“You really felt bad for her”: the embarrassing British movie that gave Joan Crawford her final role
If there’s one thing Carolie Fargeat’s body horror film The Substance teaches us, it’s that Hollywood can be harsh on ageing female actors. For every Meryl Streep and Judi Dench, there are 20 Elisabeth Sparkles getting shut down and phased out of an industry that once celebrated them. This reality was particularly harsh during the Golden Age of Hollywood when once top-billed stars like Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Rita Hayworth stopped being offered major roles by the time they hit their 40s.
In one famous act of defiance, silver screen grande dame Bette Davis placed an ad in The Hollywood Reporter in the 1960s asking for a job. At 54 years old, she had been nominated for no fewer than ten Academy Awards – one of which she’d won – but was still struggling to find work. Citing her more than 30 years in the industry, her ad requested steady employment in a town that had fawned over her for the first two decades of her career.
Davis’ main acting rival during the early years of her career was Joan Crawford. Featuring a similarly ballsy presence on and off screen, she had started her career in silent movies before graduating into roles of hard-working women faced with impossible choices. In the 1940s, she transformed again, this time into a tortured victim of film noir. Though barely 40 at the time, her career had stalled in the late ‘30s, forcing her to take on roles as middle-aged women who were self-conscious about their age. Still, she emanated glamour regardless of the character she was playing.
By the time her peers were being shunted to the side in favour of the next batch of ingenues, Crawford, like Davis, refused to go quietly. Committed to movie stardom above all else, she took up roles in any movie that came her way. Sometimes, the results were surprisingly successful, such as her pairing with Davis in the 1962 cult horror classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, but more often than not, they were, if not uniformly humiliating, unworthy of her calibre of stardom.
One such example turned out to be the last film she ever made. 1970’s Trog was a low-budget British horror movie in which Crawford plays an anthropologist who discovers a living troglodyte (otherwise known as a caveman) in a cave in the British countryside. Unfortunately, it’s even worse than it sounds. The costume for the eponymous prehistoric creature is little more than a hairy ape mask, and the sets look like they were brought straight from a primary school auditorium.
Kim Braden, who played Crawford’s daughter in the film, found the whole experience deeply sad. Initially thrilled to be working with Hollywood royalty, she soon discovered that the once-celebrated star was now a shell of her former self. Recalling her first encounter with the once formidable screen presence, Braden told The Telegraph, “Joan Crawford was completely bald and draped from head-to-toe in a huge muumuu. She couldn’t have had more than two strands of hair on her head and looked about 115 years old. At first, I thought I was looking at the housemaid. I’ve never seen someone look so exhausted; it was the very essence of faded glory. Hollywood had sucked all the life out of Joan. You really felt bad for her.”
Trog was Crawford’s final film, though she continued to appear in television shows for another handful of years. Although her star had well and truly faded by the time she died in 1977, that final decade of horror movies turned her into a different kind of icon, one that fans of camp and cult horror could celebrate for generations to come.
