Barbara Stanwyck (26 page)

You never know which Wilder you're going to get in these early scripts or in his later movies. There's the man who completely understood Gloria Swanson's demented silent screen relic Norma Desmond in
Sunset Boulevard
(1950) and the changing gender mores of
Some Like It Hot
(1959), and then there's the clod whose camera tours the ruins of Berlin in
A Foreign Affair
(1948) to the strains of “Isn't It Romantic?” and who torments Ray Milland's drunk for showy fun in
The Lost Weekend
(1945). To quote his old boss, Samuel Goldwyn, with Wilder you have to take the bitter with the sour.

Critical opinion on Wilder has always fluctuated, mainly because it hinges on these highly subjective questions of taste, on deciding when
he goes too far or when he doesn't go far enough. For the first movie he wrote for Stanwyck,
Ball of Fire
(1941), Wilder gleefully stresses what he sees as the vulgarity in her character, and she rises to the bait while maintaining an untouchable sort of shrewdness. Whatever his faults, Wilder had a keen talent for coming up with character names, and he gives Stanwyck a doozy here: Sugarpuss O'Shea, a gangster's moll forced to take it on the lam with a cadre of professors working on an encyclopedia.

There are seven of these old profs, just like the seven dwarfs, plus one young grammarian, Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), who needs Sugarpuss to teach him the ins and outs of modern slang, the boogie woogie, the hoi toi toi, the corny and the cheesy. Potts too is well named, and his last name means that Sugarpuss gets to call him Pottsie, reminiscent of Stanwyck's name for Fonda, “Hopsie,” in the vastly superior
The Lady Eve
, which had been such a hit earlier in the year. Cooper's character name thus feels like a nudge reminding people of another movie they liked.
Ball of Fire
is nothing if not commercial.

Stanwyck received her second Academy Award nomination as best actress for
Ball of Fire
(it really should have been for
Eve
, but the academy members had
Ball of Fire
more freshly situated in their minds), so it has pride of place in her filmography. While she's somewhere near her best in it—and certainly as sexy as she'd ever be in a movie—
Ball of Fire
is a flawed film, and there are several reasons why it never quite comes together. It runs one hundred and eleven minutes, which is rather lengthy for such a slim subject, and it has several scenes that go on far too long—especially a sequence where Dan Duryea's hood, Pastrami, is holding the professors hostage and they slowly work toward getting a heavy portrait to fall on his head.

Pastrami starts shooting things in their room at random, hitting a flower vase that explodes right next to the camera. This ostentatious shot is a good example of another problem here: Gregg Toland's deep focus photography seems much more suited to a somber melodrama like
The Little Foxes
(which he shot the same year). So many of Toland's shots are simply too heavy looking and deliberate for light comedy. When Potts confesses the deepness of his love for Sugarpuss, Toland has Stanwyck put on blackface so that only her eyes glow in the dark, and this trick is typical of his stylistic excesses, which never suit Wilder's material.

Then there's the question of tone. The scenes with the professors are just this side of cutesy, with a bedtime nursery score emphasizing what harmless old sweeties these guys are. The actors playing the professors generally follow suit. S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall has many reasons to slap his
hands on his shaky jowls to get a laugh, while Henry Travers does his blandly beaming Henry Travers thing. Richard Haydn (as Professor Oddly) is too much in love with the sound of his own overly fastidious voice, so that his speech about his own marriage seems to go on longer than it should. Only that memorable on-screen scoundrel Tully Marshall bothers to seem like a three-dimensional person as Professor Robinson, and the script doesn't give him enough to work with. If Marshall had played Professor Oddly, the speech about marriage might have had a chance of working.

As Miss Bragg, the old maid housekeeper who treats the professors like naughty children, Kathleen Howard, best known as the harridan wife to W.C. Fields in
It's a Gift
(1934), is stuck in an unlikable, go-nowhere role. At one point, Sugarpuss punches Bragg out to keep her from blabbing, and this feels like a mistake, not funny and not really deserved (Stanwyck's punch actually connected during one take, to her horror, and Howard suffered a fractured jaw for her trouble). Worse still, the coy professor scenes are intercut with a kind of gangster picture featuring Dana Andrews as criminal kingpin Joe Lilac. Andrews's scenes feel perfunctory, and at the end, he and his men are tossed into a garbage truck, as in a cartoon, yet they seem all too unpleasantly real in earlier parts of the movie. And Cooper is not as precise a comedian as Henry Fonda; his shambling delivery tends to get deliberately vague at times, as if he trusts that his own personal charm can get him out of thinking through his part.

Where is director Howard Hawks in all this? Critic Robin Wood, in his book on Hawks, sees
Ball of Fire
as an attempt to right the “wrongs” of Hawks's magnificent
Bringing Up Baby
, which Wood sees as troublingly anti-intellectual. But to my eyes
Ball of Fire
only reflects a stony lack of interest on Hawks's part. It isn't really a Hawks movie, either in terms of its look, which falls to Toland, or its attitude, which falls to Wilder. Perhaps the chief culprit, though, is producer Sam Goldwyn, who always managed to impart an overly dignified feeling to most of his movies, a heavy touch fatal to a brash comedy like this.

Considering all these obstacles, it's nearly incredible that Stanwyck is as good as she is here. There are classic moments, to be sure, not least Sugarpuss's first entrance. Potts is in a nightclub, researching his slang and jotting down colorful terms in a notebook (something I can imagine Wilder himself doing, so greedy was he for the low side of American culture to remind him of vestiges of his own lost Weimar milieu). We see a lacquered fingernail pounding out the beat to Gene Krupa's “Drum
Boogie” on a curtain, and the nail seems sexy, a little contemptuous, impatient. Even when she's only acting with the fingers of one hand, Stanwyck manages to give a nuanced performance.

Sugarpuss practically leaps out on stage, wearing a spangly-tatters outfit courtesy of Edith Head that shows off a bare midriff and Dietrich-caliber legs. Martha Tilton, a Benny Goodman warbler, dubs Stanwyck's singing. The voice may be a little too high, but it's still not a bad fit (it would have been better to have dubbed Stanwyck with Krupa's lead canary, Anita O'Day, whose spirited, libidinal, croaky style would have ideally matched the star). The best moment is when Tilton's voice cuts out and Stanwyck herself cries, “C'mon, Krup, knock yourself out!” and we see the manic, highly sexual Krupa do his inimitable thing with his drums. “Yeah!” Sugarpuss breathes—almost hisses—at the close, using Stanwyck's own voice again. There's a brief reprise where Krupa plays the boogie with matchsticks, spoiled by Toland's glossy concept shot of Sugarpuss's face gleaming down on a table as he saws away.

“Screw, scram, scraw,” says Sugarpuss, trying to get rid of Professor Potts at her dressing room door, but she changes her tune when she realizes she'll need a place to stay to hide from the police. She makes another entrance, even more striking, when she shows up at the professors' domicile. Potts opens the door and she winks and says, “Heidi Ho!” clicking her tongue on her palette (there's elemental rain beating down behind her). When she hears the seven old professors scampering upstairs, she says, “Hey, what is that?” in a harsh, mean-sounding voice. Stanwyck is always alert to the moments when Sugarpuss lets her hard edges emerge.

Sugarpuss was an orphan, it seems, like Ruby, and ran away from her aunt, but her childhood is no bummer in this movie. Stanwyck tosses the single line about the aunt away as if an unhappy childhood couldn't possibly matter at this point. Unlike Jean Harrington, whose father insists that she be “crooked but never common,” Sugarpuss can be downright dirty, as when she reacts to Potts's embarrassment at not being quite dressed, unsettling him with, “You know, once I watched my big brother shave”—one of those Wilder remarks that just skirts that line of upset stomach bad taste. The Wilder “note” is so different from Brackett's prep school elegance that it's easy to guess at who did what; the Oddly marriage speech, for instance, seems like pure Brackett.

“Wee, that's a lot of books!” exclaims Sugarpuss, taking in the large encyclopedia working room. “All of 'em different?” she asks. At a moment like this, I'm grateful that uncultured but ever-sharp Stanwyck is
playing this Sugarpuss, and not, say, Ginger Rogers, who was originally pursued for the part but turned it down. Rogers would have played it “dumb,” self-consciously, which is not something Stanwyck could ever do; witness the failure of her dippy heiress in
The Mad Miss Manton
. “This is the first time anybody's moved in on my brain,” says Sugarpuss, almost seriously, plunking herself down in a chair and saying she'll work “all night.” This is not an idle boast, of course. Sugarpuss is likely one of the best lays in the world—a little scary, maybe, but worth it. When Potts hems and haws, she lifts one of her legs up into his face and commands, “Alright, feel that,” extending her foot enough so that Luis Buñuel or Quentin Tarantino would salivate. It's cold, says Potts. “It's cold and
wet
,” she emphasizes, in a lower, more forceful voice, so that this simple statement sounds very rough and visceral, bristling with sexual possibilities.

She enlists the professors on her side, giving her hand to “Cuddles” Sakall and then cracking, “Can I have this now, kid?” when he shows no inclination to let it go. Stanwyck gives this movie what it so sorely lacks, speed and dynamism, and though she's still not too comfortable with sarcasm, she's professional enough to deliver the various wisecracks quickly and with aplomb. And she couldn't be more at ease playing the kind of woman who delights in toying with older men's fancies. “Any of you can jerk a zipper?” she asks, when she's trying to close a skirt, her manner not too far from outright hostility, yet willing to be taken by surprise, too. When Sugarpuss falls in love with Potts while manipulating him for her own ends, this romance is believable, even ordained.

Though she knows the score about most of the important things, this is in some ways a naïve woman. After she accepts an engagement ring from Lilac, Sugarpuss wonders if she will continue her nightclub career or “bust in on the Helen Hayes racket,” an idea that doesn't seem either likely or sensible. There are several shots in this movie where Stanwyck is asked to walk slowly away from the camera. This is neither the exploitation stuff of
Mexicali Rose
nor the physical idealization of Capra, but rather the pro playing all of her cards, as if she's thinking, “Sure, I have a nice ass. Have a look, that's what it's there for.”

“You're the one I'm wacky about, just plain wacky,” insists Sugarpuss to Potts, with that curious vehemence Stanwyck often brought to love scenes. She puts several books down on the floor so that she'll be tall enough to kiss the towering Cooper. When his Potts asks her what she's doing, Sugarpuss says, “Oh, you'll find out,” in a heated, offhand way that would get any heterosexual man's blood racing. Lilac tells Potts that Sugarpuss is a materialist who “sulks if she has to wear last year's
ermine,” but, like many Stanwyck women, she has a basic fineness that lets her see, finally, that there are more important things than fur coats.

When Sugarpuss realizes that she really loves Potts, Stanwyck gets her abstracted look and practically spits out, “I love him because he's the kind of guy who gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk, and I love the way he blushes right up over his ears. I love him because he doesn't know how to kiss, the jerk!” As the writer Sheila O'Malley put it in a tribute piece to Stanwyck, “His very innocence shames her. Yet she loves him. She loves his innocence. And yet there's that epithet at the end, ‘the jerk'! She's got an edge. She's feeling as mushy as she's ever gonna feel, and that pisses her off.” Sugarpuss gets sidelined a bit during the last third, but she's made her brassy “yum yum” presence felt in a movie that needs to get its act together for her and stop working at cross purposes between Wilder's Berlin sarcasm, Toland's pictorial solemnity, Cooper's mannered cuteness, and Hawks's cool indifference.

When I mentioned that I was writing a book about Barbara Stanwyck to people around my age (mid-twenties to mid-thirties), they usually didn't quite know who she was, unfortunately. If they asked me what movies she had been in, I always rushed right to
Double Indemnity
first, thinking they might have at least heard of
that
. Stanwyck probably made better movies, but none seem to have had the pop cultural impact of this Billy Wilder classic—even if some recent commentators have taken to making complaints about the blond wig Wilder had her wear.

Some even question her sex appeal in the film. Stanwyck was more than capable, of course, of turning on the sex appeal in both earlier and later movies, not least in the Wilder-scripted
Ball of Fire
, where she is as delectable a physical specimen as most men could hope for (and here, maybe, is where Hawks's influence might finally show itself). But in
Double Indemnity
, there's a damper placed on that sort of thing, and it has to do, in part, with Wilder's essential misogyny. So many of his movies evince a distaste for women, especially if they happen to be a bit older than an ingénue and still trying to peddle their sexual wares (just look at how he mocks poor Kim Novak in
Kiss Me, Stupid
[1964] or Juliet Mills in
Avanti!
[1972]).