Judith Evelyn not only survived the sinking of the SS Athenia in 1939 but she survived growing up in a place called Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. She fled that to the University of Manitoba and studied acting at the University of Toronto, and from there escaped Canada to work her way up until she was playing the lead role in what later became the movie Gaslight, a Patrick Hamilton play called Angel Street which she stayed in on Broadway from late 1941 to late 1944.
Maybe all that being menaced by her husband and driven out of her head took a toll on Evelyn, who looked sometimes like she had been frightened nearly to death, a look later taken advantage of by showman William Castle for The Tingler (1959), in which she plays a deaf mute who cannot scream for help and gives Munch’s “The Scream” a run for its money.
In the late 1940s, Evelyn went for contrast and played tyrants on stage, first in a revival of Craig’s Wife and then in The Shrike. Ingrid Bergman got her role in Angel Street for the movie, which was understandable, though June Allyson being cast in the lead part in The Shrike on screen is less so. Evelyn was in her forties when she first started playing in films and on television, and she even made a TV version of Angel Street.
“You can’t chase after younger men in a town this size without starting gossip!” she warns her sister in Otto Preminger’s The 13th Letter (1951), her film debut, where she was back in a Canadian setting as a nurse. But it was when she played Miss Lonelyhearts, seen only from a distance by James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), that Evelyn entered into legend, inspiring a novel and endless academic exegesis and all sorts of wondering.
Evelyn’s Miss Lonelyhearts is seen preparing for a dinner with an imaginary beau and then crying her eyes out. Stewart’s Jefferies feels a kind of bond with her in her pitiful aloneness, finally, toasting her as she toasts her imaginary lover, yet when Miss Lonelyhearts brings back a man from a bar, it is too much for him: “He’s a little young, isn’t he?” Jefferies asks. But Miss Lonelyhearts wants romance, not sex, and she throws the young guy out.
At the climax of Rear Window, police have to be called because Miss Lonelyhearts is seen counting out pills to take her own life, but she winds up finally with the lonely composer of music who lives across the way; his music stopped her from taking those pills. Will they last together, these two? Perhaps. Maybe both Miss Lonelyhearts and the composer have learned to appreciate what they have and to be grateful for anything they might get.
Yet Evelyn is cherished even more in certain quarters for her all-out performance as an even more pitiful middle-aged lady: Eloise Crandall in the late Joan Crawford vehicle Female on the Beach (1955). We first hear Eloise as just a whimpering voice off screen as she threatens to call the police on her gigolo Drummond Hall (Jeff Chandler), whose nickname is Drummy, a name that Evelyn repeats in more and more pitiful tones, over and over again, sniveling it, whining it, nearly gargling it, for Eloise is barely able to speak she is so upset with him, wracked with loss. This is all absurdly hammy and exaggerated, yet it has the ring of some deeper truth, in the way that the best camp does.
We first see Evelyn’s Eloise stagger out of her bedroom in silhouette clutching a rather large snifter of brandy. She is wearing a negligee, which means she had been in the mood for love; she staggers over to her bar and drinks back the brandy with both hands. “I’m so-ah-ah-or-ry,” she snivels, wanting Drummy back at any cost. The lighting on her face, of course, is very harsh. (We only get one close-up in color of Evelyn’s Miss Lonelyhearts in Rear Window when she is reacting to the loss of a couple’s dog in her courtyard, and this is a fairly flattering shot that shows how good-hearted she is.)
Eloise staggers, finally, off her balcony only four minutes into Female on the Beach, and realtor Jan Sterling rents her apartment back to Crawford’s Lynn Markham just a day after Eloise took her header; this realtor refers to Eloise as a “quiet little old lady.” Evelyn was 46 in 1955.
Later in Female on the Beach, when Crawford’s Lynn has become unwillingly inveigled with Drummy, she finds Eloise Crandall’s diary (it reads DIARY…ELOISE CRANDALL in gold lettering on the cover), and flashbacks with voiceovers from the diary ensue. “Another listless morning” the first line of Eloise’s diary reads, but a young man has brought her a gift that day, and this was a pleasant surprise. At cards with his pimps, Eloise loses 80 dollars to them but writes how good it is “to feel young again” as ominous organ music plays on the soundtrack.
“How long it’s been since I collected my thoughts, or wanted to,” Eloise writes, and we see her writing this, and she really couldn’t be more abject and pitiful, and the whole thing is such a hoot because most people have felt as lonely as Eloise Crandall at some point in their life, and so laughing at her is a relief. “I’m drifting in happiness!” she claims.
“Each week with Drummy is a new delight,” Eloise tells us on the soundtrack, and we see her greeting him on her balcony. “I love him…desperately,” and there is something about the pause that Evelyn takes there that is the purest camp, a real howler, and that organ on the soundtrack provides just the right grotesque, ghoulish touch. Eloise calculates that she has given his pimps $2400 now, not counting her losses at cards.
But then Eloise learns that she cannot re-sign her lease. She drinks, she waits by the phone, she drinks some more, she reaches for the phone and thinks better of it. “Dear God, I hope he isn’t tired of me!” Evelyn cries, and here, oddly enough, she hits a rather poignant vein of sincerity, the sort of thing she provided Hitchcock in Rear Window.
Eloise begs Drummy to come to Los Angeles with her, but she finally sees that she has been played. “Maybe the police would like to know about this little game they’ve got going with you right in the middle of the jackpot!” Eloise cries all on one breath as she wraps her arms around Drummy’s neck, hitting a hilarious low vocal note on “jackpot.”
“Hate him!” Eloise rasps on the soundtrack as she pours her heart out more to her diary. “I hate him!” And then, of course, “No I don’t…I…I love him!” She looks in the mirror and flinches. “He mustn’t see me like this!” she cries. “Just one more drink…then I’ll put my make-up on.” After this line, Crawford only finds blank pages. Eloise Crandall haunts, so to speak, the rest of the movie.
Evelyn died in 1967 at age 58. Eloise Crandall was killed sometime in 1955 in her mid-forties. There’s a little bit of Eloise Crandall in all of us.
Thanks, Dan…. I had never known this actress before, though I was familiar with her films.