Free Possessed by Donald Spoto Page B

(released on June 4), when Alonso realizes that his enormous sacrifice has been for nothing, Joan recalled that Chaney “was able to convey not just realism but such emotional agony that it was both shocking and fascinating.” Her role in the picture was small but difficult, for she had to find the proper means to make Ninon both phobic and sympathetic—an effect she achieved by replicating Chaney’s quiet concentration. “Joan Crawford is one of the screen’s acknowledged artists,” wrote a New York film critic. “Certainly her performance in this picture is a most impressive one.”
    HER NEXT FILM , Twelve Miles Out, concerns a young woman (Joan) and her aging fiancé (Edward Earle) who are kidnapped and taken out to sea by a fugitive bootlegger (John Gilbert). A rival bootlegger boards the ship, and he happens to be an old buddy of the one now in charge. A fierce rivalry for Joan ensues before both die, ending a weak romantic triangle.
    John Gilbert, then madly in love with Greta Garbo, was doomed to disappointment when she summarily abandoned him. Concerned with little else than her response to him, Gilbert was indifferent to both Joan and the movie. If Joan had hoped that working with Metro’s romantic star might continue the kind of serious acting education she had enjoyed with Chaney, she was certainly disappointed.
    Two more pictures followed in quick succession, produced during the summer and early autumn of 1927—both of them with her friend Billy Haines. The first was Spring Fever —"a waste of everyone’s time and money,” according to Joan. She was on the mark, for it was indeed an insipid comedy of manners with shallow characters and nothing at stake. “God, golf is dullon film!” she added—but director Edward Sedgwick was mad for the sport, which monopolizes the picture. Joan played a rich society girl, falling for a poor shipping clerk (Haines) who is transformed into a successful golf pro. With wealth now on both sides— voilà! —they are free to marry without social embarrassment. Of working with Billy, Joan had only happy memories despite the project: “He would take you in his arms in a love scene, joking so that you had to brace yourself not to laugh. What made a Haines picture was always [Billy] himself, the symbol of eternal, cocky, lovable youth.”
    But their second collaboration that season was vastly superior to Spring Fever West Point was in fact one of the most astonishing and hilarious movies made at the end of the silent era.
    Joan was cast as Betty Channing, daughter of a hotel owner; she pops into the story every now and again as the girlfriend of Brice Wayne (Haines). Made with the cooperation and technical advice of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the movie was filmed on location in New York’s Hudson Valley. On the surface, it’s about the ambivalence of wealthy playboy Brice toward the disciplined life of a West Point cadet, his mockery of its military folderol and his eventual heroics as the academy’s star football player in the big game against Navy.
    Billy and Joan had enormous fun making this movie. He flirted with the cadets who were cast as extras, while she led one or two boys astray by inviting them off campus for a bit of canoodling. The two actors’ skylarking, practically under the noses of the academy’s top brass, was exploited in the story’s sassy tone and content. But the actual theme of West Point became (with the tacit approval of director Edward Sedgwick) that of a highly eroticized friendship between Brice and his buddy Tex McNeill—a pale, lovesick, androgynous lad, acted to fey perfection by nineteen-year-old William Bakewell.
    West Point moves along its surprising course, presenting Brice and Tex as a loving couple: indeed, Brice is far more interested in Tex than he is in Betty, and Tex is oh so grateful that Brice “has fixed it so that we can be … er, ummm … roommates,” as the intertitle reads. At several points, Tex