Barbara Stanwyck (10 page)

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).

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.

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

A
s 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 leeway 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.