Stanwyck redux

Not quite ready to relinquish my fixation on Barbara Stanwyck, I have been able -- through the good offices of TiVo’s “Wishlist” feature -- to feast on obscure films that have surfaced lately on Turner Classic Movies, and here I offer an appendix to my earlier Stanwyck career summary. In a way, the fact that these films are mostly long-forgotten is part of the appeal – it calls up the routine week to week production of Hollywood’s golden age. The first three were all directed by Frank Capra in the pre-Code era, and have a startling frankness, despite occasional circumlocution.

Ladies of Leisure (1930) makes no bones about the profession of its heroine. You could call our Barbara gold-digger or party girl, but there’s another name for a paid female companion for the evening. She meets up with a bored playboy painter, who wants to paint her portrait as an epitome of hope. And Capra certainly saw that quality in the aspiring showgirl who had been the orphan Ruby Stevens. Stanwyck shines for the first time on film, and while the story plays out conventionally, her fire shows through.

Forbidden (1932) is the only one of these films that really needs to be rediscovered and added to the essential Stanwyck canon. She starts off as a romantically thwarted librarian in a small town, with pince-nez glasses and a tight bun, but kicks over the traces and winds up in a slinky gown on a cruise to Havana. Onboard she falls for Adolph Menjou, and he reciprocates. Back in the States it turns out he’s a rising politician married to an invalid heiress. Melodramatic complications ensue in accelerating fashion, giving Barbara scope to hit all sorts of notes. Sure, there’s a headlong implausibility (yet predictability) to it all, but the dialogue is sharply written and crisply played. There’s a surprisingly natural toddler and BS is surprisingly natural with her, in a forecast of Stella Dallas. There are crimes of passion and moments of reconciliation as the lovers go gray, together and apart. Having been schooled by Douglas Sirk to see more than is immediately apparent in a “woman’s picture,” I found this melodrama absorbing and Stanwyck’s performance bravura.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) was scandalous (and a flop) because of its theme of forbidden interracial romance. Stanwyck is not believable as a missionary bride in China at a time of civil war, but smolders believably when she is abducted by a cultured warlord, who intends to keep her captive till she gives herself to him willingly. This was Capra’s attempt to go arty, and it certainly has an ersatz style to it, so it has some appeal as a period piece, but no lasting merit.

Jumping ahead to Christmas in Connecticut (1945), we are in a different cinematic universe. I don’t know whether it’s a quality of Stanwyck’s, or one of the few occupations for single women at the time, but she often winds up playing journalists. Here she’s a faux-Martha Stewart, writing an extremely popular “Great Housekeeping” column, all about her exquisite married life on a New England farm, written from her solo Manhattan apartment. The wacky premise involves a shipwrecked seaman and a publisher who unknowingly scents a great publicity stunt, of sending the lonely vet to have a traditional country Christmas with Barbara and her “family.” An imposture is set in motion and goes off like clockwork, cuckoo clock that is. Stanwyck carries an otherwise unmemorable troupe through its paces, though Sydney Greenstreet scores in some against-type comic moments as the publisher.

Stanwyck is back in calculating femme fatale mode in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), as an industrial tycoon who came into her inheritance by causing the death of her antagonistic aunt. That secret colors all the good she believes she’s accomplished through her wealth, and in true film noir fashion, it’s a secret that comes back to haunt her, in the person of Van Heflin, who returns to Iverstown long after the fateful adolescent night when he was supposed to be running away with Martha, but she wound up having the incident with her aunt. She has taken care of the other witness by marrying him, and he winds up being played impressively by Kirk Douglas in his first screen role, as a timid, troubled man whose political career has been advanced by his wife. The triangle plays out with some interest, and Lewis Milestone directs effectively, but this film does not achieve classic status.

In The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), Stanwyck is a woman in jeopardy, married to maniac painter Humphrey Bogart, and as in Sorry, Wrong Number from the next year, it goes against the grain of her appeal. She must always retain agency, never simply be acted upon. Even in disappointment and defeat, she must remain her own woman. Bogart is simply bug-eyed in his preposterous role, and aside from a few effectively gothic moments of wind and rain in an English mansion (directed by Peter Godfrey, like Christmas in Connecticut), this film is utterly disposable.

The Man with a Cloak (1951) is an historical curiosity of considerable interest, set in 1840s New York. Stanwyck is once again a woman in control of things, as housekeeper to a dying rich man (Louis Calhern), whose schemed-for inheritance is put at risk by the arrival of Leslie Caron, the young bride of the man’s grandson, who has come to get his support for their revolutionary efforts back in France. In the middle of things, solving all mysteries, is the eponymous Joseph Cotten – I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal that he turns out to be Edgar Allan Poe. Intriguing and atmospheric, literate and well-performed, Fletcher Markle’s period piece is worth a rediscovery.