At the beginning of Daisy Kenyon, Joan Crawford is the sane one. Sure, Daisy (Crawford) has made some ill-advised romantic decisions – pursuing a dead-end affair with a smug, narcissistic lawyer (Dana Andrews) while also dating a traumatized war vet (Henry Fonda) who is still pining for his late wife – but she at least has the strong independent streak of a Crawford character and isn’t shy about giving the unstable men in her life a piece of her mind. (I also like how the movie, directed by Otto Preminger from a novel by Elizabeth Janeway, depicts her career as a commercial artist as an important part of her life.) But the lawyer’s bullying and the vet’s manic-depressive vacillation prove to be too much for her to bear, to the point that their increasingly manipulative tug of war over her affections drives her to attempted suicide by car crash. (Preminger is a professional craftsman until the final third, when he begins to turn the psycho-cinematic screws.) Crawford was, perhaps, cinema’s ultimate “other woman,” and while she occasionally leaned into the villainy of that persona, Daisy Kenyon emphasizes the humanity of a woman on the outside looking in. Too bad the movie gestures unconvincingly towards romance in its final moments; no matter how happy the plot wants her to be, it’s hard to disregard the tragedy on Crawford’s drawn face, even at the end.
