Strait-Jacket at IMDB
Straitjacket is one of our most favoured of the schlock genre from which it comes and a Joan Crawford performance that compares to the great Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Straitjacket comes from Joan's 'anything for a role' years but stands as unique for a couple of reasons. The film is a production of the notorious gimmick peddler William Castle. In Straitjacket, Joan Crawford wielding an axe is the gimmick. As gimmicks go, I approve.
The film is most certainly a bad movie, the special achievement here is the way in which it is bad. The script is awful leaving Crawford little option but to retreat to increasingly extreme eyebrow acting. The film is stylistically fascinating. It is shamelessly derivative of Hitchcock but the cinematography remains outstanding.
The real thrill to be had here is in the subtext that can be applied. Straitjacket is the story of an axe wielding, criminally insane mother and a doe eyed innocent daughter.
We urge you to track this one down. In the meantime, some screen captures of the great Crawford to get your juices flowing.
Young wife and mother Crawford returns from a night behaving like a hussy in the local tavern to find her husband in bed with another woman.
Is that an axe in the foreground? Do you sense a crime of passion in the making...?
Hmmmm.... this looks serious.
The ultimate price for using wire hangers?
Note how much this scene resembles Frank N Furter wielding his pick in Rocky Horror.
Moments like this call for serious eyebrow acting.
Twenty years later, Joan returns from the mental asylum to stay with her daughter. You can tell that she has suffered, she is wearing a drab wig.
As uneasy reunion between Crawford and daughter. Joan is unsettled by finding the sculpture of herself looking exactly as she did twenty years ago.
Fortunately, the kitchen is well stocked with Pepsi.
Things start to get weird for Joan as the meat is carved...
This shot looks remarkably like Dr Frank watching the dinner being carved in Rocky Horror.
To her great alarm, Crawford awakes to find two severed heads in her bed
.
But the heads were just a bad dream.
Joan's daughter takes her shopping for a new, less drab look. Fortunately, the exact dress and wig that she was wearing in reel one are for sale on Hollywood Boulevard.
The farmhand invites Joan to behead a chicken. Will she withstand the godawful background music?
The return to madness is signaled by some first grade eyebrow acting.
Worried by Joan's mental state and some unusual goings on... the family call in Miss Crawford's personal psychiatrist.
And that's all in the first 15 minutes!