Barbara Stanwyck Read online

  Selina is in thrall to her father, and when Stanwyck’s grown-up Selina finds out that he’s been shot, it’s a kind of death for her, too. Approaching his dead body, Stanwyck keeps her face frozen and still. She draws back a coat covering the body to look at his face, makes a small movement forward with her hand, as if to comfort him, then withdraws it when she realizes that there can be no more contact between them: the enormity of death and separation, all in one precise physical movement, forward and back.

  A girlhood friend secures Selina a job teaching boys on a farm run by Alan Hale, who will also play an important role in Stella Dallas. Selina says she thinks the cabbages on the farm are beautiful, and Hale laughs at her for putting on such airs. For this role, Stanwyck labored mightily to keep Brooklyn out of her voice, even when some of her “er’s” are just dying to become “ah’s,” a process that results in some line readings that sound like she’s performing an elocution lesson. But such technical problems don’t really stop her from creating a woman who couldn’t be more different than Lora Hart, who’s so close to the real Stanwyck.

  In her early scenes, Selina is an innocent, untouched, immaculate sort of person, but when she gets married to a farmer, she seems to age rapidly. Wellman gets this aging across in just a few quick shots of her doing back-breaking work that seems to destroy her from the outside in. In one fleeting instance, Stanwyck looks up from scrubbing a floor with a pitiful, “Why?” expression on her face, another striking plea for justice.

  Wellman’s shorthand method in So Big! is far more powerful than a more studied, leisurely approach would have been. He makes us think about what’s happened between scenes, while making each episode land with a jab or an outright punch. In Stanwyck, he has an actress who can convey the fact that Selina is tired of her husband with just one split-second look (the director joins in his leading character’s contempt by dispatching this husband with a shock cut, lasting only a few seconds, of a piece of black fabric on a door). When Selina is really old, Stanwyck lets her hair go wispy and grey, and she squints into the light like some old people do (later, she would age to more than one hundred for Wellman in The Great Man’s Lady [1942]). The sense of time passing, one of the cardinal virtues of the novel, is here replicated by speed, which takes the place of Ferber’s literary elaboration.

  In the last half hour, Bette Davis enters the movie and gives it an electric jolt, but her energy is all over the place. Both she and Stanwyck were still a little green in 1932, though Stanwyck is far more accomplished at this point and would always be more focused than the flashier Davis. When Selina is being manipulative to get her son back on the right track in the final scenes, Stanwyck doesn’t play the manipulation at all; she’s too busy, unfortunately, being less of a person and more of an idealized heroine. And there’s a big, unintended laugh: Selina is always saying, “How big is my little son, how big is my boy?” and her small son stretches his arms wide and answers, “So big!” When he’s a man, Selina asks this question, and her son beams, “So big!” while measuring out the size of the average erect male penis with his hands (you can’t tell me Wellman didn’t stifle a laugh behind the camera).

  The ending of So Big! is inconclusive. We’re told in dialogue how beautiful and fulfilling Selina’s life has been, but what we’ve mainly seen, and sensed in between vignettes, is that this is a story about ceaseless physical work breaking a woman’s spirit. In the last scene, Selina tearfully shrugs and says that she doesn’t care about never really seeing the places she wanted to see when she was a girl. But Stanwyck puts a tiny oomph of hurt in her eyes as she says it, and it’s details like that that always make her worth watching as closely as possible.

  For their follow-up, Warner Bros. found Wellman and Stanwyck another “back to the land” script, The Purchase Price (1932). It begins well, in a naughty nightclub, where Stanwyck’s torch singer, Joan, decked out in a dress that sits lazily around her shoulders and seems about to fall off, haltingly croons a song called “Take Me Away.” Stanwyck could just barely carry a tune, and she looks like she’s about to crack up; it’s not clear if she’s embarrassed to be singing, or if her character is just amused by the song. Joan saunters over to a ringside table where she easily seduces a chump male. Back in her dressing room, she takes off her make-up with cold cream (Stanwyck made a career out of putting on make-up and wiping it off before a mirror) and goes into a well-written speech about how she’s been on Broadway since she was fifteen, just like Ruby Stevens had been. “I’ve heard all the questions and I know all the answers,” she says, “and I’ve kept myself fairly respectable through it all.” I love the way she says “fairly,” as if she’s gained enough distance to be good-humored about all those men and their messy advances.

  In one early scene, Stanwyck trips slightly when walking through a hotel lobby door, but she keeps on going in order to sustain the Wellman speed of this period. (After a Turner Classic Movies showing of The Purchase Price, Wellman’s son explained that his dad liked to shoot only one or two takes at most and didn’t do a lot of coverage, so that his films were “cut in the camera,” and couldn’t be tampered with in the editing room). Stanwyck has some amusing moments here, especially when she waves away her married lover (Lyle Talbot) so that the gesture reads as, “Bye … bye … screw you!” And when her maid Emily (Leila Bennett) talks about getting a husband and confides she’d like to “try the goods” before she buys them, Stanwyck says, “Emily!” in a very funny, mock-shocked manner. She’s lighter here in these opening scenes, playing a woman who seems well adjusted.

  When Joan becomes a mail-order bride to a farmer (George Brent) in order to get out of town, however, the film sputters and dies, and Joan herself starts to take on a masochistic tinge. Brent plays this man as a bumptious moron, so that when he goes after Joan on their wedding night and she slaps him away, we can’t blame her. Then, for the rest of the film, Joan tries to win him back, for reasons that remain mysterious. Her lover shows up on the farm toward the end, and he explains her behavior by calling Joan “a natural mud lark” (the title of Arthur Stringer’s original story was The Mud Lark), and that explanation will have to do. Joan chasing after this dumb lug farmer for so many reels makes about as much sense as Stanwyck staying loyal to Frank Fay. These things happen in life, alas; they shouldn’t have to happen on screen, too. For the final scenes, set during a fire, Stanwyck did her own stunts and got her legs burned as a result. She wore her burns and falls and physical blows on set like medals of her professionalism.

  Nine years later, Stanwyck reunited with Wellman for another through-the-years saga, The Great Man’s Lady, which is at least as episodic as So Big!, but far less effective. The film was contrived by Adela Rogers St. John and Seena Owen from a Vina Delmar story, though the screenplay is credited to a man, W.L. River. The basic material is magazine-like, and Wellman does nothing to flesh out the various crises in the life of Stanwyck’s “woman behind the man.” The film opens with an obnoxious title card about all these little women the world over and how they’ve helped their men. And then Wellman indulges himself with a crane shot up from a rocking chair, up, up, up over a town until we dissolve to a newspaper office, where an editor bemoans the little old lady of the title, centenarian Hannah Sempler (Stanwyck), who might or might not have been married to the man who founded the town, Ethan Hoyt (Joel McCrea). There’s a wipe to a room where a reporter sits surrounded by female wax dummies, suggesting discarded wives, mistresses, daughters, and other women associated with all the world’s so-called great men.

  The press gathers around for the unveiling of a statue of Hoyt, and a pretty young Hoyt biographer (Katharine Stevens) beams as the figure is revealed; Wellman then cuts to another reporter yawning. The press all convenes on Hannah’s house to ask questions, and Stanwyck makes her first entrance in long shot, heavily made-up. “To what do I owe this peculiar honor, may I ask?” she says, making a nice “sh” sound on the word “ask”—as if Hannah were wearing dentures. So fa
r, so good, but that first line of Hannah’s is an initial indication that there are going to be problems here: creaky lines, foggy motivations. This type of advanced old age is probably beyond the reach of any actor, even one as resourceful as Stanwyck. Her lines sound dubbed in later, and she has to deal with Stevens’s inane cheerfulness in all their scenes together (and the fact that Stevens’s name is so close to that of Ruby’s dead mother).

  “The year was 1848,” reminisces Hannah, standing by a window in her bedroom, and Wellman dissolves to a young Hannah in the exact same position by the window. Stanwyck’s youthful enthusiasm as this sheltered, girlish version of Hannah is slightly overdone. She giggles at one point, an odd sight—but at least she’s willing to try new things out, even if they fail. Back at the window, looking down at her beau Ethan, Hannah asks, “Are you mad?” and he replies, “Stark, staring mad!” There’s really nothing any actor can do with lines like that, so Wellman just speeds the pair along into an elopement behind some covered wagons on an obvious soundstage prairie. There’s almost no location shooting here, which hurts the film. Wellman takes advantage of the studio setting just once. Sitting in front of a landscape, Hannah and Ethan talk about the city he wants to build, and it magically appears behind them, a charming, F.W. Murnau-like effect.

  Wellman’s movies are filled with pictorial grace notes, but sometimes these inventions seem extraneous to the film itself. When he stages a confrontation between Ethan, Hannah, and Steely (Brian Donlevy), an inexplicable third romantic wheel, he has the actors play it all in shadowed silhouettes; this just seems like a way of keeping his interest up visually because he’s not involved in the story. When Hannah loses her two babies in a flood, Wellman could be expected to give Stanwyck a proper moment to grieve, but as she drags herself out of a river, he keeps her in long shot, and Victor Young’s gloppy score kills any genuine emotion we might feel for this woman.

  If Wellman is mainly indifferent, Stanwyck is not (she believed in this movie and was disappointed when it wasn’t a success). Steely finds Hannah again when she’s middle-aged, with white streaks in her hair, stiff-backed in a chair. “I thought you were dead,” he says. “I am,” she replies, so simply that she wakes the film out of its stupor. Her grief is so intensely centered in this scene that it stands as a prime example of the hypnotic way Stanwyck could draw us into her moods on screen. When Hannah becomes the queen of the roulette table (this story leaves few clichés untried), Stanwyck wears a doozy of a black Edith Head dress with what look like silver seahorses studded all over it (Head said in her memoir they were birds). We return to Hannah as a centenarian, and Stanwyck’s performance has deteriorated into little old lady “harrumphs” and fussy business. Although she’s a far more accomplished actress here, her portrayal of age in So Big! is superior.

  From this prestige production, the team then unexpectedly moved to the lower depths of show business for their last film together, Lady of Burlesque (1943). By this point, Stanwyck was one of the highest paid women in movies and an established, distinguished player, so it feels more than a little perverse to have her play a striptease artiste wrapped up in a murder mystery plot courtesy of real-life stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, who wrote the source novel, The G-String Murders. Wellman shows us the outside of The Old Opera House, which once presented famous singers but is now exhibiting “50—Fifty—50 Beautiful Girls” and promising “Laffs” by cut-rate comics. “Girls, that’s what the public wants,” says a manager outside, and inside Wellman plunges us into a world of rump-shaking tawdriness and overall 1940s tackiness (one girl looks bored with her dance routine, then glances at an energetic chorine next to her and swiftly remembers to plaster a fake smile on her face). As a finish, the burlesque girls present their rear ends to the camera, and we cut to an audience of dirty old men enjoying the rock-bottom program.

  A crooner comes on, and the girls parade a bit before Stanwyck’s Dixie Daisy makes her entrance for her solo number. A lone violin saws away in the pit. Cut to Dixie’s bored, “something stinks in here” face, as she cleans her teeth with her tongue. “Beautiful, junior,” she snaps, “but it’s not fuh me.” Then she starts her song, an inspired little ditty called “Take It Off The E-String, Play It On The G-String” (apparently, most of the public at this time didn’t know what a G-string was, which is why they changed Gypsy’s forthright original title).

  “If this gives you a thrill,” Dixie sings, huskily, “it’s happening much against my will,” as succinct a line about Stanwyck’s relation to her male audience as we’re likely to get. When Dixie warns she sometimes starts “breakin’ in bumps,” the camera cuts away from her gyrations and stays on the orchestra leader’s inflamed reaction. But such censor-pleasing tactics are soon dropped: Stanwyck shakes her upper body so that her breasts jiggle in her scanty Edith Head outfit, and Dixie stops her song for a very funny spoken plea: “For listen, broth-uh, I’ve got a moth-uh, old and grey … I support her this way!” she shouts. “Just by shakin’ this way … four shows a day!”

  Dixie grabs the stage curtain and starts wielding it back and forth like a sword while the music sizzles and heats up to a horn blast, “duh duh duh duh duh,” followed by two dirty drum beats. During these beats, the camera moves in for a close-up on Dixie’s face as she twice mimes a classic stripper bump. It’s a tantalizing shot because, for a few moments, Stanwyck communes with herself and takes a kind of autoerotic pleasure in her own sexuality, just for itself, not for the men in the film audience or the audience watching this movie. It’s a glimpse of a kind of sexuality that you rarely see in films. Rita Hayworth displays this private sort of self-enjoyment for a few scalding moments when a man tries to undo her dress at the end of her “Put the Blame on Mame” number in Gilda (1946), but with her it’s taunting, pissed-off. Strangely enough, in this “bump bump” Stanwyck close-up, we don’t feel any anger or resentment coming from her, as we would have had she played this role in say, 1933, instead of 1943. Instead, we see a mature, fully-blossomed woman and performer casting a look back to where she came from, contrasting it with what she is now, and enjoying the contrast, because the past is truly past.

  “G-String” is a tasty, memorable number, but the rest of the film doesn’t live up to it. The other strippers are a rather dreary, mean lot, and Wellman is totally uninterested in the murder plot, so that the interrogation scenes in the girls’ dressing room seem interminable. The film is staged unimaginatively, and there are none of Wellman’s usual visual flourishes (though it can be hard to judge this aspect because Lady of Burlesque has been floating around in spliced public domain prints for years). In the middle of the low-concept narrative, Stanwyck’s Dixie is involved in another stage performance, and it’s amazing. She does a full-throttle jitterbug—complete with splits—a Russian dance, and then an expert cartwheel, so that we’re left wondering if there’s anything Stanwyck can’t do. As she performs all these unlikely things, there’s a look of purely childlike happiness on her face. Wellman understood Stanwyck as a person and as a performer in a more direct way than Capra did, and if this superior insight made for less dreamy idealizing, it also made for a tough-minded consolidation of what she stood for.

  Pre-Code Sex

  Illicit, Ten Cents a Dance, Shopworn,

  Ladies They Talk About, Baby Face

  There’s been a lot written about movies made before the censorious Production Code cracked down on Hollywood in 1934—probably too much, so that the talkies made from 1930–34 are now endlessly packaged at New York’s Film Forum repertory theater and on DVD as “dirty” old movies, quaint novelties that hint about the more relaxed sexual mores of the time, a relaxation that really began in the twenties, with the first flappers, women like Colleen Moore and Clara Bow. In her early years on screen, Stanwyck found herself in several of these so-called pre-Code items, one of which, Baby Face, is practically synonymous with this whole quasi-genre.

  Right after she filmed Ladies of Leisure for Columbia, Stanwyck made Illicit (
1931) for Warner Bros., testing the waters for the kind of independent hopscotch between studios that let her have more control over her career. Ann, the girl she plays in Illicit (which is based on another perilously outspoken play co-written by Robert Riskin), is the independent type. In the first scene, we see her relaxing in a loose robe with her hair down and picking up a love song from rich boy Dick (James Rennie). Ann is in the kitchen preparing what is clearly a post-coital meal; it’s nighttime, but she’s whipping up some breakfast. Stanwyck works up a nice natural chemistry with Rennie, and then he drops the other shoe: “We really ought to be married,” he says, a cue for the 1931 audience to gasp happily. They’re living in sin, though they keep separate apartments.

  Ann is afraid of marriage. She briefly describes how divorce ruined her mother’s life, but this explanation feels like just a sketchy cover, a “reason’ that doesn’t begin to impinge on this girl’s highly sensible ideas about keeping a romance alive. Sprawled on a couch, she playfully runs down her list of lovers for Dick (a technique that Stanwyck will perfect in The Lady Eve [1941]), and keeps him alert with some trash talk. A discussion about early morning habits leads Ann to conclude that “we’re a riot in our underwear!” and when Dick wanders into a conventional complaint about having to pussyfoot around, Ann takes the bait and cries, “Don’t say you don’t like the pussyfooting—I love it!” Stanwyck is fresh and open here, and she makes this girl’s modern ideas about freedom in love seem right-on, even when the script keeps trying to nudge us about the supposed immaturity of Ann’s theories.