Della ** (1964, Joan Crawford, Paul Burke, Charles Bickford, Diane Baker) – Classic Movie Review 11,448

The 1964 drama film Della stars Joan Crawford as Della Chappell, the wealthy matriarch and daughter of the founder of the fictional seaside town of Royal Bay. Diane Baker plays her daughter Jenny Chappell.

Director Robert Gist’s 1964 American drama film Della stars Joan Crawford, Paul Burke, Charles Bickford and Diane Baker. It is produced by Four Star Television as a TV pilot for a proposed NBC soap opera series named Royal Bay which was to star Burke as a lawyer and Bickford as his crusty father. When it was not picked up, it was re-edited as a stand-alone film and renamed Della. Its TV beginnings are still visible in the billing of Joan Crawford as ‘Special Guest Star’.

Royal Bay was set in a fictional seaside town where Crawford plays Della Chappell, the wealthy matriarch and daughter of the town’s founder, and Diane Baker plays her daughter Jenny Chappell.

Crawford and Baker most likely would have made occasional guest appearances had the pilot been turned into a TV series, with Paul Burke starring.

The short film (70 minutes) Della got a limited theatrical release in the US on 8 August 1964 and quickly vanished, before resurfacing on VHS years later under the title Fatal Confinement in 1988, and occasionally being aired on TV, and then released as a manufacture-on-demand DVD-R through the TCM Shop on 31 January 2012.

Crawford and Baker played mother and daughter for the second time in only a few months after Strait-Jacket.

The cast are Joan Crawford as Della Chappell, Paul Burke as Barney Stafford, Charles Bickford as Hugh Stafford, Diane Baker as Jenny Chappell, Richard Carlson as David Stafford, Robert Sampson as Joel Stafford, Otto Kruger as Walter Garrick, James Noah as Chris Stafford, Marianna Case as Addie Stafford, Sara Taft as Mrs Kyle, Walter Woolf King as Sam Jordon, Barney Phillips as Eric Kline, Voltaire Perkins as Herb Foster, Richard Bull as Mark Nodella, and Jan Shepard as Secretary.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,448

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