Barbara Stanwyck Page 19

  As Miss Bragg, the old maid housekeeper who treats the professors like naughty children, Kathleen Howard, best known as the harridan wife to W.C. Fields in It’s a Gift (1934), is stuck in an unlikable, go-nowhere role. At one point, Sugarpuss punches Bragg out to keep her from blabbing, and this feels like a mistake, not funny and not really deserved (Stanwyck’s punch actually connected during one take, to her horror, and Howard suffered a fractured jaw for her trouble). Worse still, the coy professor scenes are intercut with a kind of gangster picture featuring Dana Andrews as criminal kingpin Joe Lilac. Andrews’s scenes feel perfunctory, and at the end, he and his men are tossed into a garbage truck, as in a cartoon, yet they seem all too unpleasantly real in earlier parts of the movie. And Cooper is not as precise a comedian as Henry Fonda; his shambling delivery tends to get deliberately vague at times, as if he trusts that his own personal charm can get him out of thinking through his part.

  Where is director Howard Hawks in all this? Critic Robin Wood, in his book on Hawks, sees Ball of Fire as an attempt to right the “wrongs” of Hawks’s magnificent Bringing Up Baby, which Wood sees as troublingly anti-intellectual. But to my eyes Ball of Fire only reflects a stony lack of interest on Hawks’s part. It isn’t really a Hawks movie, either in terms of its look, which falls to Toland, or its attitude, which falls to Wilder. Perhaps the chief culprit, though, is producer Sam Goldwyn, who always managed to impart an overly dignified feeling to most of his movies, a heavy touch fatal to a brash comedy like this.

  Considering all these obstacles, it’s nearly incredible that Stanwyck is as good as she is here. There are classic moments, to be sure, not least Sugarpuss’s first entrance. Potts is in a nightclub, researching his slang and jotting down colorful terms in a notebook (something I can imagine Wilder himself doing, so greedy was he for the low side of American culture to remind him of vestiges of his own lost Weimar milieu). We see a lacquered fingernail pounding out the beat to Gene Krupa’s “Drum Boogie” on a curtain, and the nail seems sexy, a little contemptuous, impatient. Even when she’s only acting with the fingers of one hand, Stanwyck manages to give a nuanced performance.

  Sugarpuss practically leaps out on stage, wearing a spangly-tatters outfit courtesy of Edith Head that shows off a bare midriff and Dietrich-caliber legs. Martha Tilton, a Benny Goodman warbler, dubs Stanwyck’s singing. The voice may be a little too high, but it’s still not a bad fit (it would have been better to have dubbed Stanwyck with Krupa’s lead canary, Anita O’Day, whose spirited, libidinal, croaky style would have ideally matched the star). The best moment is when Tilton’s voice cuts out and Stanwyck herself cries, “C’mon, Krup, knock yourself out!” and we see the manic, highly sexual Krupa do his inimitable thing with his drums. “Yeah!” Sugarpuss breathes—almost hisses—at the close, using Stanwyck’s own voice again. There’s a brief reprise where Krupa plays the boogie with matchsticks, spoiled by Toland’s glossy concept shot of Sugarpuss’s face gleaming down on a table as he saws away.

  “Screw, scram, scraw,” says Sugarpuss, trying to get rid of Professor Potts at her dressing room door, but she changes her tune when she realizes she’ll need a place to stay to hide from the police. She makes another entrance, even more striking, when she shows up at the professors’ domicile. Potts opens the door and she winks and says, “Heidi Ho!” clicking her tongue on her palette (there’s elemental rain beating down behind her). When she hears the seven old professors scampering upstairs, she says, “Hey, what is that?” in a harsh, mean-sounding voice. Stanwyck is always alert to the moments when Sugarpuss lets her hard edges emerge.

  Sugarpuss was an orphan, it seems, like Ruby, and ran away from her aunt, but her childhood is no bummer in this movie. Stanwyck tosses the single line about the aunt away as if an unhappy childhood couldn’t possibly matter at this point. Unlike Jean Harrington, whose father insists that she be “crooked but never common,” Sugarpuss can be downright dirty, as when she reacts to Potts’s embarrassment at not being quite dressed, unsettling him with, “You know, once I watched my big brother shave”—one of those Wilder remarks that just skirts that line of upset stomach bad taste. The Wilder “note” is so different from Brackett’s prep school elegance that it’s easy to guess at who did what; the Oddly marriage speech, for instance, seems like pure Brackett.

  “Wee, that’s a lot of books!” exclaims Sugarpuss, taking in the large encyclopedia working room. “All of ’em different?” she asks. At a moment like this, I’m grateful that uncultured but ever-sharp Stanwyck is playing this Sugarpuss, and not, say, Ginger Rogers, who was originally pursued for the part but turned it down. Rogers would have played it “dumb,” self-consciously, which is not something Stanwyck could ever do; witness the failure of her dippy heiress in The Mad Miss Manton. “This is the first time anybody’s moved in on my brain,” says Sugarpuss, almost seriously, plunking herself down in a chair and saying she’ll work “all night.” This is not an idle boast, of course. Sugarpuss is likely one of the best lays in the world—a little scary, maybe, but worth it. When Potts hems and haws, she lifts one of her legs up into his face and commands, “Alright, feel that,” extending her foot enough so that Luis Buñuel or Quentin Tarantino would salivate. It’s cold, says Potts. “It’s cold and wet,” she emphasizes, in a lower, more forceful voice, so that this simple statement sounds very rough and visceral, bristling with sexual possibilities.

  She enlists the professors on her side, giving her hand to “Cuddles” Sakall and then cracking, “Can I have this now, kid?” when he shows no inclination to let it go. Stanwyck gives this movie what it so sorely lacks, speed and dynamism, and though she’s still not too comfortable with sarcasm, she’s professional enough to deliver the various wisecracks quickly and with aplomb. And she couldn’t be more at ease playing the kind of woman who delights in toying with older men’s fancies. “Any of you can jerk a zipper?” she asks, when she’s trying to close a skirt, her manner not too far from outright hostility, yet willing to be taken by surprise, too. When Sugarpuss falls in love with Potts while manipulating him for her own ends, this romance is believable, even ordained.

  Though she knows the score about most of the important things, this is in some ways a naïve woman. After she accepts an engagement ring from Lilac, Sugarpuss wonders if she will continue her nightclub career or “bust in on the Helen Hayes racket,” an idea that doesn’t seem either likely or sensible. There are several shots in this movie where Stanwyck is asked to walk slowly away from the camera. This is neither the exploitation stuff of Mexicali Rose nor the physical idealization of Capra, but rather the pro playing all of her cards, as if she’s thinking, “Sure, I have a nice ass. Have a look, that’s what it’s there for.”

  “You’re the one I’m wacky about, just plain wacky,” insists Sugarpuss to Potts, with that curious vehemence Stanwyck often brought to love scenes. She puts several books down on the floor so that she’ll be tall enough to kiss the towering Cooper. When his Potts asks her what she’s doing, Sugarpuss says, “Oh, you’ll find out,” in a heated, offhand way that would get any heterosexual man’s blood racing. Lilac tells Potts that Sugarpuss is a materialist who “sulks if she has to wear last year’s ermine,” but, like many Stanwyck women, she has a basic fineness that lets her see, finally, that there are more important things than fur coats.

  When Sugarpuss realizes that she really loves Potts, Stanwyck gets her abstracted look and practically spits out, “I love him because he’s the kind of guy who gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk, and I love the way he blushes right up over his ears. I love him because he doesn’t know how to kiss, the jerk!” As the writer Sheila O’Malley put it in a tribute piece to Stanwyck, “His very innocence shames her. Yet she loves him. She loves his innocence. And yet there’s that epithet at the end, ‘the jerk’! She’s got an edge. She’s feeling as mushy as she’s ever gonna feel, and that pisses her off.” Sugarpuss gets sidelined a bit during the last third, but she’s made her brassy “yum yum” presence
felt in a movie that needs to get its act together for her and stop working at cross purposes between Wilder’s Berlin sarcasm, Toland’s pictorial solemnity, Cooper’s mannered cuteness, and Hawks’s cool indifference.

  When I mentioned that I was writing a book about Barbara Stanwyck to people around my age (mid-twenties to mid-thirties), they usually didn’t quite know who she was, unfortunately. If they asked me what movies she had been in, I always rushed right to Double Indemnity first, thinking they might have at least heard of that. Stanwyck probably made better movies, but none seem to have had the pop cultural impact of this Billy Wilder classic—even if some recent commentators have taken to making complaints about the blond wig Wilder had her wear.

  Some even question her sex appeal in the film. Stanwyck was more than capable, of course, of turning on the sex appeal in both earlier and later movies, not least in the Wilder-scripted Ball of Fire, where she is as delectable a physical specimen as most men could hope for (and here, maybe, is where Hawks’s influence might finally show itself). But in Double Indemnity, there’s a damper placed on that sort of thing, and it has to do, in part, with Wilder’s essential misogyny. So many of his movies evince a distaste for women, especially if they happen to be a bit older than an ingénue and still trying to peddle their sexual wares (just look at how he mocks poor Kim Novak in Kiss Me, Stupid [1964] or Juliet Mills in Avanti! [1972]).

  James M. Cain first published Double Indemnity in serial form in 1936. Two years before, he had put out another salacious book about murder, The Postman Always Rings Twice, with intimations of carnal depravity (when the married Cora first couples with drifter Frank Chambers, she tells him to bite her lip and he does so until he draws blood). Both books were inspired by the case of Ruth Snyder, a Queens woman who murdered her husband with the help of another man in order to collect on the dead man’s insurance.

  Cain’s Double Indemnity is told in the first person by Walter Huff (Neff in Wilder’s film), an insurance salesman in Los Angeles who walks willingly into a kind of “House of Death” with blood-red drapes, the home of Nirdlinger, an oil man, and his wife Phyllis. In the film, Wilder changes Nirdlinger (a lingering nerd?) to Dietrichson (son of Marlene?), which once again shows his talent for picking just the right character names. In the book, Phyllis is “maybe thirty-one or -two, with a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair.” Though she has “a washed-out look,” Huff sees that “[u]nder those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts.” So, in Cain’s book, we have a slightly faded dish with a great bod. Not Stanwyck, by any means; more like Veronica Lake as she was in 1952 or 1953.

  “I like tea,” says Cain’s rather haughty Phyllis. “It makes a break in the afternoon.” She sounds like a bored housewife, but everything she says might be calculated for effect, so it’s hard to get a read on her. Walter notices a few attractive flaws in Phyllis: two teeth that were “maybe a little bit buck,” and freckles on her forehead. Tiny physical flaws like this can stoke a man’s lust, and they definitely do the trick for Walter. Cain’s prose is tough and funny in these early scenes. It’s not classic wiseacre like Wilder’s patter, but there are plenty of little laughs leading up to an ellipsis; afterwards, we can tell that Walter has laid Phyllis.

  When he asks about her husband, Phyllis says, “He treats me as well as a man can treat a woman,” which in retrospect sounds strange. What is her standard for good treatment? She says she doesn’t love her husband, but he’s never done anything bad to her. Then, though, she reveals her psychological buckteeth: “Maybe I’m crazy, but there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I’m so beautiful, then.” A sensible man would have been out the door at “scarlet shroud,” but Walter is a little cracked himself.

  Phyllis reflects that she would like to bring death to everyone, so they’d be happy, and she begins to seem not human to Walter. “The firelight was reflected in her eyes like she was some kind of leopard,” he says, employing a startling image in the middle of all the terse dialogue. Phyllis used to be a nurse, and as Walter plans to kill her husband and get a double payday from the insurance company, she often seems to be living in a dream world, but there’s also a sense that in her dreamlike way she is pulling all of the strings.

  After the murder, whatever feeling there was between Walter and Phyllis sours: “I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake,” says Walter. This sentiment is far removed from the tough-love tenderness Stanwyck’s Jean Harrington displays when she talks about herself as an axe that needs a turkey. It comes out that Phyllis deliberately killed the first Mrs. Nirdlinger. Then it comes out that she killed three children in the hospital where she was head nurse, one of them for money, and the others just to cover her tracks.

  “She’s a pathological case, that’s all,” says Keyes, an overweight insurance investigator. “The worst I ever heard of.” In 1936, a flat-out sociopathic murderer like Phyllis was still an exotic thing, something undreamed of by most people. Today, she’s one of the fictional firsts in a long line of genetic mutations with real-life killer counterparts. Cain makes it clear that Phyllis is incapable of feeling remorse, and in his scariest scene, her stepdaughter Lola remembers walking in on her when she was wrapped in red silk fabric “like a shroud,” her face “smeared” in white powder and lipstick, standing in front of a mirror with a dagger in her hand and making faces at herself. (If Wilder had included this scene in his movie, it might have been Stanwyck’s ultimate mirror moment in film, for she would have dared to look as grotesque as necessary while also doing what she needed to do to access Phyllis’s ghastly, private playacting at murder). Cain’s plot gets too convoluted, and his double-suicide ending on board a ship is neither very believable nor very likely, but he has laid down quite a template for any moviemaker.

  Studios were interested in Cain’s story right away, but the censors wouldn’t let them touch it. In the early forties, the rule-breaking Wilder took the novel up in collaboration with Raymond Chandler, the hard-drinking creator of the detective character Philip Marlowe. It was a pairing of opposites, like Wilder’s more storied partnership with the ivy league Charles Brackett, and it yielded a script that tarted up a lot of Cain’s dialogue while shifting some of his emphasis—sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Wilder approached various actors with the script, and they were wary of it, for this was a new type of American movie, something that hadn’t been seen before. There were precedents, like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), but this story was altogether nastier, more constricted, more pitiless.

  Stanwyck admired Double Indemnity as a script, but she was nonetheless uncertain about it. “I had never played an out-and-out killer,” she remembered. “I had played medium heavies, but not an out-and-killer.” (I love her term “medium heavy,” which suggests there is a kind of human scale for perfidy). She went to see Wilder. “I was a little frightened of it and, when [I went] back to his office, I said, ‘I love the script and I love you, but I am a little afraid after all these years of playing heroines to go into an out-and-out cold-blooded killer. And Mr. Wilder—and rightly so—looked at me and he said, ‘Well, are you a mouse or an actress?’ And I said, ‘Well, I hope I’m an actress.’ He said, ‘Then do the part.’”

  Stanwyck told this story to praise Wilder, and she always had high regard for Indemnity because it caused such a stir, but I wonder if her initial hesitation to take the movie spoke to her instinctive sense of what was real and interesting in a role and what wasn’t. Then again, maybe she was just plain scared of playing such a bad seed. Wilder took the right schoolyard tack with her and lightly taunted her, the equivalent of a bully asking, “You chicken?” He then placed that weird blond wig on her head; even he realized a month into shooting that the wig wasn’t working. Buddy DeSylva, the head of Paramount at the time, took a look at the rushes and quipped, “We hired Barbara Stanwyck and here we get George Washington.”

  Wilder told El
la Smith that, “The wig was not much good, I admit,” but later on he rationalized it as part of “the phoniness of the girl—bad taste, phony wig,” as if his Phyllis is supposed to be wearing a wig. Is she bald, like Constance Towers at the beginning of Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964)? The effect is one of disfigurement, not exactly an aid to any sex appeal Stanwyck could have found for Phyllis. Cain’s Phyllis is a looker but a monster inside, but Wilder’s Phyllis has most of her flaws all on the surface, where we can’t possibly miss them.

  Still, on the level of pure craft, Double Indemnity deserves its status. Wilder has pruned away the unnecessary fat in the book’s Lola section and also added some knockout suspense set pieces. The film feels, by and large, very modern, especially in the way it looks. We never seem to be on sets, and there’s a vivid sense of Los Angeles in the exterior location shots (when Stanwyck’s Phyllis enters a grocery store for the last time to scheme with Walter [Fred MacMurray], the sun is glaring down on her, and she’s obviously on a real street in LA). Much of the movie’s visual scheme, with all its Venetian blind shadows and cool Spanish-style architecture, must be credited to cinematographer John Seitz, who went to great lengths to achieve a dusty afternoon look for the Dietrichson house.

  Under the opening credits, a man walks on crutches in silhouette to Miklos Rosza’s throbbing, dissatisfied score. This image underlines a kind of impotence, both physical and moral. There are a few urgent shots of a car speeding through the dead of night, and this feeling of a deserted nighttime LA is amplified when MacMurray’s Walter knocks on the door of his office building. An elevator operator lets him in and talks about how the company wouldn’t let him take out insurance because of a heart condition. Walter deals with his chatter curtly, even rudely. But he’s been shot, see, so he has to amble to his office and make his confession, which sets up the first-person narration that carries Cain’s book.