TACKY RIDING CLOTHES

The movie is Queen Bee, the star is of course Joan Crawford and she rules the roost with a vicious mind to rival even Bette Davis' creation of Regina Giddens.

Joan is Eva Phillips - an evil, vindictive woman who takes pleasure in everyone else's misery and is delighted only when she has everyone under her thumb and they know it. This should be sumptuous and grand but it looks cheap, the only star quality being Joan herself who doesn't lower herself to even attempting a Southern accent despite owning the plantation and living in the deep South all her days apparently. However she does look fabulous with famed designer Jean Louis designing every one of her gowns. She's like a black widow with huge eyebrows as she weaves a web of deceit to get what she wants. She has an affair with her sister in law's beau, she slaps her visiting niece who looks like a china doll, drives said sister in law to hang herself and her husband back to the bottle, blackmails her husband, uses her children against her husband, wipes a mirror with cold cream, takes baths, is waited on hand and foot and destroys a room with a riding crop in a rather stupendous scene of unadulterate campery. Joan's daughter Christina said that the character Joan was portraying was probably the closest thing to the true Joan Crawford - I don't really buy that because this character never had a drinking problem and if Joan was the monster she supposedly was, her children would have been bitch slapped for their nonsense in the movie whereas they are doted upon!

Other highlighted scenes are - Joan gets out of a dinner party feigning illness whilst tangling the telephone wire around her would be lover - as I read somewhere, no-one does phone like Joan!

Joan discovers her sister in law is dead and whilst at her vanity takes cold cream and rather laboriously slaps it against her beautiful mirror at the shock.

Joan gets upset at "the things they made me do" in a scene where she tries to convey as to why she's such a cunt to everyone but in the end, I'm still none the wiser but she literally tears the room up with her cousin in it using a riding crop, smashing crockery and ripping pictures off the wall

Joan as self possessed Eva gets her comeuppance in the end but along the way, has some classic oneliners....

"Did you see how the doctor trembled as he spoke to me? You'd think he'd never seen a beautiful woman before"

"Any man's my man if I want it that way"

"I didn't see you. You're so quiet we'll have to put a bell on you"

and my favourite..

"Carol! Don't you look sweet - even in those tacky riding clothes"

All in all, Queen Bee is a rivetting tour de force from Joan Crawford in 1955 when she was becoming more and more masculine in appearance and her act as a pariah is fascinating especially when she's got a killer wardrobe and gets to slap the woeful actors at will and be a big bad bitch of the South. Enjoy and remember any man's her man if she wants it that way - and you won't argue!