Oscar-winner Joan Crawford stars as a woman who uses and abandons men--clawing her way from poverty to wealth and social status--a woman who knows that The Damned Don't Cry! Crawford gives one of her best performances as Ethel Whitehead, an empowered woman who leaves her laborer husband and squalid factory town behind to find a new, better life. She uses a quiet accountant who adores her to meet a rich gangster, learns to carry herself as a socialite and leads a life of wealth and luxury as the kept woman of the mobster. But her ambition doesn't stop there, and she engineers a rivalry between the city's two leading underworld kingpins--a rivalry that will lead to the ruin of everything she has fought to gain.