I Watch Films: Strait-Jacket

Strait-Jacket

Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) comes home, discovers her husband in bed with another woman. She kills the two of them with an axe, cutting off their heads, in front of her three year old daughter Carol. She’s committed to a mental institution.

Twenty years later she’s released, having reached an emotional balance. Her brother and his wife are in California, and brought up Carol; she travels there to be with them. It’s a farm, and Carol has a boyfriend, Michael, from a rich family and is an artist.

Carol takes Lucy into town, buys her a pretty dress, a wig, shoes, bracelets like she wore when she was young. And because it hasn’t been twenty years for us, we can see they’re exactly like the ones she wore the night she killed her husband. She has bad dreams, waking to find severed heads in her bed, though they’re gone when everyone else comes to investigate. When a doctor from the asylum visits she has a breakdown; later she finds him dismembered in the barn. Carol hides the car, but the farmhand tries to blackmail her; later he too is killed, his head cut off.

When Lucy and Carol meet Michael’s family things go badly. Lucy flees and Michael’s mother makes it clear that Carol is not suitable to marry into the family. The mystery of the murders is revealed, as well as Lucy’s strange visions.

Crawford looks a bit old in the twenty-years-before scenes, and great in the present for a woman in her fifties who’s been in a mental institution for twenty years. This though is one of the less unconvincing bits, as events spiral out of control.

Watch This: Stylish black and white thriller of murder and paranoia
Don’t Watch This: Even as the clues get laid out step by step in front of us it’s hard to believe in what the film is doing