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 Customer Reviews 
Joan Does Black Face (In Technicolor!) .. THE HORROR!!
Rating: 5
MGM came to the rescue of the floundering career of Joan Crawford (who had in the '30s and '40s been one of their biggest meal tickets) after she'd been toiling for ten years in the salt mines of Columbia and Warners. Anyway, that was the plan - "Discover a NEW Crawford," screamed the ads, "the ETERNAL female!" - until critics and audiences got a look at the movie, as unintentionally funny as any that Crawford ever made.
Here Hollywood's Medusa is cast as Broadway's Medusa, smitten by a blind pianist, played (virtually straight-faced) by Michael Wilding, who tells her that she has the "mouth of an angel!" but "the words that come out of it are sheer tramp." Though the studio tried to disguise the preposterousness of it all by giving Crawford Technicolor, dances and songs (dubbed by musky voiced India Adams), and enough cigarettes to stub from here till social security, her snarly dialogue gives the game away - we're talking pure, unadulterated camp.
"When the talk's about me, I'll buy a ticket," growls our Joan, and "I'm tough. That's why I'll never be lonely." Tough all right, and never more manly. She sucks up to autograph hounds ("How's your mother, dear?") and supports her free-loading relatives but fires overage chorus boys and advises the sightless Wilding that he ought to "get a nice seeing-eye girl."
Luxuriate in the cheesy '50s splendor of Crawford's getups (one suggests a lampshade that hemmorrhaged), up-to-the-minute sets (asteroid-shaped pull-down lamps, pink-and -blue sectional furniture), then blast into kitsch nirvana when Crawford, in black face, orange lips, and a Cyd Charisse wig, sings "Two-Faced Woman" (a song an earlier, wiser MGM cut, with Cyd Charisse lip-synching to the SAME India Adams track from THE BANDWAGON). Don't, however, watch this scene alone. In the finale, Crawford bugs her eyes, makes that mouth, and rips off her wig to reveal orange hair. (Oh, the horror, the horror!) Not even unmasking THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA or discovering Mother's corpse in PSYCHO come close.
Not surprisingly, TORCH SONG didn't make a plug nickel, and according to the director, Crawford, scared witless, downed three vodkas daily before nine a.m. While Marjorie Rambeau, playing Joan's poor-folks ma ("Play somethin' soothin'," she tells Joan's pianist sister), got an Oscar nomination, our Joan instead officially entered the ranks of Superstars on the skids.
JOAN CRAWFORD'S "HIGH CAMP" CLASSIC!!
Rating: 5
Jenny Stewart (Joan Crawford) is a tough Broadway musical star who doesn't take criticism from anyone. Yet there is one individual, Tye Graham (Michael Wilding), a blind pianist who may be able to break through her tough exterior. Joan puts the "C" in CAMP with one of her most outrageous performances ever! With flaming "orange" hair (yes ORANGE hair!) she's once again the tough broad that love's done wrong. The "camp" meter goes from low to over-the-top with the "Two Faced Woman" musical number, which has Joan in "brown face" and some really ridiculous routines! Thanks to a close friend, I finally got to see this Joan Crawford "camp" classic! Loads of fun! Joan's "Torch Song" belongs on every "Camp Collector's" DVD library shelf and is long overdue for a proper DVD release! Viva la Joan!
Jenny Dearest.... !!!NOW IN (lots of) GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR!!!
Rating: 5
If ever proof positive of the genius talent of Joan Crawford were needed to, say, save children from a burning building, all the fire department need do is look no further than this horrifying shambles of a movie. Yes, boys and girls, such is the strength of Crawford's performance as heartless tuneless theatre virago Jenny Stewart, that it propels this dull little movie from the lowly ranks of Pointlessness, right into the glorious lap of You Have Got To See This Right Now.
Put simply, Joan's an Atlas, carrying the combined weight of a pointless screenplay and an even more uninspiring supporting cast on her bullish, fabulous shoulders, and before God, she makes this otherwise-awful mess into an enjoyable laugh-a-minute tale of hate, love and redemption.
Swaddled in !!!GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR!!! (honestly, there's a peignoir so !!!YELLOW!!! draped around Ms. Crawford in one of the earlier scenes that it's wont to give you shingles), Jenny Stewart begins to fall in love with her new blind piano accompanist Tye Graham (artless Michael Wilding, delivering his lines with about as much passion as a dead rock), but, since the teensy little pinprick of despair that used to be her heart won't let her have any feelings, Jenny tries her hand at reverse psychology, and does her level best to make Tye think that she, in fact, HATES him. Trotting out every single cliche from insulting his education to inferring bestiality (with his seeing-eye dog, a BULLDOG, yet! Metaphorical, perhaps?), Tye Graham, that brave little soldier, remains undeterred, and dauntlessly marches on, secure in the knowlege that one day the shrieking, glowering, generally hateful Ms. Stewart will belong to him. Brave man...
Okay, so firstly, there's nothing to write home about as regards the performances of the supporting cast, screenplay or direction. Bog-standard post-Busby-Berkley fare, and quite disjointed in places. This, lest ye be mistook, was ONLY ever going to be Joan's show, and, rather than simply chew the scenery, La Crawford merely parts her VERY BRIGHT RED LIPS and points to her mouth, and the scenery jumps down her throat all of its own accord. It's THRILLED to be along for the ride!
As should we all be.
Secondly, I can't really put into words how very wrong the use of colour is in this picture. The whole production seems to be deliberately designed in shades of off-grey and drab sludge, with the express purpose of throwing Joan Crawford's hair, makeup and de rigeur preposterous wardrobe into even higher relief. The !!!YELLOW!!! nightie is but one offender: other Gowns Of Note (And Mistake) include the Two-Faced Woman blue spangled extraveganza, and the tie-on flouncy skirt (with bejewelled waist-spikes, attached). Joan's hair colour deserves a special mention here, too: whatever Sidney Guilaroff mixed to create that flaming crown of doom, he obviously had to wear protective lens. It's not just orange, it's !!!HUGE BIG ORANGE!!! and by God, Joan's got the moxy to wear it, see?!?
However, nowhere in this all-singing, all-dancing, all-laughing catastrophe is the use of colour more pronounced (and inappropriate!!) than in the 'Two-Faced Woman' musical number. Joan does it, and she does it in blackface. When she tears off her black pageboy wig at the number's end, the shocking contrast between her chocolate-brown face paint, !!!HUGE BIG ORANGE!!! hair, bleeding red lips and (and this is my favourite part) blue forhead-sequins (no, I am not making this up!) is not just shocking: it IS how it feels when doves cry.
And finally, just to add to the despair/comedy value of the picture, India Adams' voice (Joan was dubbed: watch that clip of her "singing" a song called 'Got a feelin' for you' in the documentary on the flipside of the 'Mildred Pierce' DVD and you'll understand why this was necessary) is a hoot. Literally. Actually, not so much a Hoot as a Primal Bellow. Watch Joan !!!EMOTE!!! during the plainly dubbed rehearsal scenes and I promise you, even the Almighty Faye Dunaway screeching about wire and hatchets and box-office poison in 'Mommie Dearest' will lose some of its sparkle.
Joan Crawford is my favourite actress of all time. In 'Humoresque', 'Rain', 'Mildred Pierce', 'Possessed 1947', 'The Women', 'Grand Hotel', 'Baby Jane' and so, so many others, she's a luminous, magnetic, enthralling powerhouse of talent, and a genuine delight to watch.
In 'Torch Song', she's better than she's ever been before, but sadly, for all the wrong reasons.
And if nothing else, you HAVE to give the woman credit for beating seven shades of merry hell out of this dreadful, dreadful film.
Watch it, and laugh every ounce of water out of your body. But for heaven's sake, do it with protective goggles on.
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