The following article is MovieFanFare’s contribution to the June 8-12 Beach Party Blogathon, co-hosted by Silver Screenings and Speakeasy. You can find a complete list of participating sites here.
Here’s a friendly financial tip for any middle-aged, well-to-do widows out there with seaside property that you’re looking to sell, as Joan Crawford is in Female on the Beach: always suspect something’s up when the tenant of the stylish Newport, Rhode Island beach home your husband left you suddenly disappears, the railing along the balcony is broken, and the real estate agent dismisses those cops checking out the rocks and sand under your house as “something to do with the government.”
That’s the situation our gal Joan–playing Lynn Markham, former “specialty dancer” and erstwhile spouse of a late Las Vegas gambler–finds herself in near the start of this 1955 Universal surf-and-sex soaper. Because she shows up a few minutes after the picture already began, however, Lynn doesn’t know what the audience does: that said tenant, one Eloise Crandall (Judith Evelyn, perhaps best known as Rear Window’s “Miss Lonelyhearts”), fell to her death after an argument with her boat-owning boy toy from next door, Drummond Hall (Jeff Chandler). “Drummy,” it seems, is a bit of a local legend, a former fisherman who learned to go after lovelorn ladies instead in order to support himself and his con artist mentors/procurers, Osbert Sorenson (Cecil Kellaway) and wife Queenie (a pre-Gilligan’s Island Natalie Schafer). His list of conquests also includes Amy Rawlinson (Jan Sterling), the perky realtor who knowingly overlooked telling these pertinent details–along with the fact that she still carries a torch for him–to Markham.
After she learns that Eloise died and who she was with, the solitude-seeking Lynn gets a firsthand introduction to Drummy’s M.O. when he wakes her while working on his boat, and again when he pops up uninvited in her kitchen to make her breakfast (“How do you like your coffee?,” he asks, to which she retorts “Alone!”). “You must go with the house, like the plumbing,” says the tart-tongued Markham, who seems to go out of her way to prove that she’s immune to her noisy neighbor’s grease-stained, often-shirtless charms. In one of the stranger sexual metaphors to come out of a ’50s Hollywood movie, she’s also ready to demand that he stop mooring his boat at her dock!
Drummy, however, clearly has it bad for fiftysomething females sashaying around the shore in shorts and negligees designed for women 20 years their junior. The Sorensons push an at-first reluctant Hall to work his way into the widowed would-be recluse’s good graces (“It would be an act of goodness for you to offer her your friendship–all of it,” suggests Queenie). And, before too long and true to genre form, Lynn’s initial disdain (“You’re about as friendly as a suction pump!” being one of the nicer things she says to her uninvited guest) gives way to passionate kisses on his dinghy…er, boat. She even buys him a new fuel pump to replace the malfunctioning one on his vessel.
There’s still the nagging question, though, of what really happened to Eloise that night on the balcony. “A swan dive off the top of a brandy bottle” is the not-very-sympathetic way that the investigating police detective (Charles Drake) explains it away as an accident to Markham, although his own suspicions involve Hall and his cash-poor pimps. Lynn finds a vital clue one night when, while rubbing her butt in front of the fireplace to get warm (please, don’t ask!), she comes across the late woman’s hidden diary. Reading how Eloise went from ecstasy (“I’m drifting with happiness!”) to torment (“He takes my money–but I love him! I love him!”) over her beach bum beau, our heroine does the only logical thing one could do…well, one who’s stuck in a plot like this, anyway. She tosses the diary into the fire, berates Drummy when he comes around, listens to him say things like “A woman’s no good to a man unless she’s a little afraid of him,” and–a few days later–accepts his marriage proposal. Well, I guess that definitively answers the “Is he after me or my money?” dilemma.
Or does it? One (undepicted) ceremony later comes the happy couple’s wedding night, and Drummy is eager for them to take off on a moonlit honeymoon voyage in his now-running boat. You know, the one with the recently-replaced fuel pump. As Lynn starts to unpack her bridal trousseau (which seems to be a few negligees shy), what should she happen to find tucked away on board than said pump, with the old dodgy one still hooked up, ready to explode at any minute. Did her new husband actually murder Eloise, and is he planning to make Lynn–who already stated she’s a poor swimmer–his next victim? Or, if Drummy didn’t do it, who did?
For all its cliché-packed storyline, Female on the Beach serves as prime examples of both “woman in danger” 1950s melodrama and vintage 50s-ish Joan Crawford vehicle (You know, the kind where she was either a widow or a spinster). Just three years after she received an Academy Award nomination for a similar turn in Sudden Fear, the actress is in her over-the-top prime here as an ex-dancer (She never gets the chance to do one of those “specialty numbers” here; one can only hope it wasn’t anything like her pseudo-blackface routine in 1953’s Torch Song) whom the folks around her still refer to as a “girl.” Along with an illogically lavish and often inappropriate wardrobe (Who brings semi-formal dinner dresses to a beach house?), Joan also gets the chance to chow down on such delicious dialogue as “I’d like to ask you to stay and have a drink, but I’m afraid you might accept.” and “The great god of the senses sparkling on the beach, until you remember that sewers empty into the ocean. I wouldn’t have you if you were hung with diamonds, upside down!”
As for her hand-picked co-star, Jeff Chandler, while he never gets as dramatic as Joan when he says things like “I don’t hate woman. I just hate the way they are,” he manages to go beyond his stereotypic gigolo role and effectively conveys a level of vulnerability in Drummy. With his dockside wardrobe, he also manages to look more like “Race” Bannon, the Jonny Quest character said to be based on the prematurely-gray leading man, than in any film in his far-too-brief career (He would die from complications during back surgery in 1961). And while their roles in the proceedings peter out before the final act (they leave with a new hunky protégé–future screen Hercules Ed Fury— in tow) veteran character actors Cecil Kellaway and Natalie Schafer, the latter showing off a devious side we always suspected Mrs. Howell possessed, make the most of their screen time as Chandler’s opportunistic, card-marking co-plotters. Oh, and be sure not to miss the scene early on when Schafer asks for her husband’s aid in setting up her beach chair as Chandler, in just his swim trunks, is lying face down in front of her. Kellaway gives a quick glance Chandle’s way and helpfully suggests,”Just give it a good shove and plunge it into the sand.”
For sheer high camp at high tide, Female at the Beach is as tasty a confection as boardwalk cotton candy…if just as insubstantial.