The Damned Don't Cry finds Joan Crawford on a roller-coaster ride from poverty, to riches, to notoriety and then to God knows where. Her fate is by no means clear at the end of the film.
Joan is an older version of the shop girl she played in her MGM days. She leaves her hard working, but dull husband Richard Egan after their little boy is killed in a traffic accident. She has beauty, but little else in the way of work skills. The answer is obvious, become a model.
The modeling gig gets her involved with the mob and she's soon trading up men from accountant Kent Smith, to mobsters, Steve Cochran, and David Brian. Along the way Joan acquires riches, polish, and a new name and identity of a wealthy Texas oil heiress. That's only befitting the position of mistress to the gangster elite.
With Virginia Hill's testimony before the Kefauver Committee and the spectacular death of Bugsy Siegel a couple of years earlier, the recognition of the characters played by Crawford and Cochran would have been easy for the movie-going public. In fact I'm surprised Steve Cochran never got to play Siegel in a biographical picture long before Warren Beatty did his film. Cochran would have been perfect in the role. Of course it was probably too close to Siegel's demise and a lot of Hollywood people might have been burned a bit.
David Brian is a sleek version of Lucky Luciano who was not as polished in real life as Brian is here. But beneath the polish, Brian's a deadly man although he would not be doing his own work if he was really Luciano at that stage. And Kent Smith in the Meyer Lansky part is really quite the stretch.
Crawford pulls all the stops out in The Damned Don't Cry. Her fans and others will really love this film.
