Next at The Clark

An Artist in Her Own Right:
Barbara Stanwyck and the Modern American Woman

Free Films Saturdays at 2:00 in the Clark Auditorium

Like Georgia O’Keeffe’s, Barbara Stanwyck’s career spanned most of the 20th century, and according to film scholar David Thomson, reveals the most “credible portrait in cinema of a worldly, attractive, and independent woman in a man’s world.” Brooklyn-born orphan Ruby Stevens became a showgirl in her teens and by the age of 20 she was starring on stage as Barbara Stanwyck and moving on to a 60-year career in Hollywood as a tough, smart, funny, and sexy leading lady. This series will survey the best of Stanwyck’s groundbreaking work from the same era as the O’Keeffe paintings displayed in the Clark’s special summer exhibition.

July 18: Baby Face. (1933, 70 min.) A barmaid marshals her assets and climbs man by man from the basement to the penthouse. This startlingly explicit film is notorious for leading to the Hollywood production code that desexualized film for decades.

July 25: Stella Dallas. (1937, 106 min.) A millworker marries a rich man, and after a divorce, poignantly gives up her daughter to a better life. This classic “woman’s weepie,” directed by King Vidor, earned Stanwyck her first Academy Award nomination.

August 1: Ball of Fire. (1941, 111 min.) A gang moll takes refuge with a group of seven professors (i.e. dwarves) and instructs them in compiling an encyclopedia of slang. Howard Hawks directs Stanwyck to her second Oscar nomination, as she charms the flustered Gary Cooper.

August 8: The Lady Eve. (1941, 97 min.) A con woman supreme wraps a bumbling herpetologist beer heir around her little finger – twice! No Oscar nod, but perhaps her greatest performance, in Preston Sturges’ classic screwball comedy, opposite Henry Fonda.

August 15: Double Indemnity. (1944, 107 min.) The ultimate femme fatale lures an insurance agent into a plot to kill her husband. Film noir doesn’t get any darker than Billy Wilder’s great thriller. Stanwyck indelibly earns her third Oscar nomination by seducing Fred McMurray (and the audience) while trying to outsmart Edward G. Robinson.