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BARBARA STANWYCK
Foreword
In February of 1988, a reporter named Richard Von Busack,
was sent by the Santa Clara Valley weekly Metro to interview me
about our recent purchase of the Stanford Theatre. I was quite
unhappy that he had a photographer with him (unexpected by
me), and I almost cancelled the interview. It was lucky I didn’t,
because when the story appeared (on the front cover of Metro)
I found he had written an extremely interesting and intelligent
explanation of what we were trying to do and why it was worth
doing. In retrospect, one sentence is especially worth quoting:
“The question is whether a theatre like the Stanford can lure
people out of their homes.” More than 25 years later, we can say
that the answer to Richard’s question is yes. On a typical week
several thousand people come to watch classic movies on the big
screen at the Stanford Theatre, where earlier residents of Palo
Alto watched the same movies when they were brand new. To
most of us, the movies still seem brand new.
For many years Richard wrote (and Metro published) substantial comments about nearly every film we showed at the
Stanford. I have often encouraged Richard to collect his film
essays in a book (or web site). This is still an unfinished project,
but in the meantime, Richard has agreed to be our guest curator
for a series on Barbara Stanwyck. Neither he nor she will let you
down.
David W. Packard
President
The Stanford Theatre Foundation
by Richard Von Busack
Endless study of studio-era film proves what ought to be
common knowledge: Barbara Stanwyck was the most versatile
actress in the American cinema, with a range that surpasses close
competitors like Julianne Moore, Bette Davis and Meryl Streep.
Few could match her career longevity. Stanwyck made her first
movie in 1927 and her last television show in the late 1980s. If,
as critic Manny Farber and others have insisted, one of the most
important things a screen actor does is crossing the frame from
left to right, regard Stanwyck’s endurance as a physical actress.
In any given rerun of the 1960s Stockton-set TV western The
Big Valley, she’s pushing 60 and there’s no age in her step. She’s
brandishing a rifle when many of her contemporaries were tottering on a cane.
She was the great “vernacular actress,” her fan Pauline Kael
wrote. We can honor the versatility of the actress who starred
in the finest screwball comedy (The Lady Eve) as well as the first
and perhaps best of film noirs (Double Indemnity). She was a
credible song and dance woman (Lady of Burlesque), a lovable
cowgirl (Annie Oakley), a neurotic woman in peril (Sorry, Wrong
Number), and a heartbreaking player of social drama (Stella Dallas). I’m not saying she could play any part there was, but watching the friction when Stanwyck made not-quite-right roles fit
was as exciting as watching better-cast players hitting the nail
on the head.
Stanwyck’s biographer Victoria Wilson audited a radio broadcast of Stanwyck as Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights.
She claims Stanwyck was miscast, on the grounds that Catherine is ultimately a victim of her passions, a woman who lies
Copyright © 2014 by Richard Von Busack
to herself. Wilson feels it was hard for Stanwyck to play a weak
willed woman. If Stanwyck excelled in what she called “Get Out”
parts—roles in which she told some man to hit the bricks—in
fact she had many roles where she worried herself to bits, and
couldn’t come to a decision until the final reel.
It’s tougher to imagine parts she couldn’t play than ones she
could. Could Stanwyck have played Shakespeare? Her first husband Frank Fay had a passion for the Bard, and he claimed he’d
performed in every Shakespeare play except for Titus Andronicus.
A good director could have walked Stanwyck through Beatrice
in Much Ado About Nothing. Much of Stanwyck’s time on screen
reflects the warning to men Bianca gives in Othello: “Then let
them use us well, else let them know / the ills we do, their ills
instruct us so.”
But by ‘vernacular’ Kael meant that Stanwyck had the voice
of the New World. She started her career at the dawn of sound
cinema, and she had a good voice for talkies: a husky drawl that
made some people wonder if she was a southerner (“I’m from
South Brooklyn, honey”). The voice could be clipped when she
was playing a hardboiled case. She exemplified the American
acting which came to dominate world cinema, and which still
dominates it: stressing conflict, urgency, rapidity—action, in a
word. Her salt, her impatience, exemplified American cinema’s
mockery of the euphemism. “Men like sincerity,” Stanwyck once
said.
She called herself a failed stuntwoman, and she had the injuries to prove it. A horse fell on her once, dislocating her tailbone.
The injury was worsened during a fall down a staircase at work,
and she had a bad back for life. Ms. Wilson’s Steel-True rosters
the injuries, but Stanwyck was fit enough in her fifties to get into
harness to be dragged by a horse for Forty Guns.
Stanwyck endured a cavalcade of losses and reversals. There
were two divorces, one to a husband who beat her. She had three
house-fires. She was seriously roughed up during a home invasion when she was a senior citizen—the thought of this at-
tack makes it bit difficult to re-watch the finale of Sorry, Wrong
Number. This doesn’t include things that happened to her in her
early years—losing her mother at age 4, being raped in her teens,
having a back street abortion, being branded by Al Jolson’s cigar.
She had good excuses for moods. The surprise is that she never used these excuses. She was tough enough to take suspensions
rather than start up a film of inferior material—Bette Davis is
more famous for this, but Stanwyck rivalled Davis for time on
the outs with studios. (Stanwyck was never really in a studio’s
stable. This has been the explanation for why she never got an
Oscar until she landed an honorary one in old age.) If her choice of parts was eclectic, if she reveled in playing
everyone from snarling bosses to smirking tarts, Stanwyck’s concentration and devotion to the job at hand was legendary. Crews
and directors alike looked to her with admiration for her professionalism and her long hours. And the one director to really get
her goat—Fritz Lang—didn’t have said goat for longer than the
time it took for Stanwyck to lay down a perfect scene.
She had a tough political code. She was an ardent Republican
in a Democratic town. Recall David Niven’s line in A Matter of
Life and Death when he’s asked about his politics: “Conservative by nature, liberal by experience.” Surely Stanwyck’s politics
were the reverse of that. She was a bootstrapper, with faith in
the American belief that today’s scrounger is tomorrow’s queen.
Didn’t her own life exemplify that climb? Before she was 40, she
was the highest paid woman in America, making $400,000 in
war-time money.
Ruby Stevens was born poor in Brooklyn. Her mother died of
miscarriage-related septicemia as a result of an injury falling off
of a streetcar. Her distraught father turned to drink and rambling,
and died a laborer, buried without a coffin in Central America.
Ruby’s love of theater, and a sister who was a working actress,
lured her into show business. She was a dancer and a showgirl
by her teens. A role as a condemned man’s lover in a play called
The Noose got her attention as an 18-year-old actress. The rise
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convinced her to change her name to something swank—there
are a few stories about where it came from, involving the once
popular novel The Winning of Barbara Worth, another involving
Longfellow’s flag-waving heroine Barbara Fritchie.
The early screen roles teased Stanwyck’s open sexuality. But
there was a sense in her early films that the tease would be satisfied. And Stanwyck paved the way for the more scandalous Mae
West—that is, if you take West’s word for it.
The hardest thing to imagine about Stanwyck is her size. Our
heroine of adamantine will, of “hate and hunger” (10 Cents a
Dance), that lady of purring satisfaction, who with a few words
cut men down to size, from John Wayne to Robert Ryan … she
stood only 5'3". The perfect physique for a screen actor is that of
the bobble-head doll: small body, big, slightly oversized head,
and wide-set eyes. And yet a pocket-sized Stanwyck is inconceivable. It must have seemed more shocking to people who
lived in the days when theater screens had some acreage to them. Also hard to credit is the idea that Stanwyck never regarded
herself as surpassingly beautiful. (“I have the face that sank a
thousand ships”). Look at her under bright lights and she isn’t
ravishingly pretty—the chin is soft and the nose is perhaps too
big. What she had was plasticity, an expressive mouth that might
be smiling and might not be, and the more you stared the less
you knew for certain. She had a face that caught the light distinctively. She had fine skin, even though she sunbathed. It’s the
lucky Hollywood actress who still looks recognizably like herself
at age 80.
Girliness didn’t interest her, and she wore hats only when
required. There were always some chips in that society enamel
she sometimes painted over the Brooklyn accent. (I have heard
Bugs Bunny mock the way Stanwyck drawled “thennngk you,”
in those moments when the actress was putting on the dog, such
as when she’s dazzling a bunch of Con-neckt-ti-cut soshes in
The Lady Eve.)
The marriage in 1928 to Frank Fay is the second hardest thing
to understand about her. Among the virtues of Steel-True is
the way Wilson stresses the importance of Frank Fay to comedy; he seemed like such an unredeemable person in other accounts. Movie watchers wouldn’t know about Fay, because Fay
wasn’t the kind of comedian that the cinema got. Depression-era
audiences loved him, but he was a scary piece of work, as scary as
Jerry Lewis in “Scary Jerry” mode—Fay was an early example of
the stealth-assassin type of comedian, like Andy Kaufman and
Steve Martin. In a world of brash yocksters, “Faysie” was a laconic minimalist who impressed Bob Hope and Jack Benny (if
not the more trad-vaudeville Milton Berle, who once decked Fay
for Jew-baiting him).
Fay’s profound dipsomania was complicated by what sounds
like the same kind of Catholic obsessive-compulsive behavior
Justin Green described in his pioneering graphic novel, Binky
Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. (Fay had weird rituals, blessing every cigarette he smoked and taking his eyes off the road
if he drove by a church.) Fay was twice married previously and
ten years older than Stanwyck when they were wed, but what he
brought to her was a taste for culture and the richer life. The two
had a showpiece house by the ocean, with a valuable book collection. Fay taught Stanwyck about the world, and she shielded
him from the consequences of his drunkenness. They decided to
have a family, but Stanwyck couldn’t have a child and they adopted a boy named Dion. As often happens, adoption catalyzed
the end of the rocky marriage, and the child got caught in the
crossfire. The gossip about their trouble, which Stanwyck hated,
may have lead to the creation of the film What Price Hollywood?,
the much remade drama (A Star is Born) of rising and falling
stars. There were other models for the drunken Norman Maine,
but Fay was a particularly notorious drunk, and Stanwyck was
a particularly fast rising star. The more her marriage frayed, the
harder she worked.
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In the late 1930s, she was working steadily, in everything from
frontier epics (Union Pacific) to screwball comedy (The Mad Miss
Manton). During this time she encountered Robert Taylor, a
straight-arrow kid from Nebraska and, one of the most popular
and congenitally uninteresting stars MGM ever fielded. On the
eve of the war, they married. Stanwyck and Taylor became the
Brangelina of their day, with all the gossip from the jealous you’d
expect that went from being a celebrity couple.
Incidentally, it’s tempting to jump to conclusions about Stanwyck’s personal life—non-heterosexuals love to do it, because
Stanwyck’s late career lady-boss characters are machas in tailored outfits that look as feminine as suits of armor. And then
there’s the lesbian madam she played in A Walk on the Wild Side
(“A first for Stanwyck!,” she boasted at the time.) She had very
close female friendships and she slept in separate rooms from
her husbands—the latter evidence means less than zero to all
the sleep-disordered workaholics out there. As for Taylor—there
were rumors. As Kael noted, there was only one actor the public
never claimed was gay and that was Clark Gable. And Taylor
was only shaped like Gable, the same way Tom Cruise is.
The only conclusion I’d draw about the Taylor-Stanwyck
marriage is that, as in most affairs of the heart, there are two
people: a lover and a lovee. Taylor adored buying jewels for his
wife, and she was less interested in wearing them. He copied
Robert Louis Stevenson poem “My Wife” for her, and no doubt
she received the attention prettily. The marriage ended in 1951
when Taylor had an off-screen affair. Later, Stanwyck took up
with Robert Wagner in the 1950s when he was the best looking
boy in Hollywood, and she was a regal, handsome 45.
Being second tier actress in the noir era was, actually, a good
thing. It gave Stanwyck a selection of interesting directors: Siodmak, Sirk, Lang— and leading men she could push against. Her
perennial co-star Joel McCrea, for instance, a mellow California actor with a self-effacing belief that his telephone only rang
when Gary Cooper wasn’t answering his. The similarly imper-
turbable Fred MacMurray co-starred with Stanwyck four times.
MacMurray is memorable to the short-memoried fan for being boring old Steve Douglas in My Three Sons, in the same way
people hear a bell ringing when Stanwyck’s name comes up: “The
Big Valley?” Commemorating Stanwyck’s centennial, New Yorker
critic Anthony Lane dug up a MacMurray quote, from an interview in 1986. Not counting Remember the Night, MacMurray
said, “once I shot her, once I left her for another woman, and
once I sent her over a waterfall.” I expect Lane thought the rest
of the quote was too sweet to repeat: “The one thing all these
pictures had in common was that I fell in love with Barbara
Stanwyck —and I did, too.”
Whoever she co-starred with got the benefit of acting with
one of the screen’s great reactors: watching Stanwyck listen is as
enthralling as watching her speak. She has an athlete’s focus, but
she’s ahead of the lines that will come. We watch her and share
her amusement of knowing everything a man will say before he
says it.
I ended up revisiting quite a few of her films in a short period
of time, which should have surfeited me and made me tired of
her mannerisms. It’s easy now to see almost every film Stanwyck made. What the expensive archive services won’t give you,
bit torrent will, dubbed in Spanish or bootlegged with swaying
handheld camera. It goes without saying I’d rather see her in a
theater. I should have seen some way she repeats herself. The
scary part is that when watching Stanwyck, you don’t see the
easy tricks a movie star develops to get through the long working
day. You know how Bette Davis or Joan Crawford will react, you
can bet on it—it’s what you pay to see them for. You never know
with Stanwyck. True, when she was a brash young flapper Stanwyck did a few
things that were common at the time—young girls imitate each
other. There were a lot of actresses of the 1920s who posed with
their chins on their hands, looking at the horizon in imitation
of the cute angel in the Raphael painting, or who touched their
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index finger to the corner of their mouth as if they were mentally
composing some aperçu about truth and beauty. (Proof of how
many actresses did this: watching the Marx Brothers parody
those gestures.) Baby talk was not Stanwyck’s thing, and it was
very much the thing of the 1920s. From the early thirties on,
there’s not much of a sense of repetition in a Stanwyck performance. Stanwyck always finds new ways to approach old material. And the worse the film, the better she was. What manner of
actress was this?
Take Lady of Burlesque (1943) right when the movie is heading
towards a murder mystery that isn’t quite Agatha Christie. In the
midst of a performance of that noble old burlesque sketch “Irish
Justice,” there’s some offstage screaming. The burlesquers decide
the show must go on—Stanwyck’s Dixie starts vamping: she reprises her salty tune “Take It From the E-String,” she breaks into
a fevered jitterbug, she leaps out and turns a cartwheel. Watching this, and it is pretty flabbergasting to watch, Stanwyckoligist
Dan Callahan writes “we’re left wondering if there’s anything
Stanwyck can’t do.” That is the question.
Critic David Thomson, writing about her, ends his essay humbly: “A great lady.” That compliment has weight when a British
person says it—it honors natural royalty, and suggests the kind of
artist whose likes we will never see again. She was an aristocrat.
Yet what actress was more democratic?
She lived into her eighties and instructed that there would be
no funeral; her ashes were scattered in the High Sierras, where
she loved making films. It’s more pleasant to think of her in the
present tense anyway. Her monument is right here on view for
the next two months.
She was the greatest. She still is. I hate to make it that simple,
but I keep watching her, and I keep coming back to that same
conclusion.
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Double Indemnity (1944)
The most indispensable of film noirs. Stanwyck is a bored
housewife tired of LA who meets a too-smart for his own
good insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray). In the banter between them we see the relationship between two mighty genres:
screwball and noir in the art of ruthless dialogue and pitying
attitude towards the slow learners in life. This movie has it all:
hard moral equations and appeals to justice. Educational as well
as entertaining: warnings to men everywhere never to misunderestimate a lady.
Night Nurse (1931)
“Lurid, hysterical melodrama, unpleasant in theme, yet well
presented,” claimed one ambiguous review, according to Ella
Smith’s “Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck.” A trainee nurse
(Stanwyck) discovers an appalling plot against a pair of children
ring-led by an alleged chauffeur (Clark Gable—then a freelancer
making $750 a picture). Director William Wellman careens
through this tale the same way he raced through Public Enemy;
Stanwyck isn’t just steel-true but tough as nails in this Depression-era thriller, with Joan Blondell providing the comedy relief.
Baby Face (1933)
One of Stanwyck’s best, demonstrating the willpower with
which she took control of her life, as well as the ardor she had for
rising women everywhere. “Blue and nothing else!” Variety cried.
But it is something else.
In Erie, PA, Lily Powers has a status just above the bar rag
in her father’s speakeasy. He’s carried off to hell when his still
explodes. Lily and her female traveling companion Chico (the
amazing Theresa Harris) head to New York. In the recently
unearthed Pre-Code version, Lily leases her body for the train
fare, as an amused Chico sings “St. Louis Blues” to encourage
the trick. (The tune turns up as an encouragement in Banjo On
My Knee, years later.) Once in Manhattan, Lily makes it to the
top, encouraged by liberal quotes from Nietzsche—“The great9
est philosopher of all time!” Lily trapezes her way up, using the
execs of the Gotham Trust Company as rungs.
The essence of Stanwyck’s appeal is all here: the hard shell
and the soft center; the self-amusement of letting her roots
show a little, or of watching her male prey struggle a bit. Though
glamorized by James Van Trees’s art-deco photography, Stanwyck has the appeal of commonness. Yet she’s never an infantile
floozy. Nothing stales her variety here: the nail-tough gamine,
the fur-wrapped penthouse dweller, the unrepentant hustler, the
sorrowing lover whose heart overrules her head.
Ten Cents a Dance (1931)
Jo Swerling wrote the hard-boiled dialogue and Lionel Barrymore (stoned on morphine for his agonizing arthritis) did the
direction. In fact, “there was no direction,” co-star Ricardo Cortez said later, “It was very trying.” The reason this film lasts is the
mischief that the 24-year-old Stanwyck brings to it. Her Barbara
O’Neill is a taxi-dancer at the Palais de Dance, made to fox-trot
at a dime a pop with the kind of crudesters who use tubas as a
cuspidor. She sets her hopes on a seemingly solid clerk (Monroe
Owsley) while tolerating, if not encouraging, the attention of
a top-hatted playboy (Cortez). The latter tries to give her advice: “I’ve lived longer than you …” he says. “Yeah, but I started
younger.” The Stanwyck persona is forming in this pre-code film,
as when she gives advice about surviving New York: “It ain’t how
hard you can sock, it’s how hard you can take it on the chin.”
Ladies They Talk About (1933)
The Orange is the New Black of its era. The phenomenally
amoral early-1930s Stanwyck as a bank robber—she first lures
the police elsewhere and then poses as a swank lady to get her
gang inside the building. The racket blows up on her—she never should have trusted a seemingly friendly preacher (Preston
Foster) she knew when she was a kid, and she ends up in San
Quentin. This primordial girls-in-jail film, with a revenge chaser
co-stars the lively torch-singer Lillian Roth (The Cocoanuts). The
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Pre-Code mention of the lesbian side of the girls’ hoosegow always gets cited in studies of forbidden Hollywood: “Look out for
her. She likes to wrestle.”
Stella Dallas (1937)
A key Stanwyck film, and one of the most effective dramas
of the Studio Era: you can laugh at the manipulative outline,
but it’s done with such technique and such authority about class
barriers, that it silences the snicker in your throat. Some of the
famous moments, such as a disappointing birthday party, or the
last shot in the rain, have been stolen for decades. Good as it
gets on it’s own, it’s clear that even more realistic work was going
to grow out of it.
Stella is a mother who voluntarily crushes herself to push her
daughter (Anne Shirley) to a higher social status. She doesn’t
stoop to a little deception (with the help of Alan Hale as a gross
garrulous pal) to carry it out. If there was soap on the plot, King
Vidor washed it off with the seriousness and compassion that
he demonstrated in The Crowd. Stanwyck is so right for the part
that it’s startling to read how much lobbying was done for her on
its behalf—Joel McCrea was certain, producer Samuel Goldwyn
was dubious (“She has no maternal experience … no sex appeal
…”). She triumphs in both the intimate scenes and the blatant
ones—where, as Victoria Wilson describes, she stuffed cotton
in her mouth, a la Brando in The Godfather, and wore five pairs
of stockings to make her legs look thick (“It was a matter of
upholstery.”)
Union Pacific (1939)
Cecil B. DeMille’s million-dollar spectacle on the making of
the transcontinental railroad. Stanwyck is Mollie Monahan, the
mail-woman at the end of the railroad, courted by good guy Joel
McCrea and raffish troublemaker Robert Preston. She gets a lot
of action in: fighting off raiding Indians and racing atop moving
trains. It must have pleased the childhood fan of Pearl White to
hear the film likened to “The Perils of Pauline.” The producer/
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director later wrote “Barbara’s name is the first that comes to
mind, as one on whom a director can always count on to do her
work with all her heart.”
So Big! (1932)
One of two Stanwyck dramas of scorned maternal love, and
her only teaming with her most important rival as an actress,
Bette Davis. She’s Selina Peake, a widowed rural mother turned
teacher who watches her son (Dickie Moore) grow up to disappoint her … though her values prevail, with the help of a rebellious artist (Davis). Directing from Edna Ferber’s large and
prestige-ridden novel (in 22 days, yet) was William Wellman,
who gave Stanwyck a chance to play elderly.
phony of comedic styles, from gusty slapstick to sarcasm (chiefly
by William Demerest, the Sultan of Snarl) to brilliantly elevated
wordplay (an elderly dame pronouncing her favor on a banquet:
“The fish was a poem.”) What’s even more lovable is the film’s
defiance of conventional morality in its motto: “The good girls
aren’t as good as you think they are, and the bad ones aren’t as
bad, not nearly as bad.” Stanwyck is, well, a poem—that level,
uncoy gaze, that Brooklyn rasp filtered through layers of hardbought breeding. You must see this movie. It’s a film up at the
top of the pyramid with Citizen Kane and His Girl Friday.
The Lady Eve (1941)
Henry Fonda plays the backward but filthy rich brewing scion
“Hopsy” Pike (Horace Pike’s son, of Pike’s Pale—The Ale that
Won for Yale). He’s just returned from a year up the Amazon
studying snakes. On the ship home, he encounters a card sharp
named Eugenia “Jean” Harrington (Stanwyck). Distrust and
commerce alike complicate perhaps the most purely chemical
romance that golden age Hollywood gave us. Stanwyck’s purring seduction of the hapless Hopsy still enthralls, especially in a
scene where she describes, pretty much to the point of climax,
what it is she likes in a man. Still the real strength of this movie
is the way writer/director Preston Sturges orchestrates a sym-
Lady of Burlesque (1943)
Expurgated, but not so expurgated that it matters. This
salty whodunit is based on the burlesque artist Gypsy Rose
Lee’s mystery about a stripper found dead, throttled with her
own G-string. A major suspect is headliner Dixie Daisy née
Deborah Hoople (Stanwyck). Pain in the rump but gold hearted comedian Biff Branigan (Michael O’Shea) tries to clear Dixie’s name and make time with her simultaneously. One sample
blandishment: since he does some lariat tricks, he tries to sweeten up Dixie by wishing he could calf-rope her, “But no calf ever
had a hide like that!”
William Wellman directs like a man trying to revive the
spirit of pre-Code, and surprisingly he seems to get away with
it; a gauze-clad Stanwyck shakes it as if to the manner born,
and demonstrates that at age 35, she could still turn a cartwheel. The attractiveness is more than hide-deep: while showing off ace timing and some startling dance moves, Stanwyck
also makes Dixie a democratic character who brings function to
her little world by healing the hurt feelings between the players,
the stagehands and the Chinese waiters at the diner next door. Early television comic Pinky Lee shows off his dancing and
participates in the classic old burlesque routine “Irish Justice.”
Stanwyck is tremendous brazening out the film’s tune “Take It
Off the E-String.” (As Pauline Kael said when observing Suzy
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The Purchase Price (1932)
Fleeing Manhattan and a persistent married lover (Lyle Talbot), Stanwyck heads to the country to become the mail order
wife of a South Dakota farmer (George Brent).
Neither Green Acres nor Days of Heaven, this Wild Bill Wellman drama contrasts city discontents with the stark rural life
and gets details of both right. The realism—which looks good
enough to rival Soviet back-to-the-land films of the era—includes a prairie fire that got out of control during the shoot.
Delair singing a similar tune, “Avec Son Tra-La-La” in Quai des
Orfevres: “you wonder if the higher things in life are worth the
trouble.” With Stephanie Bachelor as spuriously Russian accented Princess Nirvena, described by our heroine as “that cossack
from Canarsie.”
Red Salute (1935)
The AKAs (Runaway Daughter, and the witty Arms and the
Girl) testify to the producers’ nervousness—word had got out
about the right-wing politics, so blatant that students of the
time protested the film, thus giving it free publicity. It has other
problems—it’s a short-subject plot stretched to full length, and
if even the real It Happened One Night doesn’t kill you that dead...
A U.S. general’s daughter (Stanwyck) meets a squab-eating
Communist radical and falls immediately in love. The newspapers find out and make her more infamous than Hanoi Jane herself. Dad ships his rebel daughter to Juarez, but there she meets a
bellicose Army private (Robert Young, trying to bluster through
the miscasting). The two steal a jeep to dodge a bar bill and become battling fugitives, having an erstwhile merry war of politics-crossed romance. They kidnap a dead-eyed Cliff Edwards,
bereft of his uke, and why? Edwards, best known as the voice
of Jiminy Cricket, shows off his mellifluous vocal cords with “I
Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.”
Stanwyck scholar Dan Callahan calls this Stanwyck’s worst
movie, but that’s scarcely the case. Her debut as a minxy comedienne shines; her sparkle withstands and surpasses both the material and Sidney Landon’s Monogram-level direction. And she
has lines: “You look good when I’m tight,” Stanwyck says, giving
Robert Young a look Robert Young does not merit.
The Mad Miss Manton (1938)
Straightforward screwball, highlighted by Henry Fonda’s bogus death scene (heading for those pearly gates, he requests to
hear “Home on the Range” one last time). Stanwyck leads a
gang of Manhattan debutantes to solve a pair of murders that
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have baffled the police, despite the uproar caused by a newspaper editor (Fonda) on a crusade against fur-bearing upper-class
varmints. Some of the tension between the leads was real; Fonda
was unhappy with the trifling film, and when they teamed up
again several years later on The Lady Eve, Stanwyck cried “You
ignored me!”
Ball of Fire (1941)
When Mr. Butler called Miss O’Hara “the sweetest trick in
shoe leather” it’s because he never saw Sugarpuss O’Shea (Stanwyck). She’s a gangster moll recruited by Gary Cooper, playing
a fussy linguist. He leads a ring of other bookworms studying
American slang: the mob of professors includes Brezhnev-eyebrowed Oskar Homolka and the world’s only Welsh dialect comedian, Richard Haydn.
Others delved into this matter deeper—S. J. Perelman’s
“Swing Out, Sweet Chariot” describes the subgenre of ‘40s hepcat pulp fiction that these professors would have had to be poring through.
But Stanwyck is nothing but adorable here; fond fan Anthony
Lane relished the way she clicks her tongue “like someone geeing up a horse.” Back from the fussbudget roles Capra relegated
him to, Gary Cooper isn’t quite right; his polysyllabic pedant
is a little uncomfortable. They needed an Englishman, frankly.
It might have been a job for Cary Grant, who never did get a
chance to co-star with the equally gifted “Stany.” However, if
that had happened, we never would have got the scene of Sugarpuss pulling up a stack of books to stand on, so she could show
the too-tall Cooper what we Earthlings mean by the word “kiss.”
The second best scene—a dubbed Stanwyck (Martha Tilton, and
Dan Callahan is right, it would have been better if they’d gotten Anita O’Day), a box of matches, and wild-haired, wild-man
swing drummer Gene Krupa performing “Rum Boogie.” Stanwyck was nominated for an Oscar, but Joan Fontaine won instead for Suspicion.
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Christmas in Connecticut (1945)
A gossip columnist (Stanwyck) is recruited to pretend to be
the ideal wife—a domestic with a baby—for the benefit of a returned serviceman (Dennis Morgan); agreeable Christmastime
entertainment dwarfed by Remember The Night.
Banjo on My Knee (1936)
Rural comedy/drama on the Big River, with a finale that
sounds like Scorsese’s version of Cape Fear. Paid for a treatment, Faulkner had a discernible hand in it. Walter Brennan as
a Snopesish Mississippi river patriarch concerned with his lineage, as well he might be: he can’t keep his son (McCrea) and
his daughter in law (Stanwyck) together. From a fight scene to a
dance to a number with crooner Anthony (Tony) Martin, Stanwyck demonstrates her unequalled eclecticism.
Internes Can’t Take Money (1936)
The first adventure of a doctor named Kildare—a perennial
B-movie medico who was, at one point, played by the actor who
would be Stanwyck’s last serious leading man, Richard Chamberlain. (Recommended reading: Dan Callahan’s tender description of the vividness, the ardor for acting, Stanwyck brought
to her last big role in the first part of the TV series The Thorn
Birds.) Joel McCrea is the selfless medical intern who intervenes
when the child of a bereft woman (Stanwyck) is kidnapped—the
ransom is either $1000 or her body.
More prestige than it sounds and meant to be seen on a big
screen. When critic Dave Kehr likened it to Ophuls, part of the
reason must be the smooth camerawork by Theodore Sparkuhl, a
veteran of Germany’s UFA, the studio that was a lab for German
Expressionism. Wrote Kehr: “Long camera movements through
spatially complex sets create a trenchant sense of ephemerality;
the dialogue direction, slow and unemphatic at a time when fast
and loud was the default setting, establishes an attentive tenderness between the main characters, further developed by the
emphasis on the silent looks they exchange.”
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Clash by Night (1952)
The mature Stanwyck caught in a fork of attraction and repulsion for a macho weakling. In Clash by Night, Fritz Lang gets
down to business after some Rossellini-style images of Monterey stirring and awakening as the fishing boats dock at Cannery Row—in fact, co-writer Alfred Hayes had worked with the
Italian film industry after the war and had a story credit on Paisan. A weary local lady, Mae (Stanwyck), returns on the morning
train, having been chewed up and spit out by the outside world.
(“Big ideas, small results,” she says). She gets involved with two
men: Jerry (Paul Douglas), an egoless dullard of a fisherman, and
his antsy but studly buddy Earl (Robert Ryan). Earl is a movie
projectionist: an intelligent symbolic occupation for a man who
watches others go through life and treats them as if they were
no more important than shadows on a screen. Who else besides
Ryan made surliness so interesting? Together Ryan and Stanwyck have explosive physical chemistry. It’s a hard-nosed, urgent
movie, firmly on the side of the usual sacrificial victim of this
kind of picture, namely the straying wife. Marilyn Monroe has a
small but attention-getting part as a cannery girl.
Co-scripter Clifford Odets’ title swipe from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” foretells a verbal banquet meant to please
the divorced and the alcoholic alike. (Earl waving off a rescuer:
“Why didn’t you let me sleep it off in the gutter? I drank that
shellac to get unborn.”) Crime of Passion (1957)
The plot doesn’t add up—it’s not even really about a crime of
passion. A man ought to be very careful before throwing around
the word feminist … but with Stanwyck in it, there’s undertones
of a woman’s justifiable frustration after doing what everyone
told her she was supposed to do. In her last film noir—a “last
saunter down Hate Street,” as noir aficionado Eddie Muller
puts it—Stanwyck is a San Francisco advice columnist for the
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newspapers. Bored with her routine, she makes a sudden and
inadvisable choice to become the hausfrau to a sizable but otherwise ordinary LAPD plainclothesman (Sterling Hayden). In
Dr. Strangelove, Hayden was parodying Gen. Curtis Lemay’s
Bell’s Palsy, but he developed that curare-struck look earlier in
his career: he was the angriest beef on two feet. Driven to the
verge by beautifully-captured domestic dullness (and driven loco
by the clown paintings her husband has on the wall) Stanwyck
becomes the Lady Macbeth of LA’s Westchester, attempting to
use a cold-as-a-cod Raymond Burr as her patsy.
Annie Oakley (1935)
Her first western. Biographers argue that the casting was a
perfect match in background, physique and spirit between subject and actor. When she rode in this picture, Stanwyck was using a borrowed saddle than had once belonged to Ms. Oakley. George Stevens’ fresh, charming biopic of the shooting star
follows Annie from her days selling game birds to Ohio restaurants to her world-wide fame in the arena; the romance is
derived from the rivalry between the unbeatable shootist and a
handsome fellow performer, Toby Walker (Preston Foster).
Witty nostalgia—like the harrowing side of frontier photography—matches early and subtle commentary on the difference
between the Wild West and the Wild West Show. (Robert Altman hammered this material like a blacksmith in Buffalo Bill and
the Indians, some 40 years later.) a Stanwyck fan has to say the magic is all in the second part—a
version of Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.” Edward
G. Robinson as a gentleman maddened to the point of murder
by the prediction of a self-described “Chiromantist”—a palm
reader rejoicing in the name Septimus Podgers, and played by
Thomas Mitchell with as much juice as Emil Jannings in a German silent film. Innovative visuals give Robinson an imaginary
dark companion, to debate the foul deed with himself.
The Stanwyck/Charles Boyer third episode is heavy on the
romance: tight-rope walker The Great Gaspar is shaken by a
dream of falling during his act … and then, during a rough Atlantic crossing on an ocean liner he meets the woman in whose
eyes he witnessed his own death. Much of Stanwyck’s appeal is
in being a resistor—a woman two steps ahead of any line a man
can try out on her. She represents a challenge for the always
persistent Boyer, whose not-to-be-refused approach was the
model for ardent cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew. Stanwyck plays it
mercurial—she’s a Fate that doesn’t want to be sought out. The
story isn’t inexorable, and the switch it makes isn’t dramatized as
sharply as it ought to be. But the set up stretches the nerves, in
both the dream sequences, and in the sweaty, Grosz-like faces in
the circus crowd, watching to see whether Gaspar will make it
across the wire.
Flesh and Fantasy (1943)
Julien Duvivier’s rare omnibus drama of the supernatural, done
in advance of The Twilight Zone and Dead of Night (1945). Even
Witness to Murder (1954)
A compact indie film, released a few months earlier than Rear
Window. Miss Cheryl Draper, an interior designer at W. and
J. Sloane’s Beverly Hills branch, is trying to sleep during one
Santa Ana wind wracked night; through her window, she sees
the strangling of a prostitute in the apartment across the street.
The cops are unusually inept, but one detective (the uninteresting Gary Merrill) starts to believe her story.
John Alton’s stark yet velvety cinematography, the lattices of
venetian blinds caging these characters, makes the cheap sets
deep and foreboding. Particularly brutal is a mental hospital, in
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This Is My Affair (1937)
Stanwyck as a turn-of-the-century café warbler who stumbles
into a drastic plot. Robert Taylor, her husband at the time, is an
undercover agent left out in the cold when his control—President William McKinley—is assassinated. which later Oscar nominee Juanita Moore (billed as “The Negress”) explains the rules to the newcomer.
Stanwyck’s subtlest moment: the hurt she shows when she
realizes her apartment was broken into by the villain. As said villain, the Arch-cad George Sanders enjoys the richest Corinthian
evil: “You have an idée fixe about me,” he tells the heroine, wrapping that phrase in his usual spider’s silk. He’s some kind of foreign intellectual Commu-Nazi: “his philosophy is a muddle of
Nietzsche and Hegel.” But Draper’s description of Sanders is no
muddle whatsoever: “the smile and the eyes don’t go together.”
Director Roy Rowland’s finale anticipates Vertigo. Insistent
music by Herschel Burke Gilbert who composed that noble fanfare on TV’s The Rifleman.
Remember the Night (1940)
In a minute and a half long opening sequence, a black velvetgloved forearm slinks across a department store jewelry counter.
It acquires an expensive diamond bracelet, and slips away into
the Christmas holiday crunch as the salesman hollers for the
cops. Following the thief, the camera swivels up to see a 5th Avenue street sign. It dissolves into “3rd Avenue”: New York’s pawnshop district. We watch from this high angle, as the lady we’re
following tries to fence the bracelet. She’s caught, and arrested.
The accused presents a problem for the District Attorney.
Though the perp is a three time offender, it’s hard to convict a
pretty woman at Christmas time. You need an especially trustworthy face to do the job. MacMurray’s assistant DA John Sargent was born with one. O’Leary (Willard Robertson, a lawyer turned actor), the lady shoplifter’s lawyer, considers himself
the new Clarence Darrow. And he weaves a spellbinding tale of
“hypnoleptic catalepsy.” Our first sight of the face of the accused,
Lee Leander (Stanwyck) is a grin of flabbergasted amusement. The jury buys it. Sargent plays a trick of his own: he gets a continuance until January 3, when the prosecution can get a psychiatrist to analyze this story. Feeling a slight bit of guilt about
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sending Lee to jail for Christmas, he sportingly decides to bail
her out. Over dinner, she and Sargent bond in a supper club
(must be the Rodgers and Hart music), and then the prosecutor decides to drive Lee back to Indiana with him, where he’s
headed for the holidays.
Remember the Night deserves to be remembered: it’s a romance, a Christmas story, a road movie, a rural comedy and a
rural gothic story.Ted Tetzlaff ’s powers as cinematographer are
at his finest filming a dark-as-a-cavern farmhouse, an image of
the bitter darkness in which some self-described churchly people
dwell.
Lee is one more stop on Stanwyck’s career-long walk on the
shadow-line. She’s caught between the comedy of a woman who
knows the world is rigged, and the tragedy of a person who’ll
always be a fugitive from the moral world. Director Mitchell Leisen had just come off of his Midnight,
considered one of the most sublime of romantic comedies. In
Sturges own memoirs, he disparaged Remember the Night, as
“schmaltz.” He was wrong, and this is one former rarity that deserves its reputation.
There’s Always Tomorrow (1956)
MacMurray as a lonely toy factory businessman whose childobsessed wife ( Joan Bennett) doesn’t understand him … or at
least, she doesn’t understand him as well as his brave, honorable old girlfriend (Stanwyck) does. Mad Men fans—if you don’t
know the name, it’s time you met director Douglas Sirk, master
of suburban angst, artful disguiser of critiques of Ike-era despair
as harmless soap operas for the ladies. This unusually harmonic pair of actors complemented each
other’s strengths and weaknesses in a way I’m still trying to
figure out. MacMurray was so handsome and stalwart that he
was the model for the superhero Captain Marvel, but he had a
crumbling blocked side that directors loved to tease out. (Wilder
partcularly saw the brutality under the breezy charisma).
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As for Stanwyck, she could outclass everyone in a picture,
and thus occasionally seem like she was outside of what was going on. She tended to lean into MacMurray and glowed a little
brighter with him; she liked to act with beautiful men with tangible weaknesses.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
“A successful invasion into Bette Davis territory,” said Jerry
Vermilye, who wrote one of the first books on Stanwyck’s cinema. In Double Indemnity, Barton Keyes warned Walter Neff that
a pair of murderers “are stuck with each other and they got to
ride all the way to the end of the line and it’s a one-way trip and
the last stop is the cemetery …”
The unusually no-good Kirk Douglas (debuting) is on this
ride with the lady boss of midwestern Iverstown, Martha Ivers
(Stanwyck at a near career-peak for evil); it was a deal sealed by
the execution of an innocent man. That’s when an old flame (Van
Heflin) turns up to complicate things. As Martha Ivers said, this
deep dark drama is “about what people want and how hard they
want it. And how hard it is for them to get it.”
Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)
Stanwyck goes as big and as expressionist as she knew how
to go in this still effective, Oscar-nominated adaptation of a hit
radio play. If the outlines of her character Leona are fairly 2-D
(“I’m a sick woman alone in this horrible empty house!”) she
uses maximum force. Writer Lucille Fletcher, who was married
to Bernard Herrmann for a time, wrote the celebrated radio play
first performed with Agnes Moorhead as the terrified invalid.
Fletcher expanded into a script, with director Anatole Litvak
using the help of cinematographer Sol Polito and thundering
composer Franz Waxman. Some of Stanwyck’s fans resent seeing this fighter playing
a terrified victim … but repeated viewings show Leona was
in danger the minute she fell for a studly but chip-shouldered
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student (Burt Lancaster) who looks like a truck in a turtleneck
sweater. (“I work in a drug store and your father owns a hundred
of them.”) He’s so good looking that she flicks her eyes downwards when she sits with him … too amazed by his handsomeness to listen to some very disturbing things he’s saying about
what a washrag his mother was. Her unwariness has a penalty
later, when she’s a paralytic in a nightgown trapped at the mercy
of unseen killers.
Jeopardy (1953)
Stanwyck in another late-period hit as a strong-minded
woman in peril. Like Sorry, Wrong Number, Jeopardy is based on
a radio play, but the two films couldn’t be more different: tough
male action director John Sturges puts Stanwyck through a grueling action picture that predicates the later Cape Fear.
During a trip to the Baja coast, a married woman’s son is
pinned under some timber as the tide is rising … and the only
one who can help her is a fugitive murderer (Ralph Meeker, the
thuggish Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly).
All I Desire (1953)
In a beautifully modulated performance, Stanwyck is Naomi,
a fading actress of the turn of the century. She returns to the
small Wisconsin town she came from, a decade after she left
husband and family to avoid a scandal. Naomi is summoned
back to her former life by her stage-struck daughter, who is performing in a school play … but this trip brings her back into the
sphere of the old acquaintance Dutch (played by the Borgnineish Lyle Bettger) whom she never wanted to see again.
Douglas Sirk directs, beginning his streak of 1950s societal
critiques packaged as popular melodramas.
The Violent Men (1955)
In ‘Scope and Technicolor. In the Old West, a would-be
cattle-queen schemes. While married to the crippled Edward
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G. Robinson, Stanwyck messes around with his brother (Brian
Keith), but that doesn’t prevent her from conniving to annex the
land of a vet (Glenn Ford) who has had enough of killing.
Based on a novel by Donald Hamilton, a New Mexican who
created the pulp fiction agent Matt Helm.
Forty Guns (1957)
Furious stuff, in black and white and CinemaScope, with
single-entendre dialogue punctuated with exclamation points—
material big enough to highlight Stanwyck’s powers. She’s the
armed and dangerous queen of Cochise County; Barry Sullivan’s
a lawman, and they try to find some common ground, even as
their close relatives make that impossible .
It’s a terrific pairing of forceful woman and perhaps even more
forceful director. Sam Fuller’s matchless graphic fist is demonstrated in a wild horse and tornado tangle that Stanwyck volunteered to stunt for three times. In Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle
Woman, Dan Callahan quotes Fuller, describing Stanwyck in almost military terms: “Her form or class or appeal or whatever
you want to call it stems from … thousands of closeted thoughts
she can select at will, at the right moment, for the exact impact.”
East Side, West Side (1949)
Stanwyck as Jessie, a Gramercy Park wife who took back her
straying husband Brendan Bourne III ( James Mason) after he
nearly destroyed their marriage with an affair. Now he’s rekindling his thing with the old flame, played by a highly combustible Ava Gardner: “Sacred and profane love, eh?” Gardner says,
smiling. Jessie herself finds some consolation with Mark Dwyer
(Van Heflin) an NYPD police officer turned Army intelligence
agent shopping his memoirs among New York publishers.
It’s based on a then-popular novel by New Yorker critic Marcia Davenport, the author of the first American mass-market bio
of Mozart, and a Monterey resident in her last years. East Side,
West Side is a little irresolute; director Mervyn LeRoy seemed
to have trouble nailing down an ending, and one wishes Max
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Ophüls, director of the previous two Mason films, had worked
with the material. Mason later complained that his American
accent wasn’t quite right, and he looks uneasy pleading out his
case of sex addiction to his wife. As well he might; as usual,
Stanwyck is nobody’s doormat.
Heflin—an odd fire-hydrant shaped actor to whom there is
no current comparison, except maybe Peter Sarsgaard—warms
the picture up, bringing out Stanwyck’s love of the sidewalks of
New York. East Side, West Side is a record of what was then postwar chic—we see a well-off publisher hosting a hillbilly band
and a square dance underneath what must have been one of the
first Calder mobiles ever seen in an American film. Interesting character work abounds: Cyd Charisse as a nice
Italian girl Mason tries half-heartedly to pick up; Nancy Davis,
later Nancy Reagan, has a scene honoring female solidarity, and
Gale Sondregaard—stick with it—eventually gets her snakeeyed scene. Playing the blank-faced blonde “Amazon” is Beverly
Michaels, then-wife of the film’s producer Voldemar Vetluguin.
The File on Thelma Jordan (1950)
Robert Siodmak directs: Stanwyck throws herself at the mercy of an Assistant DA (Wendell Corey), but he’s the one who
needs mercy when she’s through with him. Saying more than
that tends to ruin the surprises of this formerly disrespected noir,
with its sudden hand-of-fate ending.
Titanic (1953)
The best thing in the Cameron film, if it wasn’t the two elderly lovers holding each other in the room filling with water, was
Kathy Bates’ Molly Brown standing in a lifeboat watching the
calamity and saying, with gentle flatness, “That’s not something
you see every day.” Stanwyck aboard the doomed ship recalls that
indomitability, though it’s Thelma Ritter who is the film’s nouveau riche Molly.
The way this story is done is the way it’s always been done,
as a series of slices of life as the ship heads for its iceberg; Stan25
wyck’s part is the problem of protecting her children from the
sinister influence of their father (Clifton Webb), while steering a suitable young man toward her daughter. The young man is
played by Stanwyck’s boyfriend of the time, Robert Wagner, who
listens in a shared scene as Stanwyck reads Housman to him. Director Jean Negulesco uses ambient noises instead of music
to heighten the mood, and the effects were state of the art (and
rather dangerous, with Stanwyck hanging 47 feet above the studio tank in a fouled lifeboat). Executive Suite (1954)
Director Robert Wise teams with Ernest Lehman (the scripter
of North By Northwest) in this drama about a sudden death that
makes room at the top for a group of ambitious climbers. Stanwyck is the female wild card among the players, the daughter
of the dead owner and mistress of the heir-apparent. She shot
her part in this multi-star film in a week, Stanwyck claimed, but
worked on it so hard that co-star Nina Foch claimed Stanwyck
got bruises from her table-pounding scenes.
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