The Damned Don't Cry

It's a man's world. And Ethel Whitehead learns there's only one way for a woman to survive in it: Be as tempting as a cupcake and as tough as a 75-cent steak. In the first of three collaborations with director Vincent Sherman, Joan Crawford brings hard-boiled glamour and simmering passion to the role of Ethel, who moves from the wrong side of the tracks to a mobster's mansion to high society, one man at a time. Some of those men love her. Some use her. And one -- a high-rolling racketeer -- abuses her. When the racketeer murders his rival in Ethel's swanky living room, she flees a sure murder rap right back to the poverty she thought she had escaped. And this time there may not be a man to pick up the pieces of her shattered life.

• drama