Barbara Stanwyck

by Dan Callahan

  There are a few laughs scattered around in Lily’s manipulative schemes, but Baby Face has a reputation for “fun” that isn’t borne out by the film itself; it’s about as fun as Heart of Darkness. Lily is funny when cutesily pulling on the bank vice president’s curly hair and calling him “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” but there’s a telling lapse into bitterness when he asks her if anyone in her family played the piano. “Anybody that had a nickel,” she says, her weighted delivery making it seem as if she’s shoving her distaste at her john—and at us. Cragg continues to send her more Nietzsche. We see her alone on Christmas, glancing at a page that reads, “Crush all sentiment.” Looking at scenes like this in Baby Face, I’m reminded of Stanwyck’s great enthusiasm for Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and of her fervent, thwarted desire to play Rand’s sadomasochistic heroine, Dominique Francon. This is the dark side of Stanwyck, the right-winger who struggled to teach heartless self-reliance to her adopted son Dion.

  When a collision of two of her men results in murder and suicide, Lily’s old, depressive face breaks through her fancy mistress make-up mask. In the conventional but nearly convincing final third, Lily falls in with her last man, Trenholm (George Brent), a playboy who cock-blocks her attempt to blackmail the Gotham Trust. She sees that he’s not a fool like all the other men she’s known, and so she makes a calculated play for him. He falls like all the rest, and she makes her new ambition known: “I’d like to have a Mrs. on my tombstone,” she says dreamily, as morbid a proposal as any in movie history.

  Staring at five hundred thousand dollars worth of loot, Stanwyck puts on her most abstracted mask as Lily says, “Someday, I’ll have the other half that goes with it,” as if this pursuit of money were a kind of religion for her character. The film hits a patch of bad, overly explanatory writing when Lily is made to detail how she’s not like other women (we’ve seen that already). But Stanwyck saves the film with one reaction shot. Following a montage of all the men she’s used, Lily looks up and away, and there’s some kind of recognition in her face: BAM! Something has happened to her, but we don’t know what exactly, so that even the putative happy ending feels consistent with the mysterious girl that we’ve been watching. Baby Face contains some of Stanwyck’s most penetrating, disturbing work, and there are moments in it that stand as unreachable heights—or depths—in her art of leveling with us.

  Drama Grab Bag, 1930s

  Ever in My Heart, Gambling Lady, A Lost Lady, The Secret Bride,

  The Woman in Red, Red Salute, A Message to Garcia, Banjo on My

  Knee, Internes Can’t Take Money, Always Goodbye

  As she worked out her contract at Warner Bros. and then acted at 20th Century Fox, Stanwyck found herself in some bread-and-butter program pictures and a few bizarre ventures into political intrigue. Ever in My Heart (1933) is a total downer, a bold, somewhat crude but forceful look at bigotry during wartime. The movie is barely known, though it gets eulogized in Ella Smith’s Stanwyck book. It suffers from uninspired direction by Archie Mayo and a short running time that doesn’t allow the various outrages of the plot to gather momentum. But in a way these shortcomings add to the film’s sense of unfairness, of life being against us no matter what we do or how stoic we are.

  Ever in My Heart starts in 1909, in America. Stanwyck is Mary, a well-brought-up young girl and “daughter of the American Revolution.” The first scenes are played for comedy, as Mary deals with her immature brother (a typecast Frank Albertson) and tries to get things ready for her childhood sweetheart (Ralph Bellamy). The fast pace slows, quite effectively, when she catches her first glimpse of Hugo (Otto Kruger), a German schoolteacher. They fall in love with each other at first sight.

  Some soft-focus cinematography, courtesy of Leon Shamroy, idealizes Stanwyck in her period garb, as she listens attentively to her new sweetheart sing a familiar German lullaby, which he translates as: “You are ever in my heart, you are ever in my thoughts. You make me many sorrows. You will never know how much I love you.” Ladies of her family gossip about his lightning-fast courtship, and in school, Hugo puts together two foreign chemicals that “don’t mix,” but the cross-cultural couple gets married and she gets pregnant. Before her child is born, Mary goes with Hugo to pick out a dog as a pet, and she zeroes in on a German puppy that looks lonely, putting her love and faith in a literal underdog.

  Hugo becomes an American citizen, and at a party afterwards his friends and family play “Dixie,” the “Marseillaise,” “Britannia,” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” pledging themselves to the idea of America as one large melting pot. Immediately, we cut to a newspaper telling us that Germany has invaded Belgium, and then we see a paper that says the Germans have sunk the Lusitania. Mary and Hugo suffer social rejection when no one shows up at a party she’s giving. Tired of small talk, Mary finally explodes: “Talk about it! Talk about the Lusitania!” Stanwyck pushes here because she’s obviously been rushed and doesn’t have enough time to prepare for this outburst (she’s “gone dry,” which she saw as “a physical thing,” and she would never have the kind of technique that would allow her to fake an outburst as extreme as this). But she does have two extraordinary moments later on in this film.

  Her son is deathly ill, and some stifling hot weather isn’t helping matters. Hugo goes in to sing to the boy while Mary lies down. The camera stays on her face as she listens and tries to rest, but then Hugo’s singing abruptly stops. In a matter of seconds, she knows her son has died. Mary gets up and looks into the boy’s room. She is a wretched, skinny, stark figure with stringy hair hanging down on both sides of her head. “Oh my …” she says, as if she’s about to say, “Oh my God,” but then chokes on the word “my” and puts her hands over her face. This is the first time Stanwyck gives us something of the panic of grief, of disbelief—her words land like a stab in the stomach, sharp and aggravated. Just when we think it can’t get any worse for this couple, neighborhood kids attack their dog because it’s a German dog. At this point, it’s hard not to wonder who gave the go-ahead to such an upsetting, downbeat project. It was written by Bertram Milhauser, based on his novel with Beulah Marie Dix, and the material feels personal. The script is so strong, in fact, that Mayo’s often thoughtless direction doesn’t hurt it in the end.

  When Hugo finds the dog, which has been stoned and broken up (at least we aren’t made to look at its wounded body), he shoots it to put it out of its misery. He’s lost his job at the school, and it is intimated that he and his wife are barely getting enough food to survive when her family finally comes to get her (Stanwyck makes herself look older and realistically worn down in this scene; surely Ruby Stevens knew something about hunger). When Mary gets a letter from Hugo telling her he has to leave her and go back to Germany, Mayo holds a long close-up of Stanwyck until her face looks like it’s suspended in time. She could crumple her face in tears, finally, or drop her head to end the shot, but no, Stanwyck avoids these physical clichés common in that era, instead finding this woman’s state of mind and staying inside it until you are intimately acquainted with it and can feel compassion and then empathy.

  Years later, on the wartime front, Hugo and Mary meet again, and she realizes that he has information that will hurt American soldiers. Loving him as much as ever, she collapses in bed with him after putting some poison in their wine. They settle down to die together, star-crossed lovers, believably destroyed by ignorance and hate. Ever in My Heart is an imperfect movie, and Stanwyck’s performance is uneven, but it packs a wallop and it deserves to be more widely shown.

  Gambling Lady (1934) is Stanwyck’s first real post-Code movie, and a chill of compulsory virtue affects her performance right away. Her Lady Lee is a far cry from her pre-Code heroines, a cardsharp who insists on playing straight for her winnings (it’s as if the Code has forced Nan Taylor or the bilious Lily Powers into an unflattering corset). Stanwyck had a gambler’s wary face, and she made a convincing professional sharpie in later years. But this brief little movie doesn’t allow her much leew
ay to do anything but grieve a dead father (again), fall for Joel McCrea (easy to do, of course), and then wait out an increasingly convoluted plot that involves several unconvincing twists courtesy of a villainous society girl (Claire Dodd). In one of her last scenes here, Stanwyck is asked to carry a “hysterical laughter” scene, and she plays this routine admirably, even stumbling over a word or two to make it more real, just as earlier in the film she does a panicked, klutzy run up some stairs when she finds out that McCrea is in jail. Even in a nothing movie like this, Stanwyck makes sure to give us at least a few moments of recognizable human behavior.

  Willa Cather was outraged when she saw what Warner Bros. made of her book A Lost Lady in 1934, and anyone who has read Cather’s evocative, perfectly structured novel can only share her feelings. Marian Forrester, Cather’s lead character, is a naturally bewitching woman, flighty, life loving, unstable. She makes a strong impression on a boy named Niel, who falls in love with her as a youth, becomes disillusioned with her when he discovers her sexual infidelity to her much older husband, and finally comes to terms with her profound impact on his life. Cather writes: “Where Mrs. Forrester was, dullness was impossible, Niel believed. The charm of her conversation was not so much in what she said, though she was often witty, but in the quick recognition of her eyes, in the living quality of her voice itself. One could talk to her about the most trivial things, and go away with a high sense of elation.” (p. 70). This isn’t a natural part for Stanwyck. It’s closer to the Julie Christie of Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (1971), based on L.P. Hartley’s novel, which contains a more dangerous version of Cather’s basic theme (Hartley even calls his enchantress Marian).

  It’s possible to imagine Stanwyck doing a decent Marian at the more expansive Warner Bros. of the 1940s, with King Vidor or Frank Borzage directing. But this Cather book really needs the Orson Welles of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and what it gets is “let’s finish this fast” hack Alfred E. Green, who was more suited to his job on the sordid Baby Face. The first sign of trouble is when the credits inform us—with that Warner Bros. “living headshot” style of this time—that Niel is to be played by sweaty, gangster-ish Lyle Talbot, but nothing can prepare us for what this movie does to the book. It uses Cather’s basic story outline in the cheapest possible way, opening on Stanwyck’s Marian kissing her fiancée at a swank party, then watching him get shot (she puts her hands in the front of her hair, a mechanical gesture to mime the distress she refuses to feel).

  On a sabbatical in the Canadian Rockies, Stanwyck starts to emote a little for her maid (Rafaela Ottiano), but she’s sitting on a truly hideous striped chair next to a hideous matching striped couch, and this juxtaposition serves to dampen anything she might want to try. This is a movie that reduces an audience to carping over unfortunate set design, or the succession of ugly, unflattering Orry-Kelly gowns that Stanwyck is made to model (the film was originally intended for clotheshorse Kay Francis, and it shows). Her Marian takes what looks like a pratfall and is saved by nice fuddy-duddy lawyer Dan Forrester (Frank Morgan). Schmaltzy music comes on when he asks her to be his wife, saying that they’ll live on “honesty” instead of love, and she half-heartedly accepts his hand. No attempt is made to capture the rural atmosphere of Cather’s book; instead, the most specious kind of 1930s glamour is endorsed. This Marian takes up with an unappealing lover (Ricardo Cortez) fast and unconvincingly, and when she tells her husband, he retreats to his room and sulks for a long time.

  Talbot’s Neil finds Marian drinking. Cather’s character is a sherry tippler, but Stanwyck’s Marian looks like she’s belting back straight whiskey. In her tired, desultory drunk scene she is hilariously far from the sensual, hedonistic woman we find in the novel, more a complaining Flatbush housewife than a special vixen grabbing everything she can get hold of. At sixty-one minutes, the film ends with reconciliation between man and wife, though it’s hard not to wonder just what has changed between them. Are they going to attempt a regular sex life now, or will Stanwyck’s Marian just have to go without for the rest of her years? The film is a travesty of Cather, and it doesn’t even work on its own limited terms.

  Stanwyck’s post-Code slump continued with The Secret Bride (1934), an exposition-loaded mystery for Warners that nonetheless features excellent direction from the underrated William Dieterle and a few challenges for its star. Dieterle liked to employ a restless, probing camera, and he opens the film with a picture of Lincoln and the American flag, then pans to the governor’s daughter, Ruth (Stanwyck), who looks amused at the prospect of marrying the ever-seedy Warren William. In these first scenes, Ruth is well dressed, in a pampered kind of way, and Stanwyck makes her face look childlike and undisturbed. She uses her most regal, mid-Atlantic-style voice, because she’s playing a rich, cloistered girl who sometimes verges on being outright inane. When Ruth finds out that her father is mixed up in a scandal, Stanwyck finds a credulous mask; this most wised up of actresses is playing a bit of a fool, and doing it well. “It’s ridiculous of us to worry,” she says to William, managing to sound quite vague and Main Line snooty.

  Ruth is a girl who grew up in a gilded cage. When she has a confrontation with her father, Dieterle uses some striking low angles, and there’s some fast editing to convey the confusion between them. Then we cut to a full close-up of Stanwyck, as she stares at her father and starts to doubt him. Only here does she falter. The sadness in her eyes is too heavy and deep to belong to this girl, but it’s probably too much to ask of the former Ruby Stevens to be able to access the first sadness of a happy, oblivious society type. Ruth is convinced of her father’s innocence, and Stanwyck quite impressively keeps the upper-crust voice she’s been using, even when she’s making her intense pitch to William to keep on fighting to clear her dad’s name. Glenda Farrell is given the typical pre-Code Stanwyck part as a working girl caught up in the case, while Stanwyck labors to stay interested in the last half of the film. Understandably, she looks bored in some of her last scenes. “She was not happy at Warners and wanted to get out of her contract as quickly as possible,” said Dieterle.

  Her unhappiness is visible throughout her last Warners contract dud, The Woman in Red (1934), a horsey, mechanical drama that has Stanwyck in jodhpurs and then a red coat, which figures in the film’s badly cross-cut courtroom climax. Robert Florey, a Frenchman who began his career with some experimental shorts, tries to enliven the film with a few odd camera angles and visual compositions here and there, but he doesn’t have Dieterle’s touch. “Mush,” says a bored Stanwyck at one point, tossing a book aside (is it the script?). Then she walks through a totally unconvincing romance with Gene Raymond.

  It’s as if she’s saying, “You have my body, but you won’t get my soul or my talent, Jack Warner.” Asked to explode at wicked society woman Genevieve Tobin and her stuffy set in one of the last scenes, Stanwyck shoots the works, but she doesn’t trouble to control her emotion, so that it spills out all over the place and makes a silly mess. (Off the set, Fay was at his drunken, abusive worst, which must have contributed to her cold misery here.) In court, Stanwyck’s character has another “eruption,” as another character puts it, and this instance is expert, but to little end. Clad in the red coat of the title, Stanwyck’s character participates in “a notorious yachting party”—but not aboard the omnipresent “boat of vice” of her early films, alas.

  After portraying this dull woman in red, a no-doubt demoralized Stanwyck spent six idle months at home before moving into Red Salute (1935), an often jaw-dropping, independently made anti-Communist gewgaw. Though she must have been desperate to get out of the house, it’s worth stressing that she chose this controversial movie for herself in the middle of the radical thirties, when it was fashionable and even de rigueur in most artistic circles to be pro-union, pro-proletariat, anti-capitalist, and even a shade or two pink. When the film opened at the Rivoli theater in New York, it was picketed by the National Student’s League, a leftist student group, and eighteen people
were arrested when fights broke out in the theater.

  Stanwyck picked up her right-wing politics from Fay, and she held onto them throughout her life. As late as the seventies, she was complaining about Jimmy Carter and his family to artist Don Bachardy, and she fit right into the Nancy Reagan red eighties. During Vanessa Redgrave’s acceptance speech at the 1978 Academy Awards, a canny TV editor cut to a resplendent, glittering Stanwyck just before Redgrave pronounced the offensive words “Zionist hoodlums.” It was as if she could serve as a kind of conservative counterpoint to radical Vanessa.

  Describing a fake sore throat in Ball of Fire (1941), Stanwyck’s Sugar-puss O’Shea cracks wise on the left: “It’s as red as The Daily Worker and just as sore!” Off-screen, in the forties, Stanwyck and second husband Robert Taylor helped to found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization that aligned itself a few years later with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Taylor himself was the only major movie star to name names. Stanwyck wasn’t called, but gung-ho Taylor said that if she were called, “[S]he would be tickled to death to come down and she would come a-running.”

  Taylor’s jingoism sounds close to that of the odious Jeff (Robert Young) in Red Salute, a restless, cruel soldier determined to uneducate Stanwyck’s Drue Van Allen, a general’s daughter who has fallen in love with Arner (Hardie Albright), a radical Communist propagandist. The film begins with a shot of an American flag flying in the breeze. We then see one of Arner’s Communist harangues. “What’s a proletariat?” asks an onlooker, and a man standing next to him snaps, “I’ll take vanilla.” Arner is described as a brainy graduate student who might be in the country illegally. A beaming Drue tells the “sez you!” dissenters that Arner’s ideas are the way of the future. All the sloganeering in this first sequence goes by in a blur.