David Denby in The New Yorker:
Must we hate Joan Crawford? The question sounds a little odd. Must we think about Joan Crawford at all? That’s perhaps a little more like it. Crawford the always posing, eternally hardworking star, with her affairs and marriages and triumphs and miseries and comebacks, inspires both exasperation and wonder. Her ferocious will to succeed seems a grim version of the life force itself. Few men go weak in the knees dreaming about her, as they might with Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth; nor is she the kind of woman men could imagine bantering with blissfully as a lover, as they might with Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck. She’s the date who raises your blood pressure, not your libido. She was always a bigger hit with women than with men, but, at this point, young women eager to emulate her drive and success may shudder. The ravenous smile, the scything broad shoulders, the burdensome distress, the important walk and complicated hair—she’s too insistent, too laborious and heavily armed, and also too vulnerable. She lacked lyricism and ease, except, perhaps, when flirting onscreen with Clark Gable, her offscreen lover and friend, with whom she made eight movies. She almost always tried too hard—it was Crawford who reportedly uttered the grammatically ambitious sentence “Whom is fooling whom?”—and she demanded that you capitulate to her vision of herself. Many people dismissed her as crazy.
Yet if Joan Crawford is not very likable she would, in a just world, be widely honored for a series of fiercely effective performances and for her emblematic quality as a twentieth-century woman.
More here.