Barbara Stanwyck (24 page)

Julien Duvivier's episodic
Flesh and Fantasy
(1943) was a follow-up to his earlier omnibus picture,
Tales of Manhattan
(1942). The last of the three tales here pairs Stanwyck with Charles Boyer. He plays a tightrope walker whose act involves pretending to be drunk and then finding himself on the high wire. We see him choke in the middle of this act (Duvivier was always expert at portraying moments of fear and humiliation), and then later, on a ship, he bumps into Stanwyck's elegantly dressed crook. Boyer's smooth-talking roué act makes an interesting contrast to her wised-up common sense, and she adjusts herself to him, becoming a bit more mercurial, a bit more continental. This pairing was an event, because Boyer was Stanwyck's equal as an actor, and it's a shame that they couldn't have found a good romantic comedy to do together, something more developed than this stylish but flimsy short story.

“
My Reputation
[1946] was what we classify as a good woman's picture,” Stanwyck told John Kobal. “It is a problem throughout the world: the widow who is
comparatively
young, who does start to go out with eligible men, and then gossip starts.” This movie, with its tacit wartime theme, was made in 1944 but only released in America in 1946. In the meantime, it was shown to serviceman overseas as a kind of dream of what they might be coming home to: a glorified suburbia, in this case Lake Forest, Illinois. Stanwyck plays Jessica Drummond, “a wife type” and widow of thirty-three whose former athlete/businessman husband has just died. It's a difficult role for Stanwyck, and she's uneasy in some of the early scenes as she tries to feel her way into this cloistered young matron dominated by a mother (Lucille Watson) who's been wearing black to mourn her own dead husband for twenty-five years. Jessica refuses to wear black, the first of many small rebellions that grow larger as the film goes on.

Jessica is the type who organizes picnics for her two young boys, driving around in her perfect station wagon with picture perfect silent dogs in the backseat. She's naïve and sheltered, and when a married friend (Jerome Cowan) makes a pass at her in his car, she's undone by the sleaziness of the encounter. Running to a female friend (Eve Arden), she breaks down. “I don't know what's the matter with me,” she says, choking up, then smashing her arms into a couch. “I seem to be going to pieces!” she cries, and in this release of emotion, Stanwyck gains some control over her characterization.

She's shaky again when first dealing with a rather leering army major (George Brent). Encased in a tight white sweater, Stanwyck can't stop her eyes from looking a bit too knowing, but she's able to use her
innate rebelliousness when Jessica begins to assert herself with her gossipy neighbors. Curtis Bernhardt, a minor but effective Warners stylist, gives the film a dark, velvety look, and he's capable of striking shots. When Jessica breaks away from her major, his shadow looms over her as she cringes against a brick wall.

My Reputation
is often too polite for its own good; even Arden gets swallowed up in the chintz and candlelight. Stanwyck just seems miscast when asked to choke back hard liquor or to flinch when she sees the major's bed, but in the last half hour she comes into her own. The major tells Jessica that he isn't the marrying kind, and she's bold enough not to care. In one of the last scenes, staged quite beautifully by Bernhardt, Jessica stands in shadows while she relates to her boys how their father had been ill for two years before he died. She has had to go without sex for a while before meeting her major, and this revelation is an unexpectedly frank detail. Right before going in to talk to her sons, Jessica marches to the door and then hesitates slightly before opening it, an illuminating physical grace note that lets us see how closely Stanwyck has melded with her role after her early missteps.

In the fully charged ending, Jessica sees the major off at a train station and reacts gratefully when some passing sailors whistle at her, proving that she's still in her prime and more than just a mother and a widow. Stanwyck finishes Jessica's wave to the major, then just stays in her own feelings of relief and joy for a moment before squaring her shoulders and walking confidently out of the station. This isn't a major film, and Stanwyck strikes out as often as she hits the ball here, but the ending of
My Reputation
is certainly a keeper (Todd Haynes's melodrama pastiche
Far from Heaven
[2002] has a very similar climax, and this Bernhardt film can be seen as a rough sketch for Douglas Sirk's far more complex
All That Heaven Allows
[1955]).

Erich Maria Remarque wrote what would become
The Other Love
(1947) as a treatment for his inamorata Marlene Dietrich, but what wound up on screen was a lot more simplified than his original scenario, and it shares only certain surface similarities to his other work. The glossiest of soap operas, it's an anomaly in the career of André de Toth, who thrived on small crime films and westerns that he made as harsh as possible. And it's also anomalous for Stanwyck, in that she plays in a totally different style to suit this purple material, deploying an expert sort of feyness and quiet lyricism. As Karen, a concert pianist suffering from tuberculosis, she even pitches her voice much higher than usual, so as to sound as breathy and gaspy as possible (reviews of the time, however, noted that she made an absurdly healthy-looking patient).

The heroine looks better and better as she gets sicker and sicker, and Stanwyck shows up in a new (and becoming) Edith Head ensemble in practically every scene. The film has more clothes sense than dramatic sense. “There's been a lot of men in my life,” chirps Stanwyck's Karen. “Bach, Brahms and Beethoven!” She plays the piano athletically, like someone digging ditches, and has David Niven as her lovelorn physician and Richard Conte as her rich racecar driver lover. Conte was a replacement for Robert Stack, who shot the film for a month before falling ill and dropping out. Conte acts more like a gangster than a playboy, while Niven is too lightweight for his role.

De Toth seems uninterested for most of the film, so that what should be a grand wallow in glamorous sickbed masochism seems more like a chore (Stanwyck was out sick for a while during shooting, unusual for her, and her illness added to the film's troubles). “At that time the motion picture industry was still shackled to Hollywood,” de Toth later said. “We who were seeking reality not only in portraying characters but also in presenting real geographical locations had a great deal of difficulty and many obstacles to overcome.”

Apparently Stanwyck shot a death scene. In the sixties, she talked about watching the film at home: “I have no will power. I watch all the old movies on TV, including some of mine …. But it does make me angry that they cut these movies. They cut key scenes. One of mine,
The Other Love
with David Niven, had a dramatic scene at the end, where I'm dying of consumption. Just before my death, Niven is talking to me. He knows I'm dying and I know it. It was very difficult doing. On TV, right in the middle of the scene, when David is talking and I'm gasping for breath, they end it, cutting out the death. I look like an idiot.” IMDb lists the running time for this film as 95 minutes, but most circulating prints run 89 minutes, and a little-girlish Karen is still alive at the end of this print, cozied up to her doctor as he plays the piano for her.

The following year, Stanwyck cut her long hair short for
B. F.'s Daughter
(1947), an MGM adaptation of a John P. Marquand novel, and this haircut instantly made her look more severe and matronly. The early scenes are set in 1932, but no attempt is made in sets or costumes to suggest this period. Thus, Stanwyck's Polly, the devoted daughter of industrialist B. F. Fulton (Charles Coburn), meets her future husband Thomas (Van Heflin) in a staid-looking MGM cocktail lounge that's supposed to be a downtown speakeasy. Thomas is a Columbia professor with leftist ideas, but the film is generally vague on the subject of politics. At one point, Thomas mentions that he's written about B. F.'s “interlocking companies,” but this is the only hint that her father might be up to
anything crooked. Once married, Polly uses B. F.'s right-wing money and influence secretly to advance the lecture career of her leftist husband, a neat irony that the film is too wishy-washy to do anything with.

As
B. F's Daughter
goes on, the hugely wealthy, up-by-his-bootstraps B. F. is painted as a man so sentimental that he has kept several ailing companies going purely out of love. Unlikely, of course, but B. F. really is the swellest old capitalist you're ever likely to meet. This admission inspires Polly to fight for her dead marriage, which is the film's ultimate message—one that Stanwyck herself took too much to heart off-screen, I'm afraid. This is another film choice that reveals just how right wing Stanwyck was at heart (Keenan Wynn's opportunistic left-wing radio broadcaster here is a cartoon character to match the wilder excesses of
Red Salute
). It was shot quickly by old MGM hand Robert Leonard, and it was a cheerful set where a lot of practical jokes were played. The shrewd Bette Davis once remarked that happy sets rarely make for great or even good films, and
B. F.'s Daughter
is a case in point. This is a soap opera, one where a woman is finally forced to say, “I need you!” to a weaker-willed husband, and one masquerading at times as a glossy piece of right-wing agit prop.

Bosley Crowther, the film reviewer for the
New York Times
, could usually be counted on to get everything wrong, but he hit a rare bullseye when he wrote about Stanwyck's next MGM soap outing,
East Side, West Side
(1949): “A picture that just about hits the low-water mark of interest, intelligence and urgency.” Like
B. F.'s Daughter
, it runs 108 minutes on very little story (at least Stanwyck's mid-thirties stinkers at Warner Bros. only lasted a little over an hour), and there's no feel at all for Manhattan on the clean studio sets. This is late studio filmmaking at its most barren and machinelike.

The film is filled with fine actors like James Mason and Van Heflin, but they're stuck in dull roles, and Stanwyck herself is saddled with the worst role as the kind of sniveling, stoic wifey who does nothing but worry about her husband's infidelities. She's up against young Amazons like Cyd Charisse and the ultimate big blond, Beverly Michaels, who acts as a deus ex machina in the last third. Sitting beside Charisse in a car at one point, Stanwyck is photographed like a grizzled old frontierswoman. The resplendent Ava Gardner, playing the hellcat trying to break up her marriage, dominates the whole stultifying enterprise through sheer physical splendor.

In her autobiography, Gardner admits to an affair with Robert Taylor when they made
The Bribe
(1949): “Our love affair lasted three, maybe
four months. A magical little interlude. We hurt no one because no one knew.” Stanwyck, who certainly could be counted on to know the score on things like this, was cuckolded in real life and then had to submit to the indignity of being cuckolded on screen by the same young woman that same year. In their one confrontation scene, Stanwyck goes into lockdown mode, so that Gardner even wins their exchange histrionically, and this isn't the end of the film's trials. Gale Sondergaard, who plays Stanwyck's mother here, was a noted victim of the blacklist. And the future Nancy Reagan, here billed as Nancy Davis, makes an uneasy impression in her few scenes as Stanwyck's loyal friend, as if she'd like to rush over and whisper, “Hey Barbara, let's name some names!”

More time and thought seems to have been lavished on the women's sculptural coiffures than on the script or direction. Their hair is twisted all over their heads into the most crazily elaborate shapes (Charisse in particular must have spent hours with the hairdressers in the morning). The only elements that compel attention here, finally, are these hair creations, a number of unaccountably ugly lamps, and the beauty of Gardner's body (especially her Louise Brooks-like back) in her clothes. Stanwyck is nearly a zombie throughout, looking like she's on some sort of medication, except in one scene where she displays a grand lady condescension to a short New York “type” that's as unattractive as it is uninteresting—even if it is theoretically right for the boarding school priss she's playing.

Close to twenty years after he menaced her in
Night Nurse
, Clark Gable was teamed with Stanwyck in
To Please a Lady
(1950), an MGM star vehicle that gets off to a rocky start. It opens with a poster that reads, “Regina Forbes, America's Leading Woman Columnist, 40 Million Readers, Fearless Exposés.” And then Clarence Brown's camera prowls around a large office, settling on Stanwyck's Regina smoking a cigarette and looking cold and vindictive, as a shrunken Adolphe Menjou cowers in the corner of the frame. They're watching Gable's maverick racecar driver being interviewed on television, and it feels like the screenwriters have given Gable a character that he could have played in his barnstorming style in 1940, but is hard-pressed to put over as the older, much sadder man he is in 1950. There's a similar disconnect with Stanwyck's role in these early scenes, especially when she swaggers around a racetrack and has to listen to the drivers crow, “Take a look at that chassis!” and “Nice looking dish!” She seems embarrassed by this, not because she's lost her looks in any way (she never really did), but because their catcalls sound like they should be directed at a young bombshell, not a seasoned, attractive middle-aged woman.

The racecar sequence at the beginning and the one that ends the film play out as filler, but Brown often gives this movie a grey-toned, somber kind of melancholy that can't have been entirely intentional, as if he's taking his cues from his weathered stars. And stars they are, two of the greats—it's a pleasure to watch them together in a nighttime scene where her high heels sink into the dirt of the racetrack and he gallantly carries her around. Gable's driver intrigues Regina by slapping her face; Stanwyck takes the slap without flinching, as if her stoicism was so well known by this point that it's almost getting to be a joke.