A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940

by Victoria Wilson

  “How could I?” the Stanwyck character says. “I couldn’t get a job after you called me a thief in front of the whole town.”

  Later, on the porch of her house, she weeps and says to the DA, “I’d forgotten how much that woman hates me and how much I hate her. Ever since I was little, she was always so right and I was always so wrong. She was always so good and I was always so bad.”

  Her longing in that moment for home, for a childhood with happy memories—for love—makes it clear that she has been living out, frozen to the persona, her mother’s unforgiving view of her: rebellious and criminal.

  It is a powerful scene—surprising, chilling, melancholy. Unlike the rest of the script, which is done with the lightest of touch and thrown away, this scene is emphatic, underlined. Though there is foreshadowing of trouble at the prospect of visiting her mother, the harshness of the encounter between mother and daughter seems like a nightmare from another story.

  And it is: it’s the arrival of Jane Eyre at Lowood.

  Not only did Sturges inject a bit of Charlotte Brontë into the script, but later he uses the familiar element of Camille (the tainted woman willing to sacrifice herself for the man she loves who’s too besotted to see his ruination in their love). In addition, Beyond These Tears, with Leisen’s cutting and reshaping of the script, became a Wizard of Oz in reverse. L. Frank Baum had been Sturges’s neighbor in Coronado; Baum’s sons, Sturges’s playmates. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Wizard of Oz, directed by King Vidor and Victor Fleming, was about to have its premiere with Sturges still at work on the script of Beyond These Tears weeks before Leisen was to start shooting.

  Instead of Kansas, the picture starts in the fast-paced, glittering city, not exactly Oz, but where anything’s possible. The story leads back toward a simpler life where man and woman are cleansed: she’s no longer the bad girl with a disregard for the law; he’s not the cynical DA. There’s the bad witch, her unloving mother; the good witch(es), his mother and his aunt Emmy; Willie, the hired hand, is Hickory; and the others.

  Lee Leander, self-admitted thief, and John Sargent, hard-driving but naive district attorney, go on a three-state junket through (seemingly bucolic) small towns and pastures fraught with unexpected twists and turns (the MacMurray and Stanwyck characters spend the night in their car marooned in a field; try to milk a cow for breakfast; are arrested for trespassing on posted property and charged with petty larceny and wanton disregard for the law) until they arrive at Sargent’s boyhood home, which is bathed in snow, where cookies are baking in the oven and wood is being set in the bedroom fireplace. Mother (Beulah Bondi) and Aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson) are aflutter with excitement that their boy is home for the holiday; all is safe, wholesome, restorative.

  His mother welcomes the girl and tells her, “It’s a joy to have you here.”

  And Willie (Sterling Holloway) adds, as an aside to the DA, “Ain’t she a peacherino.”

  On their way west to Wabash, Barbara’s and Fred’s characters—she, the wary, glib, seen-it-all thief “whose mind works differently”; he, the earnest, decent, hardworking, straight-and-narrow letter-of-the-law lawyer—get a taste of what it’s like to see the world as the other does. She sees his sweetness, is touched by his goodness and generosity. He feels what it’s like to be exploited, to defy the rules, to give a false name (“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”) to the justice of the peace. And, when they are under arrest and she sets fire to a wastebasket so they can make a getaway in the confusion, he becomes a fugitive from justice and like her is on the lam, trying to make it safely across the state line.

  The difference between them is clear when he finds out that she’s deliberately set the fire. “I suppose you know that’s called arson,” he tells her.

  “No,” she replies, feigning jokey ignorance. “I thought that was when you bit somebody.” And then, her knowing, realistic self: “Well, it’s better than going to jail. I told you my mind worked differently.”

  “What’s that got to do with the morals of the case?” he asks her.

  “What have morals got to do with it?”

  She pauses and says under her breath, the real outrage, “And you treated me like a sister.”

  Leisen cut Sturges’s speech about marriage being God’s greatest gift to man and woman, which the district attorney says in response to the farmer who arrests him and accuses him of not “even being married” and traveling with “whatever she is.” In an effort to put some zip in the story, Sturges tried various approaches to make sense of why the Fred MacMurray character, a district attorney, would take the Barbara Stanwyck character, a girl on trial for theft that he was attempting to put in prison, with him during the Christmas holiday.

  First Sturges wrote it so the district attorney took the girl to the mountains to reform her, then he took her out of guilt, for winning a continuance until after Christmas, then out of feeling for the Christmas spirit. Finally, Sturges had the DA take her along with him for “the purpose of violating the Mann Act; this has always been a good second act,” said Sturges. “It is an act enjoyed by all, one that we rarely tire of, and one not above the heads of the audience.”

  The reference to the Mann Act stayed in the script but was later cut.

  The studio felt the picture’s title was wrong for the box office. Beyond These Tears had little bearing on the script. It was decided that a contest might produce a better title. A synopsis of the script with the title Remember the Night was sent around. Suggested titles included The Fortunate Sinner, I Love a Thief, State Versus Love, Romance on Probation, Love Convicted, Out on Bond.

  It was finally decided that the title Remember the Night would do. “The title doesn’t do violence to the story,” said A. M. Botsford of Paramount, “and has attractive box office quality.”

  The picture was sophisticated, clever, tender. The studio couldn’t decide if Sturges had written a “crime melodrama” or a “quiet homey comedy.” It finally settled on “romantic drama.”

  • • •

  Stanwyck’s first line to MacMurray when Fat Mike, the bail bondsman, delivers her to the DA’s apartment: “One of these days, one of you boys is going to start one of these things differently, and one of us girls is going to drop dead from surprise.” It’s a line that has everything; it’s light, amused, cynical, sophisticated, trashy, elegant. It’s mysterious and rich.

  When Stanwyck and MacMurray are home with his family after their travels together, and just when it seems as if they are in a romance, he makes the choice to tell his mother the truth about the girl he’s brought home for Christmas. If he hadn’t told her, he would have been a heel and seen to be taking advantage of his mother as he palmed off a criminal as an ordinary person. To save him and keep him pure, Sturges has him tell his mother that she is a thief. (“It’s not even her first offense,” he says. His mother can’t believe it and says that if she—the girl—did take anything, it must have been by mistake, she must be a “hypochondriac.”) It also makes his betrayal that much more poignant when, later in the courtroom, he deliberately tries to lose the case and spare the accused.

  At the end of the scene, his mother reminds her son of the time when he was a little boy and stole her egg money that she was going to use to buy a new dress. She reminds him of how hard he worked to pay it back once he understood what he’d done wrong.

  He tells her, “You made me understand.” And she replies, “No, dear, it was love that made you understand.”

  The picture’s lesson: “there’s no place like home” coupled with “there’s nothing as powerful as love.”

  The scene between Barbara and Beulah Bondi after the New Year’s Eve barn dance is nuanced. Here Barbara is at her absolute best; she’s not self-pitying but a woman in love. She plays shame in front of the mother, but she rises to the occasion, and there’s much nobility of soul. There’s no anger or bitterness at the mother for asking the Stanwyck character not to ruin her son’s chances by allowing him to fall in love with her, onl
y nobility of heart; both women love the man, and they meet on the ground of love. Barbara is noble and gorgeous. After Beulah Bondi has thanked her for not getting involved with her son and has walked away to leave the room, she turns in the doorway and says, “You love him, though, don’t you?” Barbara says, “I’m afraid so.”

  Bondi had always admired Barbara. They worked well together, though Bondi thought Barbara was somewhat impersonal when the day’s work was finished.

  • • •

  Leisen understood about timing and rhythm, about using the actors’ spontaneous reactions. He favored his female stars, was drawn to them, which is why many actresses wanted to work with him. He was attracted to strong women, women who were audacious, who didn’t play by the rules, and who made up their own: Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck.

  With Beulah Bondi, John Sargent’s mother, in Remember the Night, 1940. Mitchell Leisen’s direction and Ted Tetzlaff’s camerawork made Barbara look her most beautiful. (PHOTOFEST)

  Colbert adored Leisen as a director. She appreciated that he didn’t impose his will on actors. “Mitch left the acting to the actors.” Leisen built sets specifically for Colbert so he could easily film only the left side of her face. She had a notion that her nose was crooked on her right side and used to shade it with green, adding a highlight down the center to straighten it. Leisen photographed his actors with Ted Tetzlaff as his cameraman so that they looked more beautiful than they did in other pictures.

  Leisen preferred a first take rather than counting on four, five, six, seven takes to produce an ideal take. While the soundmen and the cutters wanted the actors to pause between sentences so there would be a natural place to cut, Leisen had the cutters find the pause in the sentence. He understood how to create atmosphere and how to use it to bring a sense of reality to the audience.

  He kept certain scenes long and deliberately slowed up the pace once the DA and the girl arrive at the Sargent farm to show the effect on the Stanwyck character of the family’s warmth, love, and coziness. In the scene in which the family has gathered in the parlor around the Christmas tree, MacMurray plays the piano and sings “Swanee River,” and Barbara plays “A Perfect Day” on the piano as Willie (Sterling Holloway) sings.

  Leisen knew how to use visual business in a scene to create character, mood, story. His subtle eloquence and deftness was called the Leisen magic.

  He admired how Barbara never moved her head or her hands. He liked to have actors play a scene with their backs to the camera. He thought Lombard knew how to do it. Barbara’s scene in her bedroom with the Beulah Bondi character ends with Barbara turning her back to the camera, facing the vanity, absently brushing her hair, gazing in the mirror, and seeing how once again she can’t be loved; she has to give up the one good thing that has happened to her. The sadness, the defeat, the inevitability, come through as she holds herself up by the dresser and gives in to the tears, expressed by a lovely downward cast of her head.

  A simple response but full of color, full of depth.

  • • •

  When Barbara and MacMurray are at Niagara Falls (they return to New York by way of Canada to avoid the law in Ohio), MacMurray, who has been equally transformed by romantic love, does what for him would have been unthinkable: he offers her her freedom and the easy way out. “You’re in Canada now,” he says. “If you didn’t go back now, I couldn’t make you.” He kisses her and tells her she is in love with him; she denies that she is. He kisses her and she melts; she comes out of it and says to him, simply, “Be fair.” She’s promised his mother she wouldn’t be with him and is trying to keep her word.

  It is such a deep line, and Barbara gives it a beautiful reading of vulnerability, common sense, and integrity. It is a line that isn’t anticipated—and is dead-on of the character in the moment. That is the brilliance of Sturges’s writing, and there are flashes of it throughout the script.

  The Fred MacMurray character tells her that after she has been acquitted and he pulls out the marriage license, they will march into the judge’s chambers and be married, and for their honeymoon they will return to Niagara Falls.

  “But, darling,” she says, “we’re there now.”

  He takes her in his arms and they kiss; it isn’t a kiss about getting married. It’s about sex.

  It was Sturges’s genius to come up with a title for the picture, which seemed so curious to the studio—Remember the Night to replace Beyond These Tears—with an ellipse. Sturges is saucy and irreverent; to title a picture from a night of illicit sex is outrageous, but he gets away with it, as well as the scene itself; he is piquant, and he has good taste.

  Sturges’s genius is to be both high and low, never middle-class, not official art, as with Odets’s Golden Boy. Sturges always has more than one thing happening, unlike Odets, who has a self-preoccupation with being smarter than everyone else. Sturges can play the violin and knock you out.

  Sturges had what few screenwriters had. He was upper-class and Europeanized; elegant and sophisticated, he could be colloquial and slapstick without ever being vulgar. He could take slang and the vernacular and vulgarity and give them panache, energy, wit, and brains.

  Sturges’s setup is artificial: a DA who bails out a crook for Christmas because he feels guilty that he got a continuance and drives her to Indiana. This would never happen. The realism is in its emotionalism, character, people, and humor. Whereas Odets—who was so careful to summon up real life with the taxicabs and the grocery store and was considered so deep and human—is artificial and stylized, Sturges is high elegance and high sophistication while being banana peel low, and Barbara as an actress is freed up by it.

  • • •

  Remember the Night was scheduled to be completed in forty-two days. It was finished in thirty-four, including the scenes Leisen shot and cut from the final print. Leisen was able to shoot quickly by avoiding rewrites. He was also helped by the pace Barbara set.

  She learned the entire script to help her with the way movies were made—bits and pieces here and there. “They begin anywhere,” she said. “Usually at the end. Never a performance straight through.” At first—eleven years before—she’d found it hard to snap into the required mood. Then she caught on to the trick.

  “Memorize the script, the whole thing,” she said, “so you can think of any place in it, then work backward or forward from there—like a sailor boxing the compass.” Before shooting started, Barbara knew her part completely, and all the other actors’ so she could prompt them. She never blew one line; the other actors worked harder trying to outdo her.

  Barbara had a bad back, but she was dressed and on the set by eight thirty in the morning.

  Leisen came on the set at a quarter to nine, having lined up the sets the night before. Barbara’s voice came out of the fly gallery saying, “Come on, you sonofabitch, let’s get this show on the road—where the hell have you been?”

  Leisen was able to shoot more than four pages a day, the fastest he’d ever shot.

  Just before shooting a scene, Barbara called for a hat she was to wear and put it on.

  “Okay, let’s go,” she said.

  Leisen asked Barbara if she wanted to look in the mirror.

  “Why? Isn’t the hat on right. This is the front I hope. Looking in the glass won’t help.”

  Leisen couldn’t believe that Barbara never looked in the mirror. He’d waited hours for other actresses who’d held up scenes looking at themselves in the mirror.

  “Suppose I don’t look good in it,” said Barbara. “Nothing can be done about it. Just looking won’t help. Come on, let’s shoot.”

  Barbara was willing to withstand great physical discomfort and saved Leisen time. In one scene she and Fred, having spent the night in a pasture, try to milk a cow for breakfast. The scene was shot at the Paramount Ranch during the hottest time of the summer. In the picture, it’s supposed to be the day before Christmas.

  For the scene Barb
ara had on a wool suit, a sweater, a fur coat, galoshes, and a scarf; the crew was wearing as little as possible. In between scenes, instead of changing out of the hot, heavy clothes, Barbara refused to take off any of the layers; it would take too long, she said, to get them back on when they were ready to start again.

  For the New Year’s Eve barn dance scene, Barbara had to wear a wedding dress with corsets. Edith Head, who designed the clothes for the picture, created a 1900-type wedding gown that had corsets, petticoats, chemises, and underskirts, which Barbara had to wear in hundred-degree heat.

  Leisen wasn’t going to be using Barbara for an hour and said, “For God’s sake, why don’t you loosen up those corsets?”

  “No, you may need me.” Barbara sat on the set by Leisen the whole time. When he was ready for her, she was there. Leisen never had to wait for her to finish with the hairdresser or the makeup man.

  Leisen told Barbara he wouldn’t need her anymore that day, and she left. He continued to work with the other actors until about an hour later, when he realized that to wrap up the set, he would need one more shot of Barbara and sent someone to see if she was still on the lot. Leisen’s assistant, Chico Day, ran to her dressing room. Barbara was still in costume with her makeup on. “I knew you would need me again,” she said.

  With Fred MacMurray as John Sargent, camped in a pasture, on their way back home to Indiana, Remember the Night, 1940. (AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING)

  Every time Leisen dismissed Barbara early, she waited in her dressing room in costume and makeup, just in case.

  In another scene Barbara had to pack a suitcase and had to do several takes. Each time she had to redo the scene, she put everything back before the propman could get there. In every take, she put things in the suitcase exactly the same way.