Stanwyck, Barbara

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 in 2007, on the hundredth anniversary of her birth. Soon after that I offered a film series at the Clark called “An Artist in Her Own Right: Barbara Stanwyck and the Modern American Woman,” tying into a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition.  Since then, I’ve been filling in my knowledge of her immense filmography, and I have some highlights to share.

Recently, a Criterion Channel presented a collection of "Pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck," which filled some early gaps.  I'd seen several before, as part of TCM’s “Forbidden Hollywood” collection, but now I can insert comments on several more films.

Ladies of Leisure (1930) is the first of five films that Frank Capra made with Stanwyck, and 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.

Illicit (1931) provided Stanwyck’s first above-the-title starring role, but is merely a curiosity in that she was miscast as a Park Avenue socialite.  She does, however, provide some grit and reality to the role of a girl who doesn’t want to marry her boyfriend, because she worries that it will ruin their beautiful sleepover relationship, sexy and funny.  She eventually succumbs to his suit, and turns out to be right about the perils of wedded bliss.  This is an early and earthy example of the genre that would come to be known as the “comedy of remarriage.”  Despite the fancy dress and her inexperience, Stanwyck is very much the straight-talking, independent-thinking broad she would always be.

Night Nurse (1931) is 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 may soon be coming back -- 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 an accompanying documentary.

The Miracle Woman (1931), clearly based on the life and ministry of Aimee Semple McPherson, was another that Frank Capra directed.  Not surprisingly, Stanwyck is terrific as the young evangelist, who comes under the wing of a Barnum-like promoter, but retains her soul and attains the love of a blind WWI veteran, who reveals the shoddiness of her show-biz vocation, more minstrelsy than ministry.  The dialogue is sharp and the direction effective, but it is the 23-year-old actress who astonishes with the depth, range, and naturalness of her performance, predicated more on fearlessness than technique.

Forbidden (1932) may be the best of the early Capra/Stanwyck collaborations. 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 retains some appeal as a period piece, but no lasting merit.

So Big! (1932), William Wellman’s adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer-winning novel, is a truncated affair, but this “epic of American womanhood” gives our Barbara a chance to grow from pampered ingénue to grand dame of a prairie farm – with some unexpected wrinkles in the story – and also provides a promising early glimpse of Bette Davis, less than a year younger but not nearly the star that Stanwyck already was.  Less than epic, but not without interest, especially if you’re a fan of these two great screen queens.

Purchase Price (1932) is another Wellman-Stanwyck collaboration, with a roomful of chimps as screenwriters.  The result is ridiculous, both intentionally and unintentionally.  Painful stereotyping, antic slapstick, and incoherent motivation snip the thin thread of plausibility in this similar set-up, of Stanwyck as a city girl transplanted to the Great Plains.  Wellman definitely has his directorial moments, but overall the film is dumb as a fence post, and tangled as a coil of barbed wire.  The classic Stanwyck moment comes when she beats back a fire in a North Dakota wheatfield with a wet blanket, and refused a double, always the consummate pro. 

I’m just a sucker for this gal.  So I could take all the mediocrities of the prison drama Ladies They Talk About (1933), though I could only get past certain racial stereotyping by remembering that we’ve come a ways to get from there to a president called Obama, though we’ve surely got a long ways yet to go.  So this film is old-fashioned, and not in particularly good ways, though it is amusing to check off all the scenes and dialogue that would have been disallowed by mandatory enforcement of the Hays Code within a year of its release .  Also amusing to see it as the precursor of every women-in-prison movie, right up through Orange is the New Black.  Barbara is a gun moll who winds up in a crowded and chaotic, but not especially harsh, women’s prison.  Along the way, she somehow attracts the affections of a straight-arrow radio preacher, for a push-and-pull romance.  It’s all very silly if you think about it for a minute, but don’t think, just look at that face (and figure) as Ms. Stanwyck puts it through its paces.  Watch in particular how she plays when her character is putting on an act.  Whatever material she’s given, she maximizes it through intensity and truthfulness to character.

I had not seen a complete and uncensored version of Baby Face (1933) when I showed it at the Clark, so I was surprised by its sharpness and wit, and pleased by how well it was received by the audience.  It definitely holds up as entertaining and provocative, as the title character unashamedly exploits her charms and will to power, in climbing from slum to penthouse.  Young Ms. Stanwyck may have precipitated enforcement of the Hays Code all by herself.  It’s delectable to see our Barbara at work, with absolute confidence in her hold 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 film seems to signal Stanwyck taking control of her career and her image. No longer a contract player in films like the foregoing, 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 Western genre began 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.  Here’s how I reviewed it before my Babs obsession kicked in:

This melodrama has a lot going for it: time-tested tearjerker material in the tale of a mother’s love and sacrifice, more than competent direction from veteran King Vidor, a fascinating time-capsule of Depression-era class attitudes, some of the most hideous costumes ever to adorn a Hollywood star, and of course the star herself in Barbara Stanwyck’s career-defining role (despite the diverse impact she made in The Lady Eve and Double Indemnity and many others.) She’s quite a dame. Both a presence and an actress. A millgirl in “Millhampton, Massachusetts,” she manages to latch on to Steve Dallas, son of a ruined millionaire, now reduced to office work. They soon separate, mostly due to class difference, but remain attached through a daughter (played very well as she grows up by Anne Shirley, in what could have been a cloying role.) The hubby hooks up again with the nice, rich young widow to whom he was engaged till his father’s suicide, and the new couple can offer the delightfully blossoming Laurel advantages her embarassing though beloved mother can’t. Cue the strings for maternal sacrifice, smiling bravely through the tears. (1937, TCM/T, n.) *7* 

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 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 first 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.

Meet John Doe. (1941)  Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper carry this film until it loses its way in the confused politics of Frank Capra (I don’t blame him, being born in Sicily and all).  She’s a determined newspaper columnist, who saves her job by creating a populist hero called John Doe, and then recruiting baseball-pitcher-turned-hobo Cooper to impersonate him, generating a movement manipulated by crypto-Fascist media tycoon Edward Arnold.  Of course she falls for her creation, and of course he comes to believe in the message that he’s made to deliver, that the little people, the common folk, can cure the mess of the world through simple neighborliness.  John Doe is supposed to jump off the roof of city hall at midnight on Christmas Eve to protest, you know, the rotten state of things.  No surprise that the fraud becomes truth, and he actually winds up there.  Does he jump?  Not even Capra could figure that out, shooting three different endings, none of them satisfactory.

The Lady Eve. (1941) Stanwyck’s peak – and Preston Sturges’ as well. Absurd that she got Oscar for Ball of Fire and not this; 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.” She’s tough, funny, and touching as the cardsharp who sets out to snare naïve millionaire Henry Fonda, and gets snared in turn.  Sturges goes Wilde, emulating Oscar, so this remains firmly among the most delightful of all American comedies, with dialogue that is astonishingly literate and amusing, amidst the hijinks and pratfalls.  The film bears very little relationship to the real world, but within its jewel-box setting, it’s close to perfect.

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 – but there’s no doubt the showgirl will continue to wrap her man around her little finger, or maybe her shapely ankle. The gang moll takes refuge with a group of seven professors (read: dwarves) and instructs them in compiling an encyclopedia of slang.  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 Billy Wilder turned to her when he moved into the director’s chair with a bang. She’s the ultimate femme fatale, luring an insurance agent into a plot to kill her husband.  Film noir doesn’t get any darker than this great thriller, which establishes a template for leavening violence with humor, and giving the bad guys (and gals!) the good lines .  Stanwyck indelibly earns her third Oscar nomination by seducing McMurray (and the audience) while trying to outsmart Edward G. Robinson. It’s possible to take this film merely as a chilly exercise in style, but stylish it is, and the players invest it with recognizably human qualities.

The war years did not otherwise produce Stanwyck’s most memorable work.  Case in point, The Great Man’s Lady (1942), directed by William Wellman, but interesting only for her performance.  She ages from Philadelphia maiden to frontier wife to centenarian teller of the hidden truth about America’s westward expansion.  Joel McCrea is the great man in question, but Brian Donlevy is the more interesting character as the gambler with a heart of gold, which he gives to our girl Barbara.  Again she is faced with babies of questionable parentage, though this story takes quite a different turn.  In an odd way, this film prefigures Liberty Valance in its balancing of fact and legend in the development of the West, but a wartime piety about American history takes any sting out of the story.

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.

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 File on Thelma Jordon (1950) remakes the story of Double Indemnity, with Stanwyck as the femme fatale luring a supposedly wised-up guy into being an accomplice to her own dastardly plot.  She is reliably great with whatever material she’s given, but Wendell Corey is no Fred MacMurray.  And I might have said that Robert Siodmak is no Billy Wilder, but instead I made a note to look for other films he directed, since this had a very distinctive look and style, even when saddled with a wooden male lead and a fairly nonsensical script.  It’s not among Stanwyck’s unmissable performances, but displays her characteristic quality work

The Furies. (1950) Here’s how I reviewed this recently: “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 noir-ish 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.

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.

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 the BS character 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.”

All I Desire (1953) retains the skill of both Douglas Sirk and Stanwyck without coming close to the best of either.  She’s a vaudeville showgirl who abandoned her Wisconsin family around the turn of the century with hopes of an acting career, and now returns when her high school daughter invites her to the graduation play in which she stars.  Her husband is stunned by her return, and her elder daughter is resentful, but everyone makes difficult accommodations.  Sirk’s direction gives off a real Magnificent Ambersons vibe, but the producer insisted on a happy ending that betrays his more truthful melodramatic instincts.  

There’s Always Tomorrow (1955), however, was Sirk at the peak of his powers.  In this black & white melodrama, the director of “women’s pictures” unusually focuses on a man’s romantic travail.  Fred Macmurray is a successful California toy manufacturer and family man, who feels ignored by his wife (Joan Bennett) and three children.  When they’ve left him to a solitary dinner, who should turn up at his door but Barbara Stanwyck, who had a crush on him in high school, and then worked for him as he was building his business.  Now she’s a successful designer in NYC, come to LA on business and looking up her old boss.  Circumstances conspiring, the old flame kindles to life, innocently at first, but despite her deference to his wife and family, he becomes increasingly obsessed with a mid-life crisis of desire.  Beautifully designed and photographed, with an intelligent script, subtle subtexts and social critique, the film is very much of its time but also timeless in its appeal.  
 
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 its 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.

Sing it like the Stones:  “Goodbye Ruby Stevens / Who could hang a name on you? / When you change with every new day / Still I'm gonna miss you.”