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Filmreihe something weird cinema
16mm-Vorführung am Mi 14.08.19 um 19.00 Uhr

"In the 1950s, Crawford made a series of films in which she played a woman of great sexual attraction whose age is never discussed but always in question. QUEEN BEE is part Southern gothic soap opera and part psychodrama. All of these films in the Fifties could play in the horror genre. It wouldn’t take much to turn QUEEN BEE into THE LEECH WOMAN! ... The camp factor in QUEEN BEE is of earthquake caliber. Joan has the best entrance and exit of all her Fifties output. She also has all the best lines and is even allowed two very dramatic breakdown scenes using cold creme and a riding crop to their best advantage. Crawford's appearance is over-the-top -- wigged, sporting Kabuki-like makeup, and corseted so sternly Playtex should have gotten screen credit. Her wardrobe's a delight, with one knockout Jean Louis strapless in black velvet with a white satin fishtail, and more jewellery than you could shake a stick at, much of it Crawford's own. Crawford was always aware of her large gay and shemale following and, subconsciously or not, created the role of Bitch Goddess for every drag queen that ever had too much to drink and too many men in their lives. QUEEN BEE opens on a Southern mansion and drifts into an antebellum drawing room full of hopelessly unhappy people. With the arrival of a dewy-eyed young niece, the stage is set for La Crawford to skewer one and all as she drifts through in Jean Louis glamour gowns inhaling bourbon as if it were Perrier. There is always a lot of drinking to be done in Joan’s Fifties films. The plot is really secondary to Crawford’s theatrics which go on and on with every scene. The thrust of the film is that Crawford’s ‘queen bee’ is a sexual predator that no man can resist, but as soon as the sperm dries, they are all disgusted and want to pull out! But in QUEEN BEE no one goes anywhere until Crawford says so. The one character that gets to exit QUEEN BEE does so by hanging herself. Even the family dog, cute as a button, is shot to death rather than spend another minute around Joan and her outrageous dialogue. When read in a gay context one can easily see the female roles played by drag queens, or better yet, by an all-male cast. The day will come when some enterprising screenwriter will adapt some of Crawford’s output as gay theatre. The real joy of a howler like QUEEN BEE is watching one male character after another reach for a bottle or the gun cabinet in an effort to cope with the spectacular villainy of Crawford’s Eva, who knows no shame even though she keeps telling her niece that she once was a young innocent, which is just NOT possible. Even in 1927 opposite Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford was a bitch!" (David Del Valle, Films in Review)

Die Filmprogramme von "something weird cinema" finden mit freundlicher Unterstützung des Kulturamts der Stadt Köln statt!