Sudden Fear (1952)
Directed by: David Miller
Starring: Joan Crawford, Jack Palance, Gloria Grahame
Heiress and successful playwright Myra Hudson (Crawford) doesn't like the looks of the leading man in her newest production, craggy Lester Blaine (Palance). She uses her leverage as author to have him replaced, only to be told off by Lester for costing him the job. She feels guilty, and tries to track him down so that she can apologize. They finally meet on a train to San Francisco. Myra falls in love, and Lester sees he has found a meal ticket for life.
Trying to appear girlish (though Crawford is nearly fifty), Myra swirls around in fluffy ruffles and coyly squints her eyes. Lester easily leads her towards marriage. With energetic chest heaves and a weaving head, Crawford shows Myra by seeming to be more afflicted with love than enjoying it.
The newly married couple throws a party one evening, and Lester's girlfriend Ivy (Grahame) shows up with one of Myra's lawyers. She is a dangerous blonde with heavy lipstick and a brassy voice. Soon Lester has the extra key to her apartment.
When Lester mistakenly sees a stingy will that Myra's lawyer had unsuccessfully submitted for her approval, he makes plans with Ivy to kill Myra before she can cut him out of her fortune. They discuss their crime in Myra's study, which is wired with an elaborate dictating machine that just happens to have been left on voice activation mode.
The next morning, Myra tries to review her dictation on the actually generous provisions she planned to make for Lester in her will. Instead, she hears the lovers plotting her murder. Myra's eyes bug out and she slides against the wall with her arms spread out, shrinking away from the spinning dictaphone record. In the fury of her dramatic flailing, the record slips out of her hands and shatters on the floor. Now panic takes her to new levels of eye bulging. She falls into a troubled sleep and awakes screaming, with her ruffled cuffs pressed to her head like frilly bookends.
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