Female on the Beach

“A lone female on the beach is a kind of target.” It’s nowhere near the best of Joan Crawford’s noir thrillers but Joseph Pevney’s Female on the Beach spotlights all of the star’s greatest assets while telling a subversive tale of matrimonial predation. Every woman seems to have the hots for hunky Drummy Hall (Jeff Chandler), an amateur fisherman and often shirtless beach bum who lives with an older couple, Osbert (Cecil Kellaway) and Queenie Sorenson (Natalie Schaeffer), and pays rent by splitting any proceeds he can wheedle out of wealthy women in the neighborhood (“We have quite an investment in your tan,” say his landlords), including their erstwhile next-door neighbor Eloise Crandall (Judith Evelyn), a lonely alcoholic who fell to her death after learning of Drummy’s duplicitous scheme. Next up is Lynn Markham (Crawford), whose icy, steel-willed resistance initially appears impenetrable by Drummy’s charms but even she ultimately relents, especially after Drummy confesses his manipulative past and assures her things are now different. As she finds herself experiencing the same stages that Eloise recounted in her diary, however, Lynn fears she may already be in too deep with Drummy. Jan Sterling plays real estate agent Amy Rawlinson, who has her own feelings toward Drummy, which include the desire to crash his motorboat in a near murder-suicide. The script by Hill and Simmons could have used a bit more work, especially in teeing up the mystery and its ultimate explanation, but the variety of bitchy one-liners they give Crawford (“I’d like to ask you to stay and have a drink but I’m afraid you might accept”) is a treasure to behold and adds to the undeniable camp value of the film, which includes Crawford in full make-up, jewels, and opulent cocktail gown, drinking a martini, smoking a cigarette, and listening to youthful music while sitting at home alone.