EW reviews ''The Joan Crawford Collection''

With her Sharpie-black eyebrows, chiseled marble cheekbones, and blood-red lips, the screen siren liked a subtle performance about as much as she did a wire hanger. Watching Mommie Dearest during her shoulder-padded peak is what makes the exquisitely campy Joan Crawford Collection, featuring debuts of three lesser-known pictures, a shiny mink coat of a guilty pleasure. The five-disc collection is anchored by digitally dolled-up versions of Crawford’s two most famous roles: the conniving man-stealer in George Cukor’s The Women and the scrappy career woman played with Oscar-winning ferocity in Mildred Pierce. Her trio of post-Pierce flicks may be more obscure, but she’s no less over-the-top. Crawford vamps it up as a wealthy seductress who fiddles with a troubled violinist in the overwrought Humoresque; amps it up as a schizophrenic murderer in the murky Hitchcock rip-off Possessed; and tramps it up as a gun-toting glamour girl in The Damned Don’t Cry, a deliciously pulpy thriller based on Bugsy Siegel’s real-life moll, Virginia Hill. EXTRAS Commentary by 98-year-old Damned director Victor Sherman is straight-up Film Noir 101, and a bonus fashion-show scene from The Women is the set’s biggest treat. The Women, Mildred: A
The Damned: B
Humoresque, Possessed: B-