Why Joan Crawford Scares Me

When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my sister and our best friend Nan watching TV together. The TV would be on sometimes even when we were doing something else.  Many of the movies that the three of us came to know and love were ones that ran in the background as we were playing.  Something in the film would make us take notice and soon we would quit playing to start giving all of our attention to the movie.  One of the films that falls into this category is “I Saw What You Did”.

​The film features a teenage girl sleeping over at a friend’s house in the country. The friend has a little sister and the parents are at a dinner in town. The girls engage in prank calls.  One of the things they tell the people they call is “I saw what you did, and I know who you are”. One of the people that gets this call is a man, played by John Ireland, who just killed his girlfriend, play by Joan Crawford. One of the teenagers thinks the man sounds attractive and wants to go see him. The man thinks they have really seen the murder. To tell more would give away more than I care to of this great 1965 film, directed by the king of gimmick movies, William Castle. Castle is best known for films like “House on Haunted Hill” where he floated a plastic skeleton above the screen and “The Tingler” where some of the seats in the theaters were wired with vibrating buzzers to “shock” the filmgoers during key scenes.

It has been said that in later years, Joan Crawford would become the gimmick he used in his films.  You can easily say that’s what he did in this one. She is listed as the star of the film although she is killed off relatively early and the teenage girls are more of the focus. Crawford’s character is manipulative and hateful in this film so I was happy to see her get killed off when she was. The girls prank calls where the thing that got us hooked. While it gave us ideas about some things to try, we were more like the little sister who was never able to get the prank calls right. We weren’t even brave enough to try.  But we loved the phrase “I saw what you did, and I know who you are”.  We went around for weeks saying it to each other in the mysterious voice the girls in the film used.  It would come up in conversation for years to come.  Even today, we are likely to send each other a message or call when it comes on TV.  

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