Barbara Stanwyck Read online

  Sometimes the young Gable enthusiasm rises back to the surface of his squinty blue eyes when he bothers to open them wide enough, and Stanwyck obviously enjoys being with a performer with charisma that equals her own, even when the script asks her to do a pixilated, Jean Arthur-type delayed reaction after he kisses her and consigns her to the stands for the last interminable racing sequence. As a team, at this point, Gable and Stanwyck would have been better off with an urban noir or a hard-driving western, but there are times in To Please a Lady when the film seems to know that just looking at the two of them sitting at a table together in a restaurant is enough for any reasonable audience.

  Titanic (1953), directed by Jean Negulesco, is a missed opportunity all around, a forgettable film, neither as respected as the later British version of the 1912 maritime disaster, A Night to Remember (1958), nor as wildly popular as the James Cameron blockbuster edition in the 1990s. It has the morbid suspense of all the other Titanic movies, but little else. Charles Brackett produced, and he also had a hand in the script, which actually won an Academy Award for best original story, even though the fictional tale it tells before the boat hits the iceberg is neither original nor overly interesting. In fact, the whole thing is a bit distasteful.

  Stanwyck’s Julia is a society woman who wants to save her children from the decadent effects of an upbringing under their effete father, Clifton Webb. Her first close-up is quite striking, a mixture of melancholy in the eyes with a “what the fuck?” set to her mouth, making for a kind of curdled face. When she first sees Robert Wagner, she gives him a hungry look from an elevator, but the script has her gently picking him as a match for her pretentious daughter. Off the set, Stanwyck apparently picked him out for herself. They share one short scene together where she reads him a poem, and it’s warm and suggestive. If this movie gave her nothing else, at least it gave her some pleasure in her personal life.

  Webb has some amusing high-bitch moments, chiding Stanwyck about how he tried to “civilize the kind of girl who bought her hats out of a Sears Roebuck catalog,” and spitting out his words with supreme contempt. He winces when Stanwyck yells at him and gets several laughs by chopping up his words: “You cra-zy woman,” he snipes. When she tells him that their little boy is not his son, the revelation doesn’t come as a shock; it’s unimaginable that Webb could have had children with Stanwyck by any means other than artificial insemination. There’s some arch writing on display when she tells him about the man who impregnated her, and Stanwyck delivers it archly. And she can’t do anything with her scene with whiskey priest Richard Basehart, a wholly expendable character. Brian Aherne, as the dignified ship’s captain, and Thelma Ritter, as the Molly Brown figure, give some energy to what is a fatally stiff first hour. By the second hour, there’s nothing to do but wait and hope for this dull ship to hit that iceberg already. When it does, the movie comes to life, even though there are still a few snafus here and there.

  In their parting scene, Stanwyck and Webb suddenly become a touching and believable couple. Lowered into the lifeboat, with her husband and son still on board ship, Stanwyck gives herself over to imagining the disaster: “I looked up at the faces lined along the rail—those left behind to die with the ship,” she told Hedda Hopper, describing her experience of shooting these scenes. “I thought of the men and woman who had been through this thing in our time. We were re-creating an actual tragedy and I burst into tears. I shook with great racking sobs and couldn’t stop.” It took an event of this size to break the floodgates open for Stanwyck, so she couldn’t stop once she’d started feeling and she couldn’t regain her usual control. It’s too bad that the film doesn’t give her a proper frame for emotions of that size and depth.

  Executive Suite (1954) is a crackling, if shallow, business drama, a kind of Grand Hotel of the boardroom in which Stanwyck took many of the unappealing aspects of her soap heroines and transfigured them through careful character layering mixed with unabashed going-for-broke effects. This is bloodless 1950s prestige filmmaking, and if it has its virtues, they’re due to the overall neatness of the script by Ernest Lehman and the clear-cut direction by Robert Wise. In the first scenes, secretary Nina Foch introduces us to the film’s main players when she sets up a board meeting: rogue Louis Calhern, emotional second banana Walter Pidgeon, Babbitt-like Paul Douglas (with mistress Shelley Winters), and bottom-line-watcher Fredric March.

  Outside the office walls, there are many scenes with William Holden, who plays an idealistic, hands-on sort with a tirelessly (or is it tiresomely?) devoted wife (June Allyson) and perfect little boy. Enough time is spent with these men in grey flannel suits and their women that any sensible audience might wish that Lily Powers could saunter in and bust the place apart. But it’s easy to see why Stanwyck decided to play Julia Tredway, the damaged daughter of the company’s founder, even if she really only has about eight minutes of screen time to make an impact (in the last twenty minutes, she’s confined mainly to silent reaction shots at an all-important meeting called to elect the next company president). Justifiably cocky, Stanwyck once said: “Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don’t care what happened before. I don’t even care if I was in the rest of the damned thing—I’ll take it in those fifteen minutes.”

  She does take Executive Suite—and by force at times. She has the flash part, the pay-off part, and it pays off in the expected histrionic ways, but it also lands deeper in several key moments. Twenty-one minutes in, when we first see Julia, she is staring out a window, her face flabby with preoccupation and worry (we later learn that her father committed suicide in 1933 by jumping out of a window). She’s an abandoned woman, and she knows that her controlling stock in the company is the only thing that binds her to Bullard, the man who saved her from a breakdown and saved her father’s company. A silly little hat sits forlornly in the middle of her graying head and she wears little white kid gloves. This costuming makes for a telling picture of a pampered girl gone sour and neurotic in middle age.

  Stanwyck’s transitions can be a bit abrupt here because she’s playing for maximum impact to make each moment count, yet she also offers some interesting, subtle moments of almost humorous inertia. Julia Tredway is one of the few Stanwyck women to have a guilty conscience about being manipulative, and in the middle of making demands and exhibiting her self-pity with Pidgeon’s understanding exec, she draws back several times into a wry self-awareness that lets us know Julia is a smart woman. She understands most of her own urges and miseries but feels she can do little to change them. Julia fondles Bullard’s chair and then caresses his pipe; her romantic attachment to him is unavoidably part of her unresolved daddy issues.

  Julia’s second scene lasts less than a minute. The telephone rings and we see a woman’s hand reach out to pick up the receiver. We hear a voice say hello, and it’s the Stanwyck voice at its most cigarette-scorched. Wise cuts to her face when she hears of Bullard’s death, and it stays completely still. Stanwyck makes us feel that Julia has somehow prepared herself for this moment, and she conveys all of this without moving her face at all. She doesn’t even have a verifiable expression in her eyes, yet she somehow gets across exactly what Julia is experiencing and then closes her eyes, not fast, but not slow, as if a curtain is being lowered. Eleanor Parker was originally set to play this part, and if she had, she would have torn the scenery and maybe even the whole film itself to shreds, whereas Stanwyck has only to stare and smolder to place a whole blasted life right in your lap.

  Foch and March do fine work in their own right, but no one can really compete with Stanwyck’s bravura style here—not even her onetime golden boy, Holden, who shares the screen with her in a climactic confrontation scene. Julia is throwing away her personal papers into a roaring fire. Holden’s Macdonald, who needs her support to take the top spot in the company, assails her directly, and she responds briefly, but then draws back into herself, the kind of “I’m watching everything from a distance” quality we saw in her first scene,
times ten.

  Julia retreats into a cold kind of remove, just as Stanwyck herself hid behind a mask in some of her poorer soap operas. But in Executive Suite this masking is revealed to be a necessary and even admirable survival strategy. Plunking down in a chair, her hands set in a sort of Zen yoga position, Julia concludes, “No matter how horrible things are, they can always get worse.” This is an indelible moment, and it touches a very deep part of Stanwyck’s creativity, the part that knows about depression so overwhelming that only the lowest energy level can possibly deal with it. She knows, and Julia knows, that if your energy is as low as possible, there’s a good chance it won’t sink any lower. A sudden rise in energy and Julia could go right out that window like her father did.

  Holden’s Macdonald keeps poking at her, and a lioness emerges, only to slink back to her cage. Stanwyck alternates between cold and hot like this until he draws blood. “I gave him ten years of my life and all my love, isn’t that enough!” she cries, her eyes wide and credulous like a little girl, as she starts to pound on her accuser’s chest. When he leaves her, Julia breaks down as she did in 1933, weeping brokenly over a desk and beating it with her arms, as she must have done many times before. She goes outside and she could easily jump off that executive tower, but then some bells start to ring (the film has no score), and this hard, massive sound sets something off in Julia. She lets out a fearsome howl and covers her ears with her hands, then shivers against a stone wall.

  It’s a bold choice. Joan Crawford covered her ears like this in many of her films, but with her it was too much a melodramatic surface gesture. With Stanwyck, it sets a visual capper on this volcano inside her character, and because the source is so genuine (and because we’ve been shown Julia’s mentality and life experience in such rapier-like thrusts), this ear covering is a flourish that feels justified, or earned. We can believe that Julia has had a life-saving epiphany in the last boardroom scenes because Stanwyck has prepared us for its possibility at every opportunity. Total self-knowledge doesn’t destroy Julia, as it does Stella Dallas; it sets her free.

  Such a role was even worth being second-billed to the unctuous Allyson, and Stanwyck might have won an Oscar for her performance if she’d allowed herself to be run in the supporting category. Foch got a nomination in that category. She remembered that Stanwyck kept hitting the desk after the Holden confrontation, bruising herself. “She showed off the bruises,” Foch recalled. “It was as if she was proud of the pain.” This is the dark side of Stanwyck, the deep-dyed physical masochist, but it offers an insight into her process and how it relates to her life.

  Julia has to pound on that desk until she’s bruised and until the bruises don’t hurt anymore before she can put all of the baggage of her past behind her. Stanwyck was a woman who had battle scars related to events that were completely beyond her control, like the cigarette burns on her chest. But she dedicated her real life, her artistic life, to mastering self-inflicted hurts of her own in order to use them constructively—this time in the service of Julia Tredway’s fall and rise. It’s probably the smallest part she ever played, but it’s also one of the most impressively virtuosic of all her performances.

  It’s a shame that Stanwyck was never paired with James Cagney—her male equivalent and then some—when they were both under contract to Warner Bros. in the mid-thirties. Instead, the two most exciting and trailblazing American actors of the time wound up in an end-of-the-line MGM adoption drama, These Wilder Years (1956), a poorly written and directed film that seems determined to act as a tranquilizer on their respective gifts. Between static takes, you can practically hear director Roy Rowland mutter, “Ah, I guess we should cut now, do a new angle on this scene, huh?” and the movie gives Stanwyck little to do but sip coffee from dainty cups and saucers and address envelopes. She’s introduced holding a baby close to her grey curls and soon mentions the man who invented the safety pin. When Cagney offers that the inventor might have been a woman, Stanwyck chirps, “Women never invent anything, except men,” which has to be a contender for the worst line of dialogue she was ever asked to utter.

  Stanwyck would have been more at home as an unscrupulous baby broker than as the kind of noble bureaucrat who would never have allowed her to adopt Dion. She tries to keep our attention here by doing clear “beats” in her relentlessly prosaic scenes, sitting down to her kitchen table with a plop of exhaustion, or eating a meal Cagney has prepared with quiet appreciation for the food. And there are a few precious two shots where the stars connect slightly and just riff with each other without any defined goal. Who knows why no one thought to put them in a crime drama instead, playing two tough old birds who turn each other on by their mutual amorality. Or even a musical; these two ex-hoofers delighted their crew with impromptu dances on the set. I’d gladly give up all of These Wilder Years for a documentary short subject on their remembered dance routines.

  Wilder/Stanwyck

  Ball of Fire, Double Indemnity

  Before moving to direction, Billy Wilder, like Preston Sturges, turned out a lot of screenplays (Wilder’s were usually co-written with Charles Brackett). A prickly Austro-Hungarian refugee from Germany, Wilder’s smart-aleck voice as a writer comes through loud and clear in his scripts for Ernst Lubitsch and Mitchell Leisen. Wilder had a weakness for lines of often-questionable taste; Lubitsch and Leisen could put some of these lines over, but not all. For instance, when Greta Garbo’s Soviet commissar is asked about the Moscow show trials in Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), she solemnly intones that “there will be fewer but better Russians.” It’s a line that aims to get a gasp and then a bit of a laugh, a sort of stiletto jab, and it works. But then there’s the moment in Leisen’s Arise, My Love (1940) when a man says that he’s anxious to get to war with Germany because, “I’ve always wanted to drop something on Hamburg after getting ptomaine from that hamburger.” This isn’t even remotely funny, or interesting, or anything. It’s just a miscalculation of tone.

  You never know which Wilder you’re going to get in these early scripts or in his later movies. There’s the man who completely understood Gloria Swanson’s demented silent screen relic Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and the changing gender mores of Some Like It Hot (1959), and then there’s the clod whose camera tours the ruins of Berlin in A Foreign Affair (1948) to the strains of “Isn’t It Romantic?” and who torments Ray Milland’s drunk for showy fun in The Lost Weekend (1945). To quote his old boss, Samuel Goldwyn, with Wilder you have to take the bitter with the sour.

  Critical opinion on Wilder has always fluctuated, mainly because it hinges on these highly subjective questions of taste, on deciding when he goes too far or when he doesn’t go far enough. For the first movie he wrote for Stanwyck, Ball of Fire (1941), Wilder gleefully stresses what he sees as the vulgarity in her character, and she rises to the bait while maintaining an untouchable sort of shrewdness. Whatever his faults, Wilder had a keen talent for coming up with character names, and he gives Stanwyck a doozy here: Sugarpuss O’Shea, a gangster’s moll forced to take it on the lam with a cadre of professors working on an encyclopedia.

  There are seven of these old profs, just like the seven dwarfs, plus one young grammarian, Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), who needs Sugarpuss to teach him the ins and outs of modern slang, the boogie woogie, the hoi toi toi, the corny and the cheesy. Potts too is well named, and his last name means that Sugarpuss gets to call him Pottsie, reminiscent of Stanwyck’s name for Fonda, “Hopsie,” in the vastly superior The Lady Eve, which had been such a hit earlier in the year. Cooper’s character name thus feels like a nudge reminding people of another movie they liked. Ball of Fire is nothing if not commercial.

  Stanwyck received her second Academy Award nomination as best actress for Ball of Fire (it really should have been for Eve, but the academy members had Ball of Fire more freshly situated in their minds), so it has pride of place in her filmography. While she’s somewhere near her best in it—and certainly as sexy as she’d ever be in a mo
vie—Ball of Fire is a flawed film, and there are several reasons why it never quite comes together. It runs one hundred and eleven minutes, which is rather lengthy for such a slim subject, and it has several scenes that go on far too long—especially a sequence where Dan Duryea’s hood, Pastrami, is holding the professors hostage and they slowly work toward getting a heavy portrait to fall on his head.

  Pastrami starts shooting things in their room at random, hitting a flower vase that explodes right next to the camera. This ostentatious shot is a good example of another problem here: Gregg Toland’s deep focus photography seems much more suited to a somber melodrama like The Little Foxes (which he shot the same year). So many of Toland’s shots are simply too heavy looking and deliberate for light comedy. When Potts confesses the deepness of his love for Sugarpuss, Toland has Stanwyck put on blackface so that only her eyes glow in the dark, and this trick is typical of his stylistic excesses, which never suit Wilder’s material.

  Then there’s the question of tone. The scenes with the professors are just this side of cutesy, with a bedtime nursery score emphasizing what harmless old sweeties these guys are. The actors playing the professors generally follow suit. S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall has many reasons to slap his hands on his shaky jowls to get a laugh, while Henry Travers does his blandly beaming Henry Travers thing. Richard Haydn (as Professor Oddly) is too much in love with the sound of his own overly fastidious voice, so that his speech about his own marriage seems to go on longer than it should. Only that memorable on-screen scoundrel Tully Marshall bothers to seem like a three-dimensional person as Professor Robinson, and the script doesn’t give him enough to work with. If Marshall had played Professor Oddly, the speech about marriage might have had a chance of working.