Barbara Stanwyck (20 page)

Leisen tended to soften some of Sturges's hard edges with his preference for visual luxury in his settings. He also clipped some of Sturges's dialogue when it got too long-winded, which was not entirely a bad thing (“Preston had thirty ideas a minute and no way of evaluating them,” said Mel Epstein, the assistant director on
The Lady Eve
, and so Sturges depended on his collaborators to help him make decisions and trim the fat). Leisen begins
Remember the Night
in one of those decadent Paramount jewelry stores that he loves so much. We see a lulu of a bracelet being clasped on a woman's wrist. “Glorious,” says the manager, and it is. But we hear the woman's voice say, “Um,
yes
,” as if she isn't sure, or as if she has a certain contempt for such expensive glory. The manager moves away for just a moment, and in a flash the woman is gone, his bracelet still on her wrist. It's the kind of smooth scene making that Leisen does so well (when Sturges directed his own scripts, simple things like this scene tended to get over-packed and jittery).

We see Stanwyck's jewel thief, Lee Leander, walking down the street in her fur coat, her head covered in a 1940s-style black turban affair (this was Stanwyck's first movie with Edith Head doing her clothes). The Christmas music on the soundtrack alternates with what sounds like the opening bars of Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries” as Lee is apprehended in another jewelry store. In court, Lee is defended by “an old windbag” named Francis X. O'Leary (Willard Robertson), a ham lawyer who used to be on the stage, and as O'Leary makes his blustering case to the jury, the whole action stops for quite a time so that we can take in his shamelessness. This highlighting of what would in most movies be a minor character was Sturges's specialty at his best, but it often led him into self-indulgence when he was less sure of himself.

What saves this scene is that Sturges has written in smart-aleck asides for John, the prosecutor (Fred MacMurray). He also gives Stanwyck a few priceless reaction shots. At first, her face registers a kind of bewilderment to her lawyer's exhibitionism, but then she chooses to be amused by him, in an aloof, amiably flustered way, as if she's thinking, “What did he just say? Oh, well, OK, I'm just along for the ride!” It's the lightness of her effects here that lets us know Stanwyck is responding to Sturges's inventions. She might not have trusted him personally, but creatively she gets what he's doing, and so she's willing to try something new for him.

“Fear turned her legs to lead!” thunders O'Leary, telling the jury that the bracelet had hypnotized Lee. Stanwyck looks down at her own artfully displayed gams and looks slightly apologetic, as if to say, “Don't blame me for this, huh?” John knows that he'll never get Lee behind bars until after Christmas, so he works to get a continuance and then feels guilty about sending her to jail over the holidays. He gets his pal Fat Mike (Tom Kennedy) to post bail for her, and Fat Mike brings her to his apartment, where Lee thinks she knows what he's after. “One of these days, one of you boys is going to start one of these scenes differently,” Lee says, “and one of us girls is going to drop dead from surprise.”

The wonderful thing here is that Stanwyck is taking a situation that she has always played for heavy drama before and turning it on its head. She does have a sense of humor, but it's a very dry one—bone dry, in fact—so that when she gets a big laugh, which is well within her power at this point, it is always based in sorrowful experience. One thing Stanwyck could never be is silly; when Sturges has Lee act a little cute as she realizes that John doesn't want her sexually, Stanwyck plays it as a wholly unnatural ploy. Her manipulation of John is all on the surface and sweetly tired-out, because Lee, like so many other Stanwyck women, is sick of playing games.

They go out to eat and talk about their situation. “Sounds like a play, doesn't it?” asks Lee, which is Sturges acknowledging the whole “movie pitch idea” of his basic screenplay, then mocking it when John replies, “Sounds like a flop.” This meta strain in Sturges's work is only in its infancy here; later on, he sometimes went too far with his “you're watching a movie!” stunts. In
Remember the Night
, this exchange leads us directly into the most important scene in the film, where Lee tries to explain her concept of right and wrong to John.

Lee asks John if he would steal a loaf of bread if he was starving, and he says yes. She smiles knowingly and then says that she wouldn't do that; instead, she would go out and have an expensive dinner and then
tell the maître d' that she'd lost her purse. He would only steal out of desperation, but she's a career chiseler. For a moment John gets lost in this distinction, then he tells her that her way is smarter. “That's it,” Lee says, some deep recognition lighting up her face. “We're smart.”

This is one of the most multi-leveled and disturbing of Stanwyck's “realization” moments, probably because for Sturges everything has to be verbal. Stanwyck can't just act here with her face, as she does in
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
or
Stella Dallas
. Stanwyck often claimed that she was not an articulate woman, and people who knew her tended to agree with that assessment, even though she seemed articulate enough in her few filmed interviews. Though she called herself inarticulate, or uneducated, maybe what Stanwyck really meant was that she was afraid of words and what they might reveal about her, and about people in general. And if she was afraid of words, then her collaboration with Sturges becomes even more suggestive. He led her out of her established comfort zones and into the kind of brilliant, yearning talk that could bring her to both new levels of understanding and new levels of desolation, all mingled together in her voice and her eyes when she says, “That's it. We're smart.” Lee leads John into an ethical trap, but then his response traps her in the kind of recognition that Sturges can put into words and Stanwyck can convey like a vibrating tuning fork.

While John and Lee dance, he asks if her mother is still alive. “I hope so,” Lee says, still a little confused about her feelings for him, and by the band playing “My Old Indiana Home.” They're both Hoosiers, it turns out, and John offers to drive her home for Christmas. “Oh, gee,” she says, a very un-Stanwyck exclamation, and it's as if Lee wants to try out being the kind of girl who can say, “Oh, gee” and mean it. Lee and Jean in
The Lady Eve
are two crooks who are seduced by innocence, and in Sturges's world, the crooked people who start to long for vanished purity or respectability—or, in Lee's case, a conscience—are usually destroyed for their trouble. They would have been much better off just staying corrupt, a conclusion born of Sturges's deep cynicism. It's this cynicism that feels true, not the squirming toward a happy ending that he tried to pass off as the unlikely reward for American striving.

That cynicism rears its head when an increasingly affectionate John and Lee, on the way to meet her mother, are confronted by a mean Indiana farmer, a gun-toting militia type who has built a detour onto his property just so he can capture and punish anyone unlucky enough to drive through. When this man takes them to a local judge, Sturges mercilessly dissects the narrow-minded prejudice of these two men.
“Weren't even
married!”
says the farmer; tellingly, John picks up on the tone of his words and wanders into a bewildered little digression about how the farmer has just made the word “married” sound, well, dirty. Sturges celebrates the discerning sophistication of John's open sensibility, just as he rightly condemns the crummy ignorance of the small-minded small town men. He also makes us feel that we would need to act like the corrupt Lee when confronted with men like these. John's sensitive deliberations only makes things worse, but she's street smart enough to light a fire in a wastebasket and get them the hell out of there.

In his car, Lee jeers a bit at John's naïveté, and Leisen takes one of Stanwyck's few faults as a performer, her inability to play direct sarcasm, and makes it seem like Lee's confusion about her own feelings. This is the emotional muddle that leads her right into the lion's den, the place where she came from. Lee tries to fool herself along the way that her mother will be glad to see her (“Yeah, I guess she will alright,” she chirps), but when she's in front of her mother's house, a bit of instinctual panic sets in: “I'm getting scared,” she says finally, her eyes blank and staring.

Lee's emotions trip her up, and she's isn't as smart as John is, but her instincts are 100 percent trustworthy. When she walks up to the door of her former home with John, Lee deteriorates into a frightened little girl talking all in a rush about being a tomboy and climbing trees and how she would have run away to sea if she had been born a man. She knocks on the door and hears a loud dog. Could it be the same dog that …. Oh, no, it can't be, she says; he would be too old (at this point, the once glossy
Remember the Night
has become as foreboding as a horror film). A man answers her knock, and Lee asks for her mother by name. “I guess you mean my wife,” he says, in a manner that couldn't be less friendly.

Then, suddenly, a forbidding female face rushes out of the dark, and it's obviously Lee's mother (Georgia Caine). This is the sort of moment that's entirely dependent on casting (Caine is chillingly perfect) and lighting, and the scene that follows is Leisen's moment to shine. “Merry Christmas, Mama,” Lee says, in a pure, girlish voice. But once Lee and John are inside, Lee's mother bluntly asks, “What you come here for? What do you want?” Lee tries to tell her that she just wanted to see her, but her mother cuts her off: “Good riddance to bad rubbish I said the day she left.” Her mother says that Lee is just like her father, who laughed at serious things. Though he doesn't specify exactly what she means, Sturges suggests that the things a woman like this thinks are serious are anything but. Lee laughing at these “serious” things is analogous to
John wondering over the mean tone the farmer uses when he says the word “married,” a more open intelligence rejecting the junk that closed-minded people accept without thinking.

Years ago, Lee borrowed some money, but her mother said Lee stole it and then told the whole town that her daughter was a thief. We weren't good enough for her, Lee's mother says. At this point, Sturges's command of psychological nuance is at its most piercing; in just a few moments, we see exactly what kind of woman this is. She's not a villain. She has problems of her own, and a tiny part of her wants to forgive her daughter (we can see that in Caine's face), but she can't. Mother and daughter are at cross-purposes, and it is these cross-purposes that lead to all the trouble between people, especially family members, and most especially parents and children.

Lee and John leave, and Lee's mother returns to the dark from whence she came. But Leisen frames her silhouette peering out the window at her daughter, who is standing on the porch and crying. Lee tells John that she had forgotten how much her mother hated her, and how much she hated her mother, and then she stops herself. Lee doesn't want to say such an awful thing. She can feel this hatred for her mother, but she doesn't want to say it out loud—because once she's said it out loud, it's official (a very Sturges concept). Now that it's official, there's no room for dreaming of a better life or future. Lee wishes that she had fallen out of that tree in front of her mother's house and died, proof that when you can't evade, put-off, or ignore something as bad as hating your mother, among other unmentionables, you might find yourself in a suicidal state of mind, a progression that Stanwyck always understood. It is Sturges, though, who gets her to actually verbalize this concept, out loud, in all its danger.

When John takes Lee home to his picture-perfect family, Sturges can't quite make these family members as believable as he made Lee's mother or those terrible Hoosiers at the courthouse. He tries to add realistic, knotty detail to John's spinster Aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson), but he has trouble with John's widowed mother, Mrs. Sargent (Beulah Bondi), who is small-minded but not narrow-minded—a type that exists in life, I suppose, but not a type that is all that fruitful or interesting to observe in action. When Mrs. Sargent mentions that John once borrowed some money and then was given the chance to pay it back, there is too neat a correlation between his past and Lee's. But Stanwyck keeps us focused; when she leans over a bed holding a warm nightgown from John's mother, her face gleams the way it did in the stateroom scene in
Ladies
of Leisure
, and this time there is a modicum of hope in her expression. But Sturges can't make this hope feel earned because he has so vividly shown us in the earlier scenes that such feeling is a mirage that might kill you

Mrs. Sargent, who knows the truth about her, gently warns Lee that she might spoil John's career if they were to get married. Lee is standing in front of a mirror, and when Mrs. Sargent puts her hands on Lee's shoulders, Stanwyck freezes, with her mouth wide open, one arm up holding a comb, a vision of complete Mouchette-style awkwardness. Mirrors always bring out Stanwyck's deepest feelings. They seem to tell her that she can't hide and that she needs to show us everything she has in her, even if it isn't flattering or pretty to look at. Since this is a post-Code movie, Lee must pay for her crimes, whereas before 1934 Ernst Lubitsch would have certainly left her free to make up her own mind about what she wants to do next. Leisen films the hushed parting between John and Lee with real tenderness, but the complexities of the early scenes get politely swept under the rug.

“The special tone of
The Lady Eve
is a kind of energetic cruelty, a malicious exuberance” writes James Harvey in
Romantic Comedy
. There's a unique kind of high spirits in Stanwyck's performance in many of her best scenes in
Eve
, so close to the bubbliness of an Irene Dunne or the lyricism of a Katharine Hepburn, but shaded with something more uneasy, more lethal. Harvey writes that her high spirits come out of a kind of “transmuted anger,” and that's probably true. This anger never intrudes on Stanwyck's dual characterization of Jean, a delectable card sharp working on a boat with her father (Charles Coburn) and The Lady Eve Sidwich, a rapacious English noblewoman. But it informs every bit of the pleasure Stanwyck takes while rooking Henry Fonda's slightly rancid innocent, Charles Pike, a snake enthusiast and heir to the Pike's Ale fortune (it's “The Ale That Won For Yale”).