The Damned Don't Cry

“Don’t tell me about self-respect; that’s something you tell yourself you’ve got when you got nothing else.” In Vincent Sherman’s The Damned Don’t Cry, Joan Crawford plays Ethel Whitehead, the wife of a struggling oil worker who, through her determination to live a better life, uses the social power of the men she attracts to become society woman Lorna Hansen Forbes. Unfortunately for Ethel, the men she uses (and who use her) in her ascent — good-natured accountant Martin Blackford (Kent Smith), self-made boss George Castleman (David Brian), rogue killer Nick Prenta (Steve Cochran) — all made their fortunes from a ruthless crime syndicate, which, of course, will come back to haunt them all, including Ethel. We watch Ethel become tougher and trashier scene by scene, but she’s a complex, relatable character because she’s both a victim and a perpetrator, honest about her vices but incapable of resisting them, both powerful and powerless around men. A finely paced gangster melodrama with thematic parallels to Crawford’s earlier Mildred Pierce (1945), The Damned Don’t Cry reminds us we can never escape our past, our true selves, and sometimes that’s the only thing that can save us.