the mean streets of San Francisco and barely misses Lester, who’s driving a Buick Roadmaster (the same car she was driving when they started dating). Lester is with Irene, and she takes the wheel for part of their homicidal smack-down, only after 20 minutes of great escape-and-pursuit filmmaking (at one point Myra knocks on someone’s door and the someone just thinks she’s a nut and won’t let her in, lending a Kafka-esque aspect to her predicament and providing the only bit of dialogue in this otherwise wordless sequence) Lester and Irene conveniently lose control of their car. Both are killed, and Myra is liberated from the danger they posed her but also probably ends up with PTSD big-time. Sudden Fear was a first-rate entrée for Crawford to the world of independent filmmaking – RKO distributed it and it went out under their logo, but they had nothing to do with the actual production – and though the rest of Crawford’s career would have both highs (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) and lows (Trog), it was a good start and also a huge hit at the box office. It also changed Jack Palance’s typecasting; though he was still portraying a villain, it showed he could play a debonair character with a certain degree of charm. And I liked the uncertainty writers Coffee and Smith carefully cultivated as to whether Lester was ever really in love with Myra and just got sidetracked by Irene’s appearance into a plot to kill her for her money, whether that was his intent all along, or whether he just intended to live off her money as a kept husband and it was Irene’s sudden reappearance in his life that led him off into a murderous direction.