by Dan Callahan
The movie begins with two title cards, one of which reads, “Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing.” Just so that there’s no mistaking the film’s intentions, a second card adds, “The Miracle Woman is offered as a rebuke to anyone who, under the cloak of religion, seeks to sell for gold God’s greatest gift to Humanity—FAITH.” The religious faith Capra is dealing with here can be seen as akin to emotional truth in Ladies of Leisure, but somehow this religious faith seems of a lesser order of importance and makes for a lesser film. Capra himself was a religious man, and Stanwyck had a core of religious faith in her somewhere. There was no God on Flatbush Avenue in 1915, but she yearned for Him, all the same. Late in life, she said, “I believe we must believe in God. Without God, there would be nothing. Nothing at all.”
A pastor is set to deliver his farewell address. In a brief snatch of gossip, we hear that he has basically been fired from his post. Stanwyck stiffly enters the church, as if she’s entering a cage full of lions. She plays Florence, the pastor’s daughter. Florence ascends the pulpit and begins to read her father’s last sermon in a cool, dutiful voice that sounds as if it’s about to crack under some strain. Then she breaks off. “You can see that he stopped in the middle of a sentence,” she says, and pain and rage start to flood into her face and her voice. “My father is dead,” she says, with a tinge of hysteria in her delivery that will rise up thrillingly as Stanwyck begins one of her all-time great arias.
Her hysteria is a weapon that she uses as a sword but also to whip herself, and it seems to thicken her voice, to make it throb. Watching Stanwyck in Burlesque, her friend Mae Clarke said, “I have never heard one person get as many vibrations into her voice as Barbara got into hers then. It was like a symphony chorus in the Hollywood Bowl instead of just one person speaking.” What was the source of Stanwyck’s hysteria, and how was she able to channel this quality into her voice? Was it a curse from her childhood that blossomed into a God-given gift for her professional life?
The deacon of the church was instrumental in having Florence’s father removed, and the actor who plays him tells Florence to stop, shouting in a stagy, false voice that makes a striking contrast with Stanwyck’s natural, air-that-I-breathe acting. “This isn’t a house of God, it’s a meeting place for hypocrites!” she howls, letting her voice crack into a hundred jagged pieces on the word “hypocrites.” Florence (and Capra) is going to tell these phonies “the truth,” even if it’s something they can’t hear, even if it’s dangerous. The parishioners begin to file out, slowly, but one woman tells Florence to keep going and tell it like it is.
Stanwyck swaggers down from the pulpit. Now she not only has her symphonic voice but also her body to put her points across. She lets her body literally propel her forward, one hand on her hip and another hand on a pew as she lands each and every one of her vengeful words against these people who have exploited, over-worked, and destroyed her father. At the climax of the aria, Stanwyck leans back on her heels and throws her head all the way back as she shouts and basks in the full glory of letting herself go—and in the glory of the technique she has acquired that allows her such control over her feelings, which come right from the gut. After this climax, we see Florence run to the church doors and close them; suddenly she’s a small, lonely figure, weeping huskily, quietly, privately, like a balloon with all the air let out.
Where can we go from here? No place much, alas. Hardy’s crooked promoter takes her up and makes Florence into an Aimee Semple McPherson star on the revival circuit, where she meets up with a blind aviator (David Manners) who restores the faith she’s lost. I suppose it would have made Florence look too unsympathetic if, in her disillusionment, she bilked the faithful deliberately and cynically, but such a turn of events would have added color to a girl who seems to withdraw from us just when she’s opened herself up so fully. Hardy’s character is a kind of director, cracking down on the down-on-their-luck vagrants he hires as plants to be “saved” by Sister Florence, and he expresses Capra’s ill-concealed distaste for his own audience and for crowds in general.
“I’m crazy about you when you’re mad, baby, you look more beautiful,” Hardy tells Stanwyck, as she lies down after a performance with a distant look on her face, her hysteria cooled to embers. Against all odds, there is some interest in her interactions with Manners, an attractive, gay, strangely mannered young actor. “On the set, Barbara was tremendously centered in her work,” he later said, “much too much so for any social chit chat. … I see her sitting alone in a studio chair—almost in meditation.” They’re charming together, but their scenes go on too long and distract us from what should be the meat of the movie, Florence’s crisis of faith.
The Miracle Woman is an unforgettable first scene in search of a movie to follow it. Perhaps that scene might be more effective at the end of a movie: We could see Florence grow up, see her father belittled and bled dry by his parishioners (Walter Huston could have played the part), and then die of heartbreak, so that his daughter finally goes out to tell everyone off, shuts the doors of the church, and then commits the ultimate blasphemy, killing herself in front of the altar. The movie audience of the time wouldn’t have had the stomach for that film, but Stanwyck could have played it for all it was worth.
Capra wrote the story for their next picture, Forbidden (1932), a messy takeoff on Fannie Hurst’s popular novel, Back Street, but most of the Columbia writing staff had a hand in writing the film, and it shows. Forbidden is filled with inane dialogue and rushed plot points. The movie represented a kind of last chance for Capra to win Stanwyck as his wife, and it has a distinctive “time is running out” quality that does the muddled narrative no favors. The production was plagued by bad luck. Stanwyck held out for more money from Harry Cohn, which delayed shooting and can’t have helped the frayed continuity. On October 4, 1931, Stanwyck was shooting a beach scene on horses with her on-screen lover (Adolphe Menjou), when a reflector flared into her horse’s eyes. He threw her, then fell on top of her and kicked her spine, dislocating her coccyx. Already playing the masochistic trouper, Stanwyck insisted they finish the shot before her legs stiffened. For two weeks, she worked during the day on Forbidden, then went to the hospital to spend the night in traction. In 1984, her terse comment on this accident was, “It hurt. It still hurts.” All for a few seconds in a movie. A few seconds in a movie, though, meant everything to Stanwyck.
At this point, a failed Frank Fay was drinking heavily and batting Stanwyck around in public. She took this abuse as she took her onset accident and all her other lousy luck, stoically. Her other co-star on the film, Ralph Bellamy, said that Fay was “a very unpopular guy—he worked at it.” And Fay’s jealousy was misplaced: Stanwyck later told Bellamy that Fay had thought they might be having an affair, when in reality Capra was making his last pitch for her.
Forbidden is a personal movie. Menjou’s crippled wife is called Helen, the name of Capra’s first, alcoholic wife. Bellamy’s character is a newspaperman who pursues Stanwyck throughout the film; rejecting one of his many proposals, she says he’s “married to his newspaper.” Menjou’s character is a cad of the most selfish sort, and it’s clear that Menjou is a stand in for Fay, as Bellamy is for Capra. Stanwyck is playing a woman named Lulu, named after the other woman in Capra’s life, Lu, who finally issued an ultimatum to the director and became the second and final Mrs. Capra, a role for which she was eminently suited.
Unfortunately, as any non-doctrinaire auteurist can admit, “personal” doesn’t always equal “good” when it comes to movies, and Forbidden is a case in point. It begins promisingly with a fast montage of town life. We see a plow, trees in bloom, bees pollinating flowers. A dog yawns, and an older man takes up the yawn. The older man is excited because Stanwyck’s Lulu is late for work at the public library for the first time in eight years. She never misses weddings, he says, except “her own.” Lulu is supposed to be a bespectacled, incipient spinster (“Old lady four eyes!” yell some kids as
she enters the library), but Stanwyck still walks like a chorus girl, and spring fever swiftly takes Lulu out of town for a two-week vacation in Havana, funded by all her savings. A gamble, life or death.
She cruises around on yet another “boat of vice,” and though Lulu has taken off her glasses and glammed up a bit, she can’t seem to snag an escort. In her stateroom, she finds a drunken Menjou and inexplicably takes a liking to him (just as Stanwyck’s fondness for the gruesome, abusive Fay looks fairly inexplicable to us now, unless we presume that she felt she deserved trouble). In The Miracle Woman, Stanwyck and David Manners play most of their love scenes with a ventriloquist’s dummy called Al, and in Forbidden, she and Menjou share their happiest moments on screen when they play around with commedia dell’arte-type masks. It’s as if Capra is trying to reassure Stanwyck that she’ll be protected and that the exposure of Ladies of Leisure needn’t be an around-the-clock vocation. And Stanwyck seems uncommonly relaxed in the mask scene. She’s always touching when she tries to be lighthearted, because you can see how much effort it takes for her to forget 246 Classon Avenue, where part of her lives permanently, waiting on those steps.
Forbidden becomes a formula illegitimate baby saga for most of the rest of its running time; a complicated plot twist means Stanwyck has to give up her child to Menjou and his wife. She becomes an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist for Bellamy. Time passes, and we see some grey in her hair (Stanwyck makes her face seem subtly older by holding it more stiffly than she did in the youthful scenes). The musical score goes into overdrive for her big scene with Bellamy, where he threatens to expose her secret and ruin Menjou’s career. He punches her in the mouth, leaving a trickle of blood that looks alarmingly right on Stanwyck’s face.
She shoots him from behind a door, then opens it and shoots some more, jabbing the gun in the air like a knife, just as Jeanne Eagels does at the beginning of The Letter. The camera moves close for an iconic shot of her face; there’s blood on the left side of her mouth and a jewel-like tear glistening in her right eye. In her last scene with Menjou, he remembers how he called her “the world’s best loser,” and that’s an apt description of Stanwyck’s persona here (in the forties, she might have been dubbed the world’s worst winner). Forbidden ends with Lulu walking alone down a street, her man dead, her life over, but her mood rather tranquil after all her upheavals.
Capra later told his trusted sound man, Edward Bernds, that his next film with Stanwyck, The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), “didn’t make money, but it has more real movie in it than any other I did.” He had reason to boast, for this is his most fluid, audacious, original work as a director. It’s the kind of movie even those who don’t like the Capra of Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith can embrace, for he takes his often confused, touchy talent and applies it not to politics or social messages, but to sexual longings and fantasies, important subjects that suit his brand of impassioned, mixed-up emotionalism. The Bitter Tea of General Yen cost a million dollars to make, and it was the first film to play Radio City Music Hall; scheduled for two weeks, it was pulled after eight days. Capra underestimated the engrained racism of an American 1930s audience, which couldn’t handle the thought of a Chinese warlord making love to a white woman—let alone the sight of it on screen—even if General Yen (Nils Asther) was a suave, gay Swedish actor in yellowface.
This is Capra’s best film with Stanwyck, the most unusual, and maybe the most personally revealing. “I accepted it, believed in it, loved it,” she said later. It begins with a map of China and some dissolves to Chinese natives running for their lives. Joseph Walker’s glistening cinematography lets us know that Capra has caught Josef Von Sternberg fever in his visuals, and he seems to want to piggyback on the success of Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932). These two films look alike and share a common background and technical filmic vocabulary, but their effect is as different as Stanwyck is from Marlene Dietrich—which is to say, as different as can be imagined.
We cut to a wedding party with English missionaries, as the Chinese keep running outside the door. The contrast is unsettling. Capra himself could be racist, as shown in McBride’s book, but he was an unsettled racist, a “let’s say everything I think and work it out later” sort, and this has the effect of pleasingly destabilizing all the racial points in General Yen. If a director of today were to cut from Chinese peasants evacuating to an English missionary social event, the film would almost be obligated to hit us over the head with the point about English obliviousness. But because Capra comes to this scene from his less certain 1930s viewpoint, the missionaries are seen as three-dimensional people, misguided in the extreme, but human and interesting.
At the party, Chinese men sing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and a repressed, bespectacled girl says she can’t wait to see the betrothed couple kiss. (She gets sternly reprimanded.) An old man missionary who has spent fifty years in China tells a story about teaching the tale of Jesus’s crucifixion to Mongolian bandits, who listened to the details avidly. Later, he found out that the bandits crucified their next victims. “That, my friends, is China,” he says, and the camera whip pans to an older Chinese man, looking inscrutable. The actor playing this old missionary delivers his lines in the phony, portentous way of the deacon in The Miracle Woman, so it’s clear that Capra is not at all on his side, even as his crucifixion story makes an uncomfortable impression.
We’ve been told at the party that Stanwyck’s Megan Davis, the bride-to-be, is from an old Puritan family and that her father is a publisher. By this point, Capra knows that Stanwyck’s range has widened and that she can play different kinds of women, women from different backgrounds and classes. Stanwyck was able to emphasize her Brooklyn accent if the part called for it, but in General Yen she represses it to the point that it’s barely noticeable.
Megan is introduced in a rickshaw that gets hit by General Yen’s car, killing her driver. When she reprimands the General, he merely smiles and says, “Life, even at its best, is hardly endurable.” Bewildered by his heartless sophistication, Megan gets into another rickshaw (the camera frames her behind the wood of this vessel, as if she needs to retreat from what she’s just experienced), and she stares at Yen and the beautiful Chinese girl in his car with tender curiosity. Stanwyck’s face is open and vulnerable, but it’s Megan Davis’s vulnerability, not Barbara Stanwyck’s, or Ruby Stevens’s. Paradoxically, Stanwyck has discovered that the more you hide behind a part that is different from yourself, the more you can reveal of your true self, an irony that might have pleased General Yen.
At the wedding party, Megan is boxed in again behind a wooden frame; she’s been cloistered, but she wants to break out. She tries to share her experience with her hostess (Clara Blandick), saying that Yen looked “so civilized,” only to be met with a blast of concentrated racism: “They’re all tricky, treacherous and immoral,” snaps the hostess, “I can’t tell one from the other. They’re all Chinaman to me.” This grossly energetic little outburst conveys exactly the kind of finger-pointing ugliness that Megan wants to escape.
Her fiancée, Dr. Robert Strike, is played by Gavin Gordan, who was the callow minister to Greta Garbo in her 1930 vehicle, Romance, and he’s cast to type here, a solid do-gooder who wants to rescue some orphans from behind enemy lines, but has to get General Yen’s permission first. The General scoffs at Megan’s fiancée. Why does he want to save a few orphans? After all, he says, they’re nameless. Such expressions make us see that the libertine General is almost as bad as the wedding party hostess, albeit in a radically different way. He’s as awful as she is, but his awfulness is dangerously alluring because it’s so aligned to sex, which he reveres, whereas her awfulness is a vile substitute for sex.
The firelight glistens on Megan’s face as she rushes into the orphanage with Strike. She saves the kids but gets clubbed on the head for her trouble, and she is soon scooped up by the General, who has been hovering around her in his car. A series of dreamy, associative images of her fiancée and the Genera
l suggest Megan’s confused psychological state as she wakes in a train with a cold cloth on her head. Sexual tension builds as Megan half-realizes her position, takes in Yen’s concubine Mah-Li (Toshia Mori), then covers the small bit of her leg showing with her skirt when she catches Yen staring at her.
Capra then cuts to a phallic train hurtling through the night, having established a mood that is sensitive to Megan’s fear and desire while also shyly identifying with Yen’s viewpoint. Stanwyck is now lost to Capra. He’s married another woman and given up hope of marrying his actress, but he wants to glorify her one more time, maybe exorcise her from his system, and he does so by making her play a repressed woman who opens up sexually on screen, just as the sexually abused Kay Arnold learned to open up emotionally.
Boldly, Capra wants to get at the truth of a certain kind of dirty, sexual power dynamic that is not aligned to anything pure or nice or conventionally romantic. From what we see of him, Gordan’s fiancée is fine and good and Yen is a cruel, cynical dictator, yet we can tell right away who is the more deeply attractive man. We later learn that Yen had drugged Megan on the train and it’s planted in our minds that he might have taken liberties with her, maybe with Mah-Li’s enthusiastic help. Only later do we learn that his pride is such that he needs to conquer and destroy a woman’s “good person” emotions before he can conquer her body. The General sees everything as conquest. And so Capra makes his film an anatomy of the sexual masochism he either experienced or sensed in Stanwyck.
