Barbara Stanwyck Read online

  Race is the dominant spice of this particular erotic dish. “You yellow swine!” Megan snarls the next morning, grabbing a nearby knife when she feels intimidated by her captor. Even Yen’s easy-going Caucasian flunky, Jones (Walter Connelly) gets scared about the situation. “This is a white woman,” he whines, in the tone of someone who feels he ought to half-heartedly lodge an official protest. But Yen zaps him: “I have no prejudice against the color,” he quips in his jaunty way (Asther almost sounds Latino at certain points here, and this effect only emphasizes his bizarre, everything-rolled-into-one sexiness). Megan refuses dinner with the General and goes outside for some air; she looks at the moon, smokes a cigarette, and sits down in a large wicker chair. Across the way, some of Yen’s people are frolicking playfully together, in a natural, sexy way, and Megan drowses in her chair.

  We see a watery door. A caricatured “Chinese” Yen with long fingernails and feral looks breaks the door down. “Chinese” Yen is then superimposed over the real Yen, an effect that conveys Megan’s racially based fear of him and her confusion over her feelings. Capra frames “Chinese” Yen’s talon-like fingernails around Megan’s horrified face as he creeps up on her to take her. The fingernails settle on her shoulders as she “struggles,” voluptuously (we can see that this is not a rape, but a rape fantasy). A masked man comes in the window to save her: Is he her fiancée, or her father? The masked man punishes the Bad Yen, who disappears into a wall. He takes his black mask off … and it’s the real Yen. There’s a close-up of Megan’s face, her eyes shining like distant harbor lights as a blurred background whirs behind her. And then she kisses Yen, amazingly enough (I imagine half of the Radio City audience of 1933 walked out at this point).

  Megan wakes up and finds herself talking to Yen by the light of the moon. He says that he’s banned all missionaries from his territory, and then he says that he’d like to laugh at her yet finds her admirable. The distinction he makes lets us know that Yen is a very intelligent man who too often retreats into adolescent nihilism. Then he puts the screws on: “There’s never been a people more purely artist … and therefore more purely lover … than the Chinese,” he drawls, in Asther’s cadenced, hypnotic voice, which finally seems to have no specific regionalisms at all.

  This does it. Megan bathes, and Capra indulges himself filming Stanwyck’s beautiful legs and then her bare back in a freestanding bathtub, with her hair up. He wants to pamper her and wait on her and turn this poverty-bred Brooklyn girl into an international movie goddess, worth idolizing not because she’s remote, like Garbo or Dietrich, but because she’s real. It’s as if a husband suddenly saw his careworn wife in their Flatbush apartment as the sun hit her at just the right angle through the kitchen window, transfiguring her, but revealing her, too.

  Megan looks at her made-up face in a mirror. In The Miracle Woman, Florence puts on make-up as her crooked promoter fusses around her, and the make-up seems to burn her skin, bringing home her own corruption, her prostitution of her faith. The make-up on Megan makes her look hard, even whorish, and this won’t do; she wipes most of it off, just as Capra stripped Kay Arnold of her false eyelashes. Capra made a fetish of Stanwyck’s naturalism and her open, yielding face. This stripped-down face is clearly sexy to him, and a large part of why he loved her on screen and in her dressing room, too, when he risked breaking her fabled concentration to murmur a few words of direction.

  He sees in General Yen that her coolness can have a puritan quality, a kind of “I am above this” that Stanwyck used for protection, but which Megan Davis has been forced into. Perversely (The Bitter Tea of General Yen, like sex itself, is nothing if not perverse), Capra makes Stanwyck give up her coolness from a “sheltered young girl” perspective that stands in total opposition to her own background. If Forbidden was personal but poor, General Yen and Stanwyck’s performance in it have the rarefied impersonality of the highest art.

  Megan preaches the Christian doctrine of mercy to the faithless Yen. “We’re all of one flesh and blood,” she argues, as if she’s falling back, with relief, on her old life, on things she’s heard and believed to be true without ever testing them. “Really?” Yen asks, sniffing out her hypocrisy and taking advantage of it. “Do you mean that?” He puts his hand on hers; she recoils. “Words,” sneers Yen, “nothing but words.” At this point in her career, Stanwyck’s slightly stilted way of talking, with all the emotions burning underneath the words, is due to her anxiety to speak correctly and not give away her lack of education. Capra uses this anxiety to represent Megan Davis’s entrapment in learned attitudes that are not her own; inside, she’s ready for rapturous, incorrect, liberating sexual enslavement.

  Helplessly, Megan sentimentalizes Mah-Li, who actually is as treacherous as the General thinks she is, and he lets his whole empire go just to prove his point to Megan and disillusion her. She thinks she’ll have to sleep with Yen because Mah-Li has betrayed him. When he intimates that she’ll pay with her life instead, her shuddering reaction makes Yen cry, “You are afraid of death as you are afraid of life!” They embrace, and over the General’s shoulder we see a startling close-up of Megan’s eyes, glimmering with some recognition of her own nature so profound that it must extend to Stanwyck, too. Megan’s recognition might be the polar opposite of what Stanwyck has discovered about herself, but that’s the joy and the puzzle of acting on this elevated a level.

  Yen goes to kill himself with the bitter tea of the title, while Megan makes herself up as heavily as Mah-Li did and humbly offers her body and her love to this man she cannot escape or explain. The last scene sees Megan on a boat with Connelly’s Jones, who drunkenly talks about Yen while she stares off into the distance, her face caught in some frozen yet lively and yearning expression. Jones says, “You can crowd a lifetime into an hour.” He wonders if Yen is now a cherry tree, or the wind that is playing in Megan’s hair. The film ends on this tantalizing bit of mood-making, as open and suggestive an ending as anyone could wish for this sublime work about the vagaries of desire, one of the most complex love offerings from a director to an actress in film history.

  Seven years passed before Capra and Stanwyck made their fifth and final movie together, Meet John Doe (1941). In that time a lot had changed in their careers, particularly for Capra, who had won three best directing Oscars and had become acclaimed for bewildering “films of ideas” like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Meet John Doe was the last of this queasy cycle of Capra message movies, and it’s something of a nightmare picture, lost in contradictions, second-guessing, and an overall self-hatred that often bleeds, hair-raisingly, into a pitch-dark misanthropy.

  Meet John Doe includes some of the worst scenes Capra ever filmed, especially a long drunk interlude with James Gleason’s newspaper editor that exhibits the lowest kind of right-wing, flag-waving barroom self-pity, an unpleasantness that is only matched by the left-wing caricature of Edward Arnold’s soft-spoken, absurdly villainous capitalist/fascist (with Capra at this point, you get the worst of all political persuasions). At the center of the movie is Gary Cooper, playing one of his mid-career bumpkins in a self-consciously dopey, “oblivious” manner to put over a character of incredible naiveté.

  So where is Stanwyck in all this? She’s Ann, a newspaper columnist who gets fired in the first scene and pleads for her job. The newborn stilt-edness of the early thirties is gone; by 1941, she’s a sleek, stylish dynamo in tailored suits and lusciously long hair. When she goes to her typewriter to write a last-ditch gimmick column signed by John Doe, an unemployed man bent on suicide, Capra frames her demonic-looking eyes over the clattering keys. In the movie’s first hour, Ann is an unscrupulous go-getter whose sole purpose in life is to make money for her mother and her two cutesy sisters. We are told that Ann’s father was a doctor who was always taking on charity cases, and her mother (Spring Byington) gives away any ready cash to needy people, so Ann’s rebellious, selfish drive for lucre makes psychological sense, up to a poi
nt. When she delivers a lightning-fast spiel to Gleason on how to hire someone to play her made-up forgotten man, Stanwyck delivers her hard-sell lines in such a concentrated, breathless manner that she turns her “no sir” speech into an aria that merits applause for its technical virtuosity alone.

  Ann is a jerk and an opportunist, and Stanwyck limns her unstoppable drive to succeed as funny but also alarming. When she first sees Cooper’s highly exploitable face, her own face takes on the look of a wolf that has spotted its dinner; this seems to be a woman without any vulnerability. Stanwyck is playing the director-like heavy role that Sam Hardy played in The Miracle Woman, while Cooper is playing the Florence figure, a dupe who starts to believe in his own publicity. Identifying with Ann, Capra also seems to side with John’s fellow hobo, Colonel (Walter Brennan), a nihilist (like Yen) who never buys the platitudes Ann puts into his friend’s mouth. Yet in the end we’re supposed to swallow and celebrate the smarmy, demagogic “love thy neighbor” bromides picked up by Doe’s sheep-like, idiot audience. Capra obviously hates this audience, yet he feels forced to endorse it in his sell-out happy ending.

  This is quite a complicatedly flawed movie. It’s almost impossible to say where it goes wrong, because going wrong is all it does—in as many different directions as possible. To her credit, Stanwyck often looks apprehensive, glancing off-screen every now and then with an “is he actually on the level with this stuff?” expression. Capra gave her her start, and he gave her two and a half major films, but he prostitutes her talent in the last half hour of Meet John Doe, where he uses the rawness of her hysteria to paper over the holes in his scenario. It’s a shame that they ended up mired in Meet John Doe instead of on the heights of General Yen, and it’s a shame that Capra’s talent led him to such a self-destructive place.

  There’s one suspiciously extended scene in Meet John Doe where John tells Ann about a dream he had about her and then goes on and on about how he spanked her. Ann looks tickled, but it’s a little more than that, for Stanwyck herself seems tickled, too, so that the scene plays like a kind of private joke between former lovers. “He’d been kicked around,” she said of Capra, “maybe not as much, but he understood it.” That “maybe not as much,” says a lot about their basic honesty, their kinship, and the life-or-death connection that still burns bright in Ladies of Leisure, some of The Miracle Woman, and supremely in General Yen, which shimmers more ambiguously and profoundly every time I see it.

  The Rough-and-Tumble Wellman Five

  Night Nurse, So Big!, The Purchase Price, The Great Man’s Lady, Lady of Burlesque

  In the same years she was laying the groundwork for her career with Frank Capra, Stanwyck made several films with another director, William “Wild Bill” Wellman, an adventurous teller of tall tales so rip-snortingly vigorous and “manly” that in interviews he almost comes across as a parody of a take-no-prisoners brawler. His reputation as a filmmaker has always been shaky; he made movies fast and furiously and was not always well suited to the subjects he took on. Though his filmography is filled with missteps, it also contains neglected, hardboiled classics like Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Safe in Hell (1931), an eye-openingly sordid melodrama about a hooker (Dorothy Mackaill) who gets sacrificed to male lust and corruption. Most intriguingly, his best-known film is probably the first official version of A Star is Born (1937), a property that was based on the embattled marriage between Stanwyck and Frank Fay, a union that Wellman was able to witness firsthand during the filming of the first three movies he made with her.

  Their initial film together, Night Nurse (1931), is one of his best, a brutally concentrated dose of grisly working girl melodrama for Warner Bros., a studio that brought out Stanwyck’s street smart, roll-with-the-punches style. The film opens with an ambulance bringing in a car crash victim. Inside a hospital, an expectant father says he hopes he has a boy, and his wife says she’ll do her best. Wellman immediately plunges us into a world where girls are seen as expendable, which means that they’ll have to work harder for a satisfying life and even play dirty if need be. Stanwyck’s Lora Hart wants more than anything to be a nurse, but she hasn’t been able to finish high school, and so the sourpuss matron in charge of new nurses turns her down and literally coughs her out of the building.

  A doctor (Charles Winninger) bumps into Lora outside, knocking her pocketbook to the sidewalk, and Wellman holds his camera low on Stanwyck’s ankles as she impatiently taps her foot. The doctor looks up: Lora’s face is sullen, closed-off. When she senses what’s necessary, her eyes flicker slightly and she smiles at the doctor, and that’s all it takes: She’s hired. This is the most restrained vamping imaginable, played as if Lora knows that men are such dopes that she doesn’t need to put any real effort into attracting them. Sex is an essential tool for the lowborn working girl of 1931 if she expects to get anywhere, and Stanwyck seems very Zen and stoically dignified about that reality.

  There’s a real flash of desire in her eyes—or at least a recognition of kinship—when Lora meets Maloney (Joan Blondell), a saucy, big-eyed blond who becomes her roommate. Wellman is forever contriving ways for Maloney and Lora to strip down to their lingerie so that horny interns can leer at them, but this gambit never feels exploitative because these girls can clearly look out for themselves and view the more outof-control male sex urges with detachment (Stanwyck) or amusement (Blondell). Frightened by a skeleton left in her bed by one of the interns, Lora hops into Maloney’s bed to cuddle and they keep each other warm; it’s as sweetly and suggestively dyke-alicious a bit as any in Stanwyck’s career.

  More happens in any ten minutes of Night Nurse than happens in two hours of most Warner movies of the forties, and Wellman thrives on the studio’s patented, jam-packed scrappiness here, as does Stanwyck. There’s room for on-the-fly inspirations, but there is also room for mistakes and carelessness, which occasionally mars even Wellman’s best work—as if lingering over something to get it right might tend to dissipate the testosterone-fueled energy he valued so highly. The men are all horrors in Night Nurse, either treacherous villains or patsies (either Fay or Stanwyck’s second husband, Robert Taylor, in fact), and Lora even seems disillusioned with Maloney by the end of the movie, when her pal proves too cynical. As they take their nurse’s oath, Lora’s eyes shine with happiness, but Maloney repeats the oath by rote; it’s just a job to her, a way station until she can get some rich patient to fall for her. Wellman gives Stanwyck several nice silent moments here that let us know how much Lora values her work.

  Stanwyck is at her best when she’s sizing up a man, as if she’s saying, “Alright, what’s your angle?” Her natural skepticism is one of the most likable things about her as a performer at this point. When she warms to Mortie (Ben Lyon), a cheerfully murderous bootlegger, Wellman gives her a few wordless “hmm, OK”-type close-ups to make her attachment believable; he knows she often does her best acting without any dialogue. Wellman deeply respected Stanwyck’s toughness as a corollary to his own, but even he must have felt that hers was more truly earned. She had a certain knowingness, along with a capacity to be outraged and make that outrage seem like a point of honor.

  In the film’s freewheeling, casually scary second half, Lora has to deal with a plot to starve two little girls for inheritance money. When one of the girls says a sister of theirs has died, Lora says, “You mustn’t think about her anymore,” a moment that Stanwyck makes personal by the gravity with which she says it. You have to forget about the mother who won’t be coming home anymore to Classon Avenue, and the sooner the better, yet Night Nurse posits that having a mother like the proudly dipsomaniacal Mrs. Ritchey (Charlotte Merriam), who does nothing but drink while her children are being starved in the next room, is sometimes much worse than having no mother at all.

  When Lora sees that Mrs. Ritchey doesn’t want to think about her children’s plight, she blows her top: “Why do poor little children have to be born to women like you?” she shouts, with a ferocity that seems to take in not
just these two abused girls, but all abused children, including Ruby Stevens. This lost girl has an artistic forum now, and she has to speak out for all of her brothers and sisters, all the kids that never made it out of Brooklyn, and the ones who came out of deadbeat homes either physically or spiritually dead.

  Lora tries to drag Mrs. Ritchey out of her stupor, but the other woman falls on the floor and passes out. “You … mother,” Lora sneers, making the slight hesitation mean both, “You? A mother?” and “You motherfucker!” Clark Gable’s nasty chauffeur Nick socks Lora on the jaw at one point, and she gets her revenge by punching one of Mrs. Ritchey’s libidinous men, delivering a heartening, symbolic blow to all the men who have physically accosted Lora in the film, all the men who grabbed at Ruby in the nightclubs of the twenties—and for all the women on earth who have had to fend off male violence with their wits (it’s a moment, too, when I can’t help but hope that Stanwyck herself landed more than a few punches that counted on the wife-battering, jealous Fay). The ending of Night Nurse is rather strange: By doing the right thing and standing up to Nick, Lora gets booted from her beloved profession and falls in with Mortie, who has had Nick rubbed out. This is a woman who needs to work; she’ll find a way to continue nursing somehow, just as she shouldn’t have much problem rehabilitating her man.

  So Big! (1932), Stanwyck’s next film with “Wild Bill,” was based on Edna Ferber’s popular novel, one of her lengthy “through the years” sagas that Wellman gives a bracingly fast treatment. As a young girl, Stanwyck’s character, Selina, is played by Dawn O’Day, who later acted under the name Anne Shirley and played the daughter in Stella Dallas. Selina has no mother and a charismatic gambler father. Over a fancy dinner, he tells the girl that no matter what happens in life, good or bad, it’s “just so much velvet,” whatever that means. The film repeats this bromide twice, once in voiceover as Selina remembers him saying it, and once on a title card halfway through.