Barbara Stanwyck

by Dan Callahan

  When Ann marries Dick, they find out fairly quickly that she was right; they get bored with one another. In one radical scene, Ann deplores her own jealousy after seeing Dick squiring an old flame. She wants to be his playmate again, not a petty spouse. Why shouldn’t they see other people, as long as their primary interest is in each other? “I’m not through playing yet,” she says, “I don’t want to get through.” Dick suggests they try to have a child, but Ann immediately vetoes this desperate measure. If only Stanwyck herself had been so pragmatic before deciding to adopt a boy, Dion, in 1932, to try to save her marriage to Fay.

  The theme of Illicit is unusual, but its pacing is meandering and amorphous. It concludes with a stagy telephone scene where Ann realizes, momentarily at least, that she really wants what everybody supposedly wants, the security of marriage. We’ve seen enough of her to know, however, that she’ll be out playing around again in a few months, maybe on the sly. In 1933, Warner Bros. threw Bette Davis back into this property in Ex-Lady, a far more interesting film because Davis plays the role challengingly, like a firebrand. Stanwyck is too tentative and vulnerable in her version to really make a big noise about her bohemian convictions.

  Movies from 1931 generally don’t have theme songs, but Ten Cents a Dance claims that it’s “based on the popular song by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers,” so we get Ruth Etting’s soft, torchy version of the tune under the credits. In our first glimpse of Stanwyck, playing a dime-a-dance drudge named Barbara, she’s leaning against a railing, waiting for another customer and pensively staring off into space. “What’s a guy got to do to dance with one of you gals?” asks a sailor. “All you need is a ticket and some courage,” Barbara snaps—not good-humoredly, as Joan Blondell would have done, but in a touchy, “fuck you” manner. She chews her gum as the gob steps on her feet, and you can tell that her feet hurt (if you had asked Stanwyck about dance girl feet in old age, she might have said, “They hurt. They still do,” à la her reaction to her back injury on Forbidden).

  The dancehall matron chastises Barbara for not putting more “rhythm” into her dancing, and she clearly means that this girl should give the guys more of a chance to cop a feel. “I’m here because my brains are in my feet,” Barbara says bitterly to her persistent suitor, Bradley (Ricardo Cortez). When the band starts up again, she can’t handle it, claiming that the music “follows me home and pounds into my head like a hammer.” (Anyone who has had to work at a job where the same music is played over and over again will know exactly how frustrated and even murderous this girl feels about her situation.) Yet when she sits with her boyfriend Eddie (Monroe Owsley) and listens to a park band play “Liebestod,” she says she feels transported, just as Kay Arnold did when she fell in love with opera music (the screenwriter on this is Jo Swerling, who did Ladies of Leisure, so he can provide Stanwyck with some star continuity).

  What small momentum the film has is soon dissipated in long scenes where the director, dreaded ham thespian Lionel Barrymore, seems to have fallen asleep (and indeed, Cortez said Barrymore did in fact fall asleep in his chair during many of the takes). The domestic sections where the now-married Barbara persists in seeing the bright side of everything while Eddie does nothing but complain are painful to sit through. Again, Stanwyck is masochistically loyal to a jerk reminiscent of Frank Fay. On set, Stanwyck took a fall: “Backing away from Monroe Owsley, in my desire to be vehement—overacting, I think people would call it—I fell down the stairs,” she said, always ready with the self-deprecating wisecrack.

  There are Stanwyck moments here worth searching out, especially one when she has a speech about how all the men from the dancehall seem to her like one large faceless man. As she talks this out, Stanwyck pulls into herself in a very Method fashion, as if she’s recalling some specific fragments of her own experience to augment and reinforce what her character is saying. When Barbara waits to ask Bradley for some money, Stanwyck is artfully arranged on a sofa so that her shapely legs are highlighted, but when the camera cuts to a close-up, her face is heavy with sleep, her mouth swollen yet tight, like a miserable little girl having a bad dream (did Stanwyck actually drift off to sleep for this shot?). Awake and asking for the money she needs to save her wastrel husband, Stanwyck flirts with the old-fashioned technique of “looking up in despair,” which suggests that Barrymore might have woken up momentarily and given her a piece of bad direction. But she doesn’t succumb; some bullshit detector inside of her won’t let her fall into anything really false, emotionally or physically.

  Shopworn (1932) has a poor reputation, and Stanwyck herself disliked the script, the director, and her leading man, Regis Toomey, who is always hovering close to ineptitude. But the film has dialogue by Swerling and Riskin and cinematography by Joseph Walker, and though it’s a standard story, at least it’s a full-blooded, unashamed melodrama. A huge explosion at a construction camp leaves Stanwyck’s Kitty fatherless, but not before Pop gives her some advice about being tough, like some fantasy of Byron Stevens talking to his daughter Ruby. When the old man dies, Stanwyck makes us feel the shock of his death simply by keeping her face still while letting emotion gently flood into her eyes.

  Kitty goes to wait on table for her Aunt Dot (ZaSu Pitts). Dealing with rowdy college boys, she punches the “No Sale” sign on her cash register and socks them a knockout sarcastic look. “You may be hot, but the coffee’s cold,” says medical student David (Toomey), and his indifference to her charms and his obvious education intrigue Kitty. Smiling happily in his car later on, she tells him, “I could cuss when I was six and say ‘no’ when I was fourteen,” as if her own education was just a grand joke of some kind (if Joan Crawford had said that line in 1932, it would have dripped with thick-voiced self-pity). Kitty wants to educate herself for David, and Walker frames a few beautiful close-ups of Stanwyck as she tries to impress her beau with words from the dictionary. Her father is dead, she tells him, and she doesn’t remember her mother. “You’re my family now,” she says, as Walker’s lighting casts a seraphic glow on her profile.

  David’s lunatic mother (Clara Blandick, the racist missionary from Bitter Tea) simply won’t have her pampered son consorting with any waitress. She talks of having Kitty committed to an institution, but she has a flunky do her dirty work for her. Kitty is expecting to go off and marry David, and as she prepares for this trip, Stanwyck does the kind of “I’m running all over the room!” joy routine that Garbo does in Grand Hotel (1932), but Stanwyck’s version is much more down-to-earth and believable, less self-conscious. When the flunky threatens her with reform school and then offers her five thousand bucks to get out of town, Stanwyck takes this information in gradually, then works herself up into as fine and precise an explosion of anger as she would ever give us on screen. “If that’s being decent, I’m glad I’m common!” she shrieks, a proletarian thunderbolt, priming the 1930s audience to shout, “You tell ’em, Barbara!”

  Kitty gets ninety days, as a pious choir sings outside the judge’s window. Forced to scrub floors continuously, she starts to feel sick. When her head hits a pillar, Stanwyck lets her forehead bounce all the way down it out of frame, a vivid physical choice to show this girl’s “let it all go” despair. Laid up in a hospital bed, Kitty wears a face emptied out by total depression, but when she’s released, she gets a job in the chorus and is soon a headliner (this plot development, amusingly, takes about thirty seconds of screen time, if that). Six years have passed in a flash, and now Kitty wants revenge on David, but Stanwyck can’t play the grand, icy contempt written into their reunion scene (by the forties, this kind of thing would become almost second nature to her on-screen persona).

  Whenever the going gets tough, Kitty prods her chin up with her fist, remembering her father’s dying words, and Stanwyck makes a stirring leitmotif out of this simple piece of business. Riskin and Swerling amuse themselves occasionally; there’s an extended bit where the place settings at a swank dinner seem to gossip with each other as Walker’s camera mov
es around them. Shopworn shows what two fine writers, one fine cameraman, and one great actress can accomplish even with a formula story, but nobody can do anything with the climax, where Blandick’s villainous Mother brandishes a gun at Kitty and then accepts her basic fineness just a scene later; it plays like a crazy-quilt version of the rich mother/poor girl confrontation in Ladies of Leisure.

  There are ladies of leisure, and then there are Ladies They Talk About (1933), which is a crackerjack women’s prison movie that has all the punchy, vital virtues of a Warner Bros. film of this era. Stanwyck’s delicate-looking face fills the screen in the first shot; she’s telephoning the police to let them know that “there’s a man running around with a butcher knife!” When she hangs up, her distressed mask drops, her mouth settles into a “whatever” smirk, and she takes a drag on a cigarette.

  In the next shot, the camera pulls back, and we see that she’s swathed in furs and has blond hair. Whenever Stanwyck has blond hair in a movie—from Baby Face to Double Indemnity (1944) to The Violent Men (1955) get out of the way, buster, there’s going to be a lot of trouble. Police go to check on her story, so Stany and her criminal associates go to rob a closed bank. Outside the door, she once again puts on a “distressed” mask, and amplifies it by using her British a: “I cahn’t wait,” she claims, and we see the bank guard react to her beauty before he lets her in. Crucially, this is the first movie where Stanwyck’s acting ability (and unusually wide range) is used as a weapon for duplicity, with her sex appeal serving as the unbeatable cherry on the sundae.

  The gang gets away with the loot, but Stanwyck is caught by a copper who remembers her. This woman has gone by many names, apparently, but now she’s known as Nan Taylor. In the DA’s office, Nan puts the moves on David Slade (Preston Foster), an evangelical reformer who knew her in her youth. She was the daughter of a deacon, and he remembers that she was sweet: “Too much deaconing took all the sweetness out of me,” she says, in a weary, “what else is new?” voice. She does a sob act for him (it’s as if Stanwyck is mocking her early “stilted sincere” acting), and Slade falls for it. He’s about to get her released when she makes the mistake of leveling with him about the bank job. Stung by her honesty, he makes sure she gets two to five years in San Quentin. Stanwyck looks at him with her full bitterness and self-loathing when she realizes what’s happened, like she’s thinking, “Tell the truth in this world and you get screwed,” something Nan probably found out originally with all that “deaconing” in her youth.

  “New fish!” cry the inmates in the women’s penitentiary as Nan makes her way through the mess hall, which is filled with all sorts of unsavory characters. Stanwyck looks vulnerable on her first entrance into the prison, an interesting choice. Her arms hang limply by her waist, and her face signals the fact that she hasn’t got a hard enough mask together yet for such a snake pit environment. Nan befriends Linda (Lillian Roth, the alcoholic singer that Susan Hayward played in I’ll Cry Tomorrow [1955]), a chummy gal who gives her the information she needs to survive. “Watch out for her, she likes to wrestle,” Linda says, and we see a full-on butch lesbian of the Gertrude Stein school. Cut back to worldly Nan, who sighs, “Hmm,” as if she can’t believe she still has so much to learn about life.

  In spite of—or maybe because of—this butch character, who we see at one point exercising in her cell with a lipstick lesbian girlfriend, Stanwyck takes pains to hold herself apart from the girl-on-girl camaraderie, though her eyes light up with enjoyment when she gets to fight with an enemy, Susie (Dorothy Burgess), a fanatic with a yen for Slade. After being told of this girl’s troublemaking, Nan swaggers over to Susie, looking tougher than John Wayne. When Susie punches at her, Nan lets her have it with her fist (later, Nan will whisper something obscene in Susie’s ear and shake her small but experienced fist in her face). Scenes like this let us know that there can be a convincing sadistic streak in Stanwyck, especially when she’s battling other women, though it never got as thorough a workout on-screen as her tendency towards masochism with men.

  Nan is loyal to her crew of crooks, assisting in their attempted jail-break, but the escape is botched and they get shot, which leads her to believe that Slade ratted her out. Stanwyck’s eyes glow with malevolence when she shouts, “I’ll get even with that dirty yellow stool pigeon if it takes the rest of my life!” Out of prison, wearing a veil that looks like it was peppered with gunshot, Nan has some amused byplay with the cop who first nabbed her, telling him that he’s got his racket and she’s got hers. We can believe the strength of character that Stanwyck sets up for this girl; to lose her “good humor,” even if it has to be put on like a heavy coat, would be to give in to total defeat, which Stanwyck usually can’t afford to do in her movies.

  When she enters a tabernacle and looks at Slade, Nan’s face is malign, but it gets more complicated than that: Stanwyck shades this expression until it looks like a kind of disappointed malignity, a weird mixing of ingredients that makes us feel Nan as a three-dimensional, finally unknowable person, even in the confines of a movie that can only claim to be a first-class, churn-them-out entertainment. Stanwyck dominates the whole film, and it’s a classic case of the star as auteur (this picture had two credited directors and a lot of writers).

  The legend of Baby Face grows stronger and stranger every year. An even franker preview cut of this uncommonly blunt movie was recently discovered, and the new scenes it reveals only deepen the film’s nasty, lingering stench. Stanwyck, of course, never really had a “baby face,” even when she was an actual baby, but that’s part of the film’s annihilating cynicism. The various men who use and are then used by her Lily Powers (that name!) never take the time to really look at her beyond her surface trappings of blond hair, warrior legs, and tip-top figure (Stanwyck often holds her hands on her hips in this movie to emphasize her sleek, lithe body). “You don’t have to be beautiful,” Stanwyck later claimed, referencing her own sex appeal. Then she joked, “I have the face that sank a thousand ships.”

  We first see Lily mired in the ugliness of industrial Pittsburgh. She stands up to her father and defends her close black friend, Chico (Theresa Harris), then makes her way through the men in the front of her father’s speakeasy, serving beer and swatting away their passes—and suffering through an insistent player piano (that hammer-like working girl music again, repeated torturously as in Ten Cents a Dance). This is the film that challenges Stanwyck most directly with the worst aspects of her past, and it functions as her platform, another “star as auteur” entry to go with Ladies They Talk About. (According to producer Darryl Zanuck, Stanwyck actually provided some input on this script, especially its early scenes.)

  Lily stares out the speakeasy window for a second at the belching coal stacks and tries to brush the coal off her few pitiful flowers. This is the rare Stanwyck woman who feels a soggy sort of self-pity. Her frowning glumness is pierced by her friend Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), a foreigner who tirelessly recommends Nietzsche to her as a kind of philosophical blueprint for escape (an unusual movie plot point, to say the least). Near closing time, Lily sits in the sort of contemplative silence that says “hands off,” but a point-of-view shot from a corrupt politician lets us know that the unthinking lust of men refuses to read signals like this.

  When the politico puts his hand on her knee, she casually spills hot coffee on him, then sneers, “Oh, excuse me, my hand shakes so when I’m around you,” using the kind of tone that gets across her contempt for (and jealousy of) upper-class women who might actually be that nervous. Ever since she was fourteen, Lily has been mauled by men and outright pimped by her father, and at last she’s had enough. She tells off the old man, and Stanwyck’s fury is all over the place here, for this is a blighted, twisted girl, lost in the worst kind of anger, self-hatred, and what looks like a nearly clinical depression. Lily has been so degraded that she seems almost beyond help, making this an anomalous Stanwyck character: a real lost soul.

  A fire takes care of the father and
his dirty business, and Lily goes to Cragg, who keeps filling her head with more Nietzsche, telling her that she must be a master, not a slave. Cragg corrupts her with the philosopher’s lowest ideas: “All life, no matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation.” To my mind, this is the kind of thought that needs to be firmly rejected, but at least it gets Lily on a train to New York, even if she has to service a railroad man to ride free in a boxcar (this is one of the recently recovered scenes from the preview version, and it enhances the film’s sordidness).

  In Manhattan with Chico in tow, with no money for food, Lily tells her friend to master her hunger. She’s been reading Nietzsche’s Will to Power and learning its mind-over-matter lessons. When she vamps her first man, a cop on the street, Lily finally uses as a weapon the “I’m sexually available” tag that she was stuck with in her youth. Putting the moves on a chubby Southern boy in personnel at the Gotham Trust Company, where she wants employment (not easy to come by in Depression-era 1933), Lily even seems to get a kick out of her blatant maneuvering. If we feel good for her in such moments, however, it’s only a base kind of triumph.

  In an ingenious bit, the camera moves up the floors of the Gotham Trust building as Lily rises there man by man, from filing to mortgages, where she sets her blond hair in a permanent wave and starts dressing in suffocating clothes edged in ruffles. She uses and throws away a young John Wayne (his later fame creates a nice “take that, patriarchy” frisson), struggles to say “isn’t” instead of “ain’t” and becomes an expert at doling out sob stories to likely men whenever she needs to move on to another, higher floor. Lily becomes a kind of actress, just as Ruby Stevens did, but her contempt for life makes her an obvious sort of actress who always puts quotation marks around her tales of woe, as if she knows she doesn’t need to expend much effort to be convincing (in direct opposition to Stanwyck the actress, of course, an irony that generates creative tension in all of these scenes).