Falling for Barbara Stanwyck

As a confirmed auteurist, I generally approach films with the notion that the controlling artist is the director, but for once I’ve been taking a fanboy approach and making my way through the collected works of Barbara Stanwyck. At one level, I can’t presume to compete with the appreciation written by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker two years ago, on the hundredth anniversary of her birth. But besides offering a film series at the Clark called “An Artist in Her Own Right: Barbara Stanwyck and the Modern American Woman,” I’ve been filling in my knowledge of her immense filmography, and I have some highlights to share.

Night Nurse. (1931) Like Baby Face, this is part of TCM’s “Forbidden Hollywood” collection, but not at all what one would expect. Yes, these nurses do seem to change out of their clothes quite frequently, but that is incidental to the way that Barbara Stanwyck both seduces and challenges the medical establishment, as she does the right thing in revealing a plot against a pair of children in her care. The mother -- in the sort of Depression-era characterization of the irresponsible rich that we are likely to be seeing more of in coming days -- is in thrall to bootleg liquor, jazz, and the evil chauffeur Clark Gable, who is scheming to get his hands on the children’s trust fund. Joan Blondell is Stanwyck’s fellow nurse, and there is a fair bit of attention to what a nurse’s career actually entails before the suspense kicks in. Besides the abundant underwear shots, the ending in which the “good” guy gets away with murder was a flagrant flouting of the production code, which is recalled in a documentary included as an extra on this dvd.

Baby Face. (1933) I had not seen this entire movie, definitely not in its pre-censorship state, so I was surprised by its sharpness and wit, and pleased by how well it was received by the Clark audience. It’s delectable to see our Barbara at work, with absolute confidence in her power over men. She’s not conventionally beautiful, despite the dialogue that reinforces that notion throughout her career, but she has no doubt about her desirability. The certainty of allure is the key to her career. I enjoyed swotting up her biography for my introduction to the film series. Ruby Stevens, born in Brooklyn in 1907, became a tough broad at an early age. Her mother died in a trolley car accident when she was very young, and her father took off, leaving four children to fend for themselves among family and foster homes. Ruby left school for good at 13 and lived with her older sister, who was a showgirl. By 15 she was in a Ziegfield chorus line herself, and before she was 20 had a hit on Broadway, under the new name of Barbara Stanwyck. Within a year, she was making films in Hollywood, and kept doing so for sixty years. Parallels to the protagonist of this film suggest themselves, as she sleeps her way up a ladder of men. Maybe it’s just acting, but there’s an unsettling conviction about it. After beginning my intro with Anthony Lane’s remark, “When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck,” and assertion that “no actress delivered a more accomplished body of work,” I wrapped up with the conclusion from David Thomson’s essay on her, “She was honest, sharp, gutsy, and smart. Terrific.”

Annie Oakley. (1935) This films seems to signal Stanwyck taking control of her career and her image. No longer a contract player in films like Ladies of Leisure, Forbidden, The Woman in Red, she was free to move between studios and choose her own material. So in this film she is the legendary heroine, demure though dead-eye, who comes out of rural southern Ohio to become an international star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Here Barbara first displays the riding skill that will stand her in good stead for decades to come. The romance is a little saccharine, and leaves the proto-feminist comedy of the sure-shot woman behind, but George Stevens does mount some impressive Wild West spectacles, which suggest that the movies actually began fifty years before -- before film was even invented.

Stella Dallas. (1937) Apparently Sam Goldwyn had a lot of emotion as well as money invested in this remake of his 1925 hit. Barbara Stanwyck was not among his first half-dozen choices for the title role, but made it her own and earned her first Oscar nomination, as well as locking in the essential duality of her persona, the tough exterior masking an inner nobility, or at least personal resolve. Selfless mother was not her most comfortable role -- neither in film nor life -- but even her self-sacrifice is made on her own terms. King Vidor’s film is not great, but Stanwyck’s performance qualifies as iconic.

Golden Boy. (1939) Wow, William Holden seems startlingly young in his debut. Apparently Stanwyck took the young actor under her wing (she was famous for her cordial relations with co-workers on the set, part of an impeccable professionalism) and I believe he wound up handing her a “golden boy” decades later, when she finally won an honorary Oscar. As usual, she has great rapport with her fellow lead, who is electric as the shy Italian violinist who becomes the brash boxing champ. Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of the Clifford Odets’ play is sharp and smooth, with surprisingly good fight scenes despite the clanking plot. Barbara is caught between her boy and long-time squeeze Adolphe Menjou, his manager. Joseph Calleia is amusingly tough as the gangster who wants a piece of the boy, and Lee J. Cobb (just six years older than Holden) plays the ethnic dad. This really needs to be added to the topflight films of Hollywood’s annus mirabilis.

Remember the Night. (1940) In an obvious nod to It Happened One Night, this romantic comedy of a mismatched couple on a road trip brings together Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, in a far cry from Double Indemnity. He’s a hotshot district attorney, and she’s apprehended after shoplifting from a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. When he sees that the public defender is successfully playing on the jury, he has the case postponed till after Christmas break. Of course he is not immune to our Barbara’s charms, feels guilty that she will spend the holiday in jail and arranges bail, and when he finds out she’s from Indiana too, offers to drive her home for Christmas. I don’t need to tell you how it turns out, but a witty script from Preston Sturges and smooth direction from Mitchell Leisen, along with the chemistry of the leads, certainly make this a palatable holiday confection.

The Lady Eve. (1941) Stanwyck’s peak -- and Preston Sturges’ as well. I wanted my series to build toward it, so only later did I find out it was made earlier than Ball of Fire, which probably explains why it was the latter that earned her second Oscar nod. Certainly she plays well in that ensemble, but here she is the centerpiece, the absolute jewel in the setting, in a brilliant quasi-dual role as adventuress and aristocrat, even though they are “definitely the same dame.” As usual, she partners effectively with Henry Fonda, and Sturges at his best goes Wilde, so this remains firmly among the most delightful of all American comedies.

You Belong to Me. (1941) Stanwyck’s chemistry with Fonda was immediately capitalized upon in this misnamed follow-up, written and directed by Wesley Ruggles. Here she is a dedicated doctor on a skiing vacation, and he is a playboy who is immediately smitten when she tends to him after an accident on the slopes. He soon proposes and she declines, citing the demands of her career, but when he promises not to interfere with her practice of medicine, she accedes. The promise is easily made, but push soon comes to shove, and she is out the door at the most frustrating moments. Henry has made his bed and now must sleep in it -- alone. You will be relieved to hear that the resolution does not involve our Barbara giving up her career for her marriage, but you know it wouldn’t have been a Stanwyck movie if she had.

Ball of Fire. (1941) Just so, Sugarpuss O’Shea may have fallen for her “Pottsy” -- he-man nerd Gary Cooper, in another re-pairing from that same year (Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe) -- but there’s no doubt the showgirl will continue to wrap the professor around her little finger, or maybe her shapely ankle. Billy Wilder’s script and Howard Hawks’ accomplished screwball direction made this a big escapist hit when it came out around the time of Pearl Harbor. Amazing though these four films in the same year may be, a few years later Stanwyck’s career reached another peak when in 1944 she edged out Betty Davis as the highest-earning woman in America, apparently on the basis of films that are mostly forgotten, except for:

Double Indemnity. (1944) There’s that ankle again, this time Fred MacMurray’s undoing. It seems that working with Stanwyck only made you want to do it again. So Wilder turned to her when he turned director with a bang. It’s possible to take this film merely as a chilly exercise in style, but stylish it is, and Stanwyck, MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson invest it with recognizably human qualities.

Sorry, Wrong Number. (1948) I suppose Stanwyck got her final Oscar nomination for playing against type as the helpless, bedridden woman menaced by ominous phone calls. But this thriller continually betrays it source in a radio play, and Stanwyck is only herself in the flashbacks, which show her as a rich girl claiming Burt Lancaster as her husband. It’s no surprise that he is scheming to escape her invalid clutches. Anatole Litvak’s direction is smooth enough, but the transposition of radio to film seems slight and artificial.

East Side, West Side. (1949) But here’s one I found much more substantial than its reputation, despite the soap opera plot of will-she-or-won’t-she stay with her straying husband. James Mason as Stanwyck’s rich lawyer husband is drawn to the wilder side of town by the strikingly young and tempting Ava Gardner, while good guy Van Heflin moons over Barbara, waiting to save her from her degradation as betrayed wife. She talks over her dilemma with best friend Nancy Davis, soon to be Reagan. It’s a period piece, to be sure, but nicely put together by Mervyn LeRoy, with a genuine feel for New York City.

The Furies. (1950) Here’s how I reviewed this last winter: “I’m not really up to speed with Anthony Mann’s Freudian Westerns, aside from one or two of the Jimmy Stewarts, but this transposition of King Lear to the New Mexico desert reeks of incestuous passion. Walter Huston, in his last film, is a cantankerous cattle baron, with Barbara Stanwyck as his spirited daughter, a mare who will not be broken. In noirish black and white, with more night scenes and interiors than wide open spaces, the film is a little much, but not enough, if you know what I mean. The leads are magnetic but much that surrounds them is laughable. Only for aficionados of one sort or another.” That of course includes Stanwyck fans, and this is a foretaste of the Westerns which would predominate in her later career, jumping off from her real-life ownership of a ranch.

Clash by Night. (1952) This would have been the final film in my Stanwyck series, if the budget allowed. I would have been glad to see it again, but I will simply quote what I wrote in my filmlog shortly before I started this website: “Fritz Lang’s noirish adaptation of Clifford Odets’ play is set with some reality in a Monterey fishing and canning village. Barbara Stanwyck is effectively wised-up as the defeated wayward girl who returns home and settles for marriage to Sicilian fishing boat captain Paul Douglas. Robert Ryan is the bad man with whom sparks fly. A very young Marilyn Monroe plays the lively, expansive girl that BS might once have been. The script is literate, if filled with a lot of hooey on the battle of the sexes, and Lang’s direction is careful and shapely. Aside from the baby who is little more than a plot point, this is a believable kitchen sink drama.”

Executive Suite. (1954) Directed by Robert Wise from a script by Ernest Lehman, this is an unusually intelligent and still-relevant business drama, as five executives vie for control of a furniture company after the president dies suddenly. Each has a strategy based on their speciality, numbers man Frederic March squaring off especially against innovator William Holden, in a battle for the soul of the company and the support of disenchanted heiress Stanwyck.

Forty Guns. (1957) In an extremely gutsy role for a fifty year old woman to take on, especially for crazed director Samuel Fuller, Stanwyck keeps all forty of those guns at her disposal, whether it’s thundering across the countryside on horseback, leading the phalanx like a troop of private cavalry, or sitting in satin and frills at the head of a banquet table where they again line up in two docile rows. But forty pistols are not enough, so when Barry Sullivan wanders on the scene, she goes after another. She obviously does her own riding and stunts, including being dragged by the heel in the stirrup of a horse spooked by a twister, in this jaw-dropping take on Western mythology, dripping with sexual innuendo.

Crime of Passion. (1957) This low-budget noir offshoot is notable for completing the picture of Ms. Stanwyck as a woman who will not be kept down. She’s a Miss Lonelyhearts at a San Francisco paper, who gets a big scoop by bringing in a woman who killed her husband, in the process meeting LA homicide detective Sterling Hayden. Sparks fly, more or less believably -- Babs is still pretty well put together at 50, though clearly her character is meant to be in her 30s -- and soon she is giving up that big break at a New York paper, and going to live in an LA bungalow with her cop hubby. No bungalow is big enough to hold our gal, and the parties where the cop buddies play poker in living room while their wives talk about nothing at all in the kitchen quickly drive her insane. Soon she’s scheming to advance her husband’s career, and then she really loses her mind, just like the lost souls who used write her for advice. This decent B-movie is a waystation on Stanwyck’s path to revival of her career in television, where she won three Emmys to make up for the four Oscars she failed to take home.

Roustabout. (1964) When her career descended to B-movie status, Barbara Stanwyck did not fall as far as other classic Hollywood screen goddesses, no Baby Janes for her. No, she’s still trim and sharp, hip to the younger crowd, as the carnival owner who encourages a certain drifter to stick around and work for her. Maybe she was in fact working for Elvis (or Col. Parker), but I know who stole the show for me. In widescreen and garish color, the tough old broad holds her own against the gyrations of all those kids.

For further Stanwyck favorites, here’s a site where various people pick their own five best.