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Eva Phillips: I'm an outsider. They hate outsiders. Oh, they're polite enough - that's how they are. You don't know the things they've made me do trying to protect myself. And how ashamed I've been sometimes because of them. You don't know how they are. But you'll find out, as I have how they whisper, small talk, laugh! As if you have to be from the South to be any good! Oh, they're so smug, and namby-pamby! I wish I could get rid of them as easy as this trash!
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Eva Phillips: Don't you look sweet, even in those tacky old riding clothes?
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Carol Lee Phillips: She'll sting you one day. Oh, ever so gently, so you hardly even feel it. Til you fall dead.
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Judson Prentiss: You're like some fancy kind of disease. I had it once - now I'm immune.
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Description
Academy AwardŽ-winner Joan Crawford (Best Actress, Mildred Pierce, 1945) is at her conniving and devious best as the Southern socialite who manipulates the lives of those around her with tragic results. The poster art screamed, "One female alone may
Amazon.com
"Any man's my man if I want it that way." The speaker could only be Joan Crawford, as a wicked man-eater terrorizing her Deep South household in Queen Bee. Crawford's the whole show in this campy 1955 melodrama, which aspires to be second-rate Lillian Hellman but doesn't even reach that level. Having trapped a wealthy Southerner (Barry Sullivan) into marriage, Crawford takes her main pleasure in making life miserable for the other women of the mansion. This is fun to watch for a while, but director Ranald MacDougall (he wrote Mildred Pierce for Crawford) can't get the pace moving, and the final comeuppance is all too predictable. Crawford was going into her final high-diva phase at this point in her career, all chalky makeup and yard-long eyebrows, and Queen Bee clearly points the way toward What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Star power prevails, however, and at least the picture summons up its share of unintentional laughs. --Robert Horton
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