This was one of Joan Crawford's last Glamour Queen movie roles, before she started doing horror films and TV, and this part itself is transitional, as she plays a legendary beauty, pathological in her manipulations of the people around her. Despite the huge 1950s eyebrows that could be seen on Joan, Audrey Hepburn, Kim Novak, and others during this period, and the weird heart shaped hairdo, Joan remains both a beauty and a really compelling and totally invested actress. This was after Joan did POSSESSED and proved she could both underplay and play full tilt. Here she plays a woman so deeply dishonest that she is unconvincing in every emotion – we don't even know if she believes any of this herself.<br /><br />The real stand out performance of this film is Barry Sullivan as Joan's physically and emotionally scarred husband. He is completely believable in a roller coaster role. The prototype of the sexy damaged man.<br /><br />The film itself is average, the script is soap opera predictable, and the biggest mystery (how he got scar) is never revealed, only hinted at. Despite Joan's title character and her entrance-making Jean Louis wardrobe, this really is an ensemble piece, and everyone does a good solid job in this Southern Gothic potboiler. The "town and country" set of this film feels both ostentatiously grand and a little too cramped and small, and that is a good way of describing the whole thing.