by Dan Callahan
This is a film about sex on the range; every gun is phallic, and a lot of the dialogue consists of impudent double entendres. “Ah-yah!” Jessica cries off-screen (it sounds guttural and ugly every time she does it). We then see her striding into jail to ask about her brother Brockie, who has shot the nearly blind man. Stanwyck has a wolfish look here and she speaks harshly, but her long ponytail provides a fetchingly incongruous physical touch (Stanwyck lost a lot of visual mobility after she cut her hair in 1948).
When Griff intrudes on a dinner set for Jessica and her forty guns, Stanwyck puts on such a knowing face that she’s obviously decided to play these next moments for laughs—and she gets them. Fuller frames her sitting very still in her chair, and she dominates the wide frames with her stillness, just as Robert Ryan does playing the criminal mastermind of Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955). The hair around Stanwyck’s face is its by now familiar grey, but something about Fuller’s direction has clawed away all the cobwebs that had grown over her on-screen sexuality, so that she’s as hot-to-trot, don’t-give-a-damn sexy here at fifty as she ever was in her twenties (what a contrasting double bill this movie would make with Capra’s General Yen). Her Jessica is a totally plausible matriarchal dynamo and born ruler, and we can feel Stanwyck’s relief at finally being cast correctly for her age and fully ripened experience (Fuller wanted to make another movie with Stanwyck as Evita Peron, and surely that would have been potent stuff, too).
Jessica asks Griff what he’s heard about her and then bites her lower lip and lowers her eyes before ordering all of her men out of the room. Once they are alone, Jessica offers Griff a job; he says that such a job wouldn’t be his size. “It could be any size you want it to be,” Jessica purrs, and Stanwyck leaves no doubt about what she’s really getting at. Griff takes out his gun. “May I feel it?” she asks. “Uh-uh,” he demurs, not willing to give over control to her. “Just curious,” she says, tauntingly. “Might go off in your face,” he warns. “I’ll take a chance,” she near-whispers, relishing Fuller’s absolutely filthy double entendre (this is the best dialogue she’s had since Double Indemnity). She lets out her “whatever” sigh when she handles his gun, tossing it contemptuously in the air. This is a woman who outright owns the guns and the manhood of forty men, and she’s not easily impressed.
Later, on the range, Griff wonders if Jessica feels “naked” without her army, and then tells her that one of her men has been misbehaving. “You want to spank him?” he asks her. “I just want to see if you can take it,” she says. There seems to be no end to their sex talk, all done barely in code. He tells her she looks upset. “I was born upset!” she declares, one of Stanwyck’s best lines, a line that shows just how deeply Fuller understood her; it reverberates back over the whole length of her against-the-odds career and life.
After she’s been dragged by her horse and survived that twister with Griff, Jessica rests up in a barn and outlines her past in some detail. As a kid, she had to deliver her own brother, and when her mother died in childbirth, Jessica buried her and then took care of Brockie. At fifteen, a man “tried to get rough” with her, and when her father intervened, he got shot. At eighteen, Jessica says, she was “the boss of my own spread.” Stanwyck delivers all this back-story in the most matter-of-fact, Olympian of tones; she’s a winner, “the best of all,” and so is Jessica. There’s no room here for the self-pity of Lily Powers, or what’s left of Ruby Stevens.
“You’ve come a long way,” says Griff. He could be talking to Stanwyck herself, but Jessica is done cantering down memory lane. “My throat’s dry, I’m talking too much,” she croaks, leaning in for a kiss, as if to say, “Screw the past, lets grab what’s good now.” This is Stanwyck’s last hurrah, her summing up, and it is indeed a long way from Capra’s gentle early talkie world to Fuller’s curious modernism. “They don’t normally write parts for women my age because America is now a country of youth,” she told a reporter who asked her about the four-year gap between Forty Guns and Walk on the Wild Side (1961). “Something is gone,” she said, rightly, and spoke of her more “romantic” films. “Now we’ve matured and moved on. The past belongs to the past,” she said, sounding like Jessica Drummond.
Forty Guns is mainly a rollicking western sex comedy for about the first hour of its running time, but then Fuller switches gears, in his ballsy way, into something more serious—all in one dazzling six-minute take. “Am I talking too much?” asks Griff, as he sits with Jessica at her piano; they’re both worried about boring the other with small talk about the past. He keeps telling her how he feels about killing, and she listens to him with an abstracted look on her face as the camera starts to prowl ominously closer. Shots are fired from the back of the room; they take cover. Jessica’s loyal retainer, Ned (Dean Jagger), walks in and says that he had to shoot Griff, and then Griff moves forward and disarms him. After this embarrassment, Jessica stands stock still at the right of the frame as Ned pitifully confesses his love to her. Jagger, never the most subtle of actors, opens himself up very purely and simply both to the camera and to Jessica.
Jessica listens to Ned talk so intently that the film seems to be holding its breath with her, taking in his words. She sits down to write Ned a check to pay him off. “I’m sorry, Ned,” she says, her face impassive, her voice stony and unforgiving. This is a telling choice for Stanwyck; it would have been so easy to act touched by Ned’s sorrow. But she makes us see that Jessica, and people like her who have made themselves winners, can’t afford to sympathize with such abject weakness, even needing to look on it as a kind of contagious disease (it should be remembered again how much Stanwyck admired Ayn Rand and her objectivist philosophy, and how much Lily Powers learned from Nietzsche).
Ned exits from frame left, dropping the check on the ground. Jessica goes to Griff and kisses his hand, mouthing her devotion to him. They hear a thudding noise and move to investigate; Ned has hung himself. Denied love and sex and given money instead, he sees no more reason to live. Is he somehow a necessary casualty? I can imagine Stanwyck answering “Yes.” It’s survival of the fittest: first in Brooklyn, then in an abusive first marriage and a humiliating second attempt, and then in that most embarrassing of roles, the aging actress, lucking into one more seminal film, a film that was loved and admired by the burgeoning French New Wave.
Brockie kills Griff’s brother as he walks out of the church with his bride. Barney croons another song as the now-widowed bride stands in her mourning black on a hillside; he sings that “God has his arms around me, and I’m not afraid,” another drastic switch in tone that works because of Fuller’s “take it and like it” long takes. As the plot starts to resolve itself, Fuller freezes Stanwyck’s Jessica into a still photo under a dissolve to her forty male guns on horses and zooms slowly into the lingering photo, a surprisingly lyrical effect (this movie is always surprising us). “You could still be the boss, if you wanted to,” says her lawyer, but Jessica is about to abdicate, just as Stanwyck herself is pretty much at an end as a star performer.
The lawyer tells her that she’ll lose everything, “everything you’ve built up,” and Stanwyck stares out at us, plunking a melody out on a piano with her finger. At this point, we’re ready for one of those looks of recognition she used to honor us with, but those are gone now. What’s left is an indescribable look, something so deeply personal and labyrinthine that there’s no following it or guessing where she could possibly be in her mind; there’s a kind of psychic wilderness in her face. Stanwyck was always smart enough to perceive what was coming for her, but who can really be truly ready for death, which to her meant retirement from the movies? In this scene, her face says all of this and more that can’t be ascertained, no matter how long we think about her trajectory as a woman and as an artist. “There was a scene loaded with a page of monologue and she knew it perfectly,” said Fuller. “I asked her, before the take, to eliminate the gibble-gabble and show the words in her face.” I’m willing to bet that this is the scene he was talki
ng about.
Fuller had wanted to kill Jessica off, and that would have been more than appropriate, but the studio insisted that she live. She survives a gunshot (crying out, “Oh!” in an orgasmic way as she takes a bullet), and is last seen inanely running after Griff. The more telling moment in these last scenes is when Jessica tries to comfort the blond widow: “You have one thing in your favor,” she says, “Youth.” A reviewer for Picturegoer saw Forty Guns and wrote, “Even the most tactful of picturegoers would have to admit that Barbara Stanwyck is no longer a youngster,” bestowing the kiss of death on her career. It would only be resurrected, in an often bastardized, sentimental form, on television, a cruel kind of shrinkage after the Cinemascope glories of Forty Guns where, Prospero-like, her powers were celebrated and then relinquished.
Aftermath
The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Walk on the Wild Side, Roustabout,
The Big Valley, The House That Would Not Die, A Taste of Evil,
The Letters, The Thorn Birds, The Colbys
When film roles started to grow sparse in the late 1950s, Stanwyck was eager to get into television with a western series. She appeared on several Zane Grey Theater presentations, but the networks wanted her to parrot Loretta Young’s successful anthology show, where Young swirled on camera in a designer gown, introduced each episode, and then proceeded to act in most of them. For the 1960–61 TV season, Stanwyck succumbed and attempted a similar format with The Barbara Stanwyck Show. The worst part of the format was that she had to introduce each story as Young did; deprived of mobility. Stanwyck turns to the camera in a stiff model’s “pose” before the title comes on, and the effect is less Young-hostessy than taunting-forbidding, as if Stanwyck is saying, “I dare you to watch!” She had to read her intros off a teleprompter and was expected to make little jokes and plug the sponsors; she was very unhappy doing this. There were thirty-six episodes in all, of which she appeared in thirty-two. She won her first Emmy for the show, but it was cancelled after only one season.
Almost all of the episodes are so poorly written that Stanwyck can’t sustain much interest in them. She’s hit with more than a fair amount of sexism on this show, playing a lot of “career women” who have to learn their place. And she deals with lots of juvenile delinquents played by Method actors like Vic Morrow; she looks at them as if she’d like to understand what they’re trying to do, yet she’s the one who seems natural and real, while their Actors Studio style has dated. There are several episodes where Stanwyck has to interact with actors who are so inept that they would never have been employed for a motion picture; it’s distressing to see her try to perform with these amateurs.
When she does get a good subject, as in “Confession,” a murder story that pairs her excitingly with Lee Marvin, the half-hour format leads to jerky writing and abrupt editing that mitigates both the sexual chemistry she has worked up with Marvin and the convincing degeneration of her character as she’s holed up in an apartment overlooking a noisy merry-go-round. “She lives only for two things, and both of them are work,” said Jacques Tourneur of Stanwyck (he directed a few of these shows for her, including “Confession”). In several episodes, she plays Josephine Little, an import/export dealer in Hong Kong who does battle with Red China. “You keep your cotton-pickin’ Red hands off my country!” she cries in “Dragon by the Tail,” which was praised in Congress by Francis E. Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. When she was cancelled, Stanwyck made some cracks at her sponsors’ expense: “I never even got a free shampoo,” she complained.
Finally, Stanwyck got a movie offer, a featured role in Walk on the Wild Side (1962) as a lesbian madam. At first, she was jubilant: “Chalk up another first for Stanwyck!” she crowed. But when gossip columnist Louella Parsons called her and claimed to be shocked that she accepted such a part, Stanwyck got defensive with her. “What do you want them to do, get a real madam and a real lesbian?” she asked. The role was juicy, but perhaps its air of exploitation made Stanwyck uncomfortable (and it definitely added fuel to the fire of the lesbian rumors surrounding her bachelor woman private life at the time). The script, which was based on a Nelson Algren novel set in Depression-era New Orleans, was worked over by many hands, and the film suffers from two miscast and uncharismatic leads, Laurence Harvey and Capucine, the mistress of producer Charles K. Feldman. Capucine is such a weak and bored scene partner that Stanwyck has to work in a kind of void, which can be seen as appropriate, since her character, Jo Courtney, is unrequitedly in love with Capucine’s prostitute Hallie. The movie featured a frustrated dynamic that Stanwyck had never been asked to play before.
Stanwyck enters Walk on the Wild Side with plummy confidence, even doing a literal “star turn” before going upstairs to see her beloved star hooker—she almost laughs, maybe with the sheer joy of just being in a movie again. Hallie says that Jo should stop trying, that she “can’t change” for her. But Jo replies, “Sometimes I’ve waited years for what I’ve wanted,” in a ghostly, absent voice. She’s a predatory hawk, a woman who swoops down on unhappy or destitute girls and installs them in her elegant New Orleans bordello, but Stanwyck makes sure we can see Jo’s genuine, tender love for Hallie. She’s aged visibly since her last on-screen role in Forty Guns, and Edward Dmytryk photographs her harshly, as if Jo is a greyed, narrow-eyed bird of prey (“Take your claws off me,” Hallie says to Jo at one point).
Jo is saddled with a legless husband who scuttles around on a pulley. In a scene late in the movie, she reveals her disgust for men. “Love,” she sneers, quietly. “Can any man love a woman for herself without wanting her body for his own pleasure?” This is a lady who despises yet profits from male lust, and this is the one quality that makes her interesting in relation to Stanwyck’s other characters. But Jo Courtney is a shallow conception, a woman who needs to be “explained” by some Penguin Freud, a lesbian who doesn’t even get to be a real lesbian because that would be too threatening in 1962. Instead, we’re made to understand that she’s frigid.
In her big early scene where she slaps and manipulates Hallie, Stanwyck performs an expert, almost campy pyrotechnical display, startling us with some decisive movements and step-on-the-gas shouting to keep the girl in line (her exhale on an “Ah!” sounds like the hiss of steam heat from a radiator). The scene plays rather like an audition, or an advertisement for her talent: “I’m tired of sitting at home with the TV, hire me!” she seems to be signaling. Wild Side, turgidly directed by Dmytryk, is anything but wild and is only enlivened by a baby-faced Jane Fonda, shaking her chassis as a runaway-turned-hooker named Kitty Twist, and by a sinuous credit sequence by Saul Bass involving a kingly black cat slinking along to Elmer Bernstein’s jazzy, amusing score. Stanwyck obviously put thought and skill and honest emotion into this smallish role, but it led her nowhere. She hated flying, so she was stranded in Hollywood when most movie production at that time had moved abroad to Europe.
Two years later, producer Hal Wallis, a trusted link to an older Hollywood, offered Stanwyck the opportunity to appear in an Elvis Presley movie. She was understandably skeptical at first. “But I thought this might be very interesting,” she told John Kobal, “this would give me an entirely different audience, a very young audience.” (Her reasoning is close to the thinking that Bette Davis used to talk herself into accepting Return from Witch Mountain [1978], a Disney feature). And so she’s billed below the title in Roustabout (1964), one of the legion of assembly line Elvis movies that make for such a depressing day of programming when they habitually get run back to back on television. Stanwyck plays Maggie Morgan, the owner of a struggling carnival, and she’s endorsed in the film as an emblem of personal feeling amid financial failure—even if this whole enterprise is just one more moneymaking venture for Elvis’s manager, Colonel Parker. “I think he’s smooth, and sexy,” says a female audience member as Elvis sings the first of many interchangeable songs. But the King looks bored and stale.
After a fight, Elvis finds himse
lf working in Maggie’s carnival, where he draws in teenage customers with his lazy, open-mouthed leers. Stanwyck is still slender and attractive in her blue denim and white and grey mane of hair. She underplays and generally takes it easy, but there’s one scene with Elvis where she can’t help herself—she has to be an artist. Fed up with his selfishness, Stanwyck purrs, “Oh … just take care of number one, huh?” Presley rises to meet her righteous energy: “That’s right, doesn’t everybody?” he drawls, in the tone of his “Thank you, thankyouverymuch.” Stanwyck is overtaken by a kind of moral unrest: “No,” she says, making the word land. “No,” she repeats, making her protest sink in. “You learn that and you might start coming alive from the waist up.”
Stanwyck seems actually to reach Elvis in this scene; he looks shaken when she leaves it. The gritty representative of the Depression 1930s rebukes the irresponsible, narcissistic neo-Boomer, and the exchange has a weight that embarrasses the purgatorial movie itself. I’m not sure how she achieves this effect, but it partly has to do with the measured rhythm of her delivery and also the need to make a large statement to her audience, an audience that she’s begun to lose. Though Roustabout is a waste of her time and ours (in the last number, she gets lost in the crowd), in that one scene Stanwyck is as galvanizing as she ever was.
Stanwyck wasn’t equipped for idleness (few people are, of course, but especially those who have always put work first). Surely she felt lonely and unappreciated at times during this period. As always, though, she looked at her situation and made the best of it. “I live very simply,” she told John Kobal. “I have a nice home and a few friends. I don’t go to many big parties or premieres or anything like that, mainly because I don’t care for them. And I have a few good friends, and I enjoy them as I hope they enjoy me. And apart from my housekeeper, I live alone. Well, of course, I’m a bachelor woman!” she insisted, giving it a name and making it sound sensible and fancy-free. “But so many people take it out of context,” she continued, “then they dramatize it and it’s like, ‘Here’s Madame X walking down the street, poor old soul.’ Well, that’s not true at all. Hundreds of thousands of people live alone …”
