Barbara Stanwyck (30 page)

The miracle actress who needed Capra's protection in order to give her all on the first take had developed a formidable technique over the years. In a scene where Joan tries to get money from a pawnbroker, Stanwyck went even further with her character's outraged gentility and sense of shame, and she did so under trying conditions. Gordon said, “Houseley Stevenson, who played the pawnbroker, was getting along in years and had difficulty remembering his lines. Because the scene was so emotionally draining for Barbara—there were no fake tears in her performance—after several takes I reconciled myself to settling for a less than satisfactory performance on the old man's part rather than ask her to keep repeating the scene. But Barbara insisted on my staying with it until she knew I felt we'd gotten it right. The wear and tear on her nervous system that day was considerable—but that's the way Barbara
worked.” If you're going to shoot for being “the best of all,” you must have flexibility and discipline. Stanwyck dug ever deeper into the reservoir of her emotions until it seemed, at times, that the rage and pleasure and agony she needed had no limit.

How did she learn to do this? In a bind like this pawnshop scene, when she had to keep repeating herself, Stanwyck may have used her own version of sense memories. When actors are dry and need a boost, they often have go-to images, thoughts, and visions from the past that can instantly call up what they need. Some of these spurs and triggers have a short shelf life, but the deepest of them can last for an entire career. What, I wonder, was Stanwyck using to come up with the scenes of Joan at the gambling tables, where she sweats and pants like an animal, her tongue sometimes sliding out of her mouth, followed by the “morning after” bliss when she wakes up in the afternoon? Stanwyck makes it crystal clear, and then some, that gambling is sexually stimulating for passionate Joan, so that there's no doubt that she isn't being satisfied by her husband (and Robert Taylor definitely wasn't satisfying Stanwyck at the time, if he ever had). Eying McNally's Corrigan, who exploits her needs, Joan says that gambling is “noisy and confusing and … just a little
dirty”
—and she doesn't mean the dirt that can be wiped away with a homemaker's dishrag.

Yet
The Lady Gambles
cannot bring itself to put the blame on Joan's good-hearted, dull husband and insists on introducing a red herring, Joan's older sister Ruth (Edith Barrett), a possessive sort who, like Stanwyck's sister Millie Stevens, raised Joan as her own child after their mother died. Bemoaning her spinsterhood, Ruth cries, “I should have put you in a home!” Stanwyck looks alarmed at this exclamation; her own sister did indeed put her in a home, several homes, in fact—most of them bad. Maybe this is part of the reason Stanwyck hesitated about taking this role, for these first scenes with her on-screen sister hit so close to home that they carry a nagging, unresolved tension.

Joan tries to reform, but she's soon gambling again. At this point, Stanwyck comes back from the tables looking like she's drunk, but in the best possible way, hyper-aware and liberated. It's scenes like this that make me wish we could liberate Stanwyck from this well-meaning but somewhat sterile movie and install her into something like Jacques Demy's
Bay of Angels
(1963), where platinum blond Jeanne Moreau makes a religion of roulette and offers it to us like a vision of paradise.

Joan looks like a startled little girl when David catches her gambling again, then sinks down into a chair like a ruined middle-aged woman
(it's often extreme age transitions like this that separate the great actors from the merely good ones). She goes back to pimp-daddy Corrigan with childlike misgiving on her face—this is a movie that suggests a lot, but never follows through on its promises. Joan winds up in a low dive, with blond hair, dancing and rolling customers for money. When a low-life forces her to blow on his dice, Stanwyck makes this moment look deeply humiliating, as if Joan is being forced to give head.

In the last scenes, set in the hospital, Ruth is set up as the villain, but Stanwyck and Barrett (who's quite good) play against the script, so that when Ruth tells Joan that she killed their mother, it seems like there's a deeper trauma at play. In a few moments here, as David tries to comfort Joan, Stanwyck transcends her material and hits a deep well of fear and remorse that feels bruisingly personal. This performance is the opposite of her Megan Davis in
General Yen
: too Method, too Lee Strasberg, too much. The doctor uses laughable reverse psychology to talk Joan out of jumping off a ledge, and the film ends with Joan and David looking out at a new day and a new beginning. But Stanwyck has shown us too much hurt and nervy excitement to make us believe that this woman will ever go back to being a housewife.

When the American Film Institute gave Stanwyck its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987, Walter Matthau remembered her in
The File on Thelma Jordan
(1950, also known as
Thelma Jordan
), particularly the way she sighed, “Maybe I am just a dame and didn't know it.” Matthau then went on to knock her co-star, Wendell Corey, an unprepossessing actor who was good when he was doing a menacing type in Budd Boetticher's
The Killer is Loose
(1956), but who was hard-pressed to hold his own as a leading man opposite Stanwyck.
Thelma Jordan
has a fine director in Robert Siodmak, a past master of film noirs like
The Killers
(1946) and
Criss Cross
(1948), and he brings a solemn, German expressionist look to the first scenes of
Jordan
, where Corey's assistant DA Cleve Marshall staggers into his office, drunk, trying to avoid a dinner with his wife and hated father-in-law. “Fed up,” he says to his co-worker. “You ever heard that phrase? No, you wouldn't, you're not married.”

Siodmak frames a long hallway behind Cleve, and he does the same thing in Cleve's house, where Cleve's slightly whiny wife nags at him over the phone. The director is trying to set up the same sense of gentle disillusionment he found in Charles Laughton in
The Suspect
(1945) and in George Sanders in
Uncle Harry
(1945). But Siodmak is defeated by Corey's limitations and also by the extremely wordy script by Ketti Frings, which always goes out of its way to dissipate any momentum with tangents and unnecessary exposition.

Still, Siodmak works up to a fine entrance for Stanwyck's Thelma, who is revealed in a slight shock cut near the office door, breaking into Cleve's dreamy inebriation with her direct look, her white Edith Head dress and gleaming gold necklace, and her somewhat ritzy manner (lots of British “a's” in these first scenes). Cleve and Thelma get to know each other at length, and as their scenes plod along, it's hard not to wish someone like Dana Andrews were playing Corey's role, someone with some charisma and presence. Andrews could have kept
Thelma Jordan
from descending into the doldrums, as it often does during its first half hour or so.

We get lots of chatty dates between Thelma and Cleve, yet the screenplay barely establishes Thelma's rich aunt (Gertrude Hoffman) before having her shot off-screen. The narrative is more interested in “whodunit” than character, and Stanwyck puts the brakes on, merely walking us through Thelma's back-story, which involved being a hostess at a gambling house and dreams of becoming an actress, both of which sound promising but get little follow-through. When Thelma and Cleve run around the scene of the crime, things start to get unintentionally comic because they keep panicking. “Touch the safe!” he tells her. “Wait, what about the window?” she asks. “I left a note!” she remembers. They wipe fingerprints off things, put new fingerprints on other things, turn the corpse over, and so on. Stanwyck's “fear” feels lazy, or at least unconvincing—which might be the point, but couldn't Thelma show
some
acting talent?

Siodmak told an unsettling story about working with Stanwyck on this film. “Barbara always had the character completely worked out,” he said. “Before we started shooting, she would be sitting in her chair, her eyes closed and her concentration on the scene she was to play.” This sounds like her, but then he added: “One day, before a very difficult scene, I tried to give her some last minute advice. That was the only time she showed any temper. She brushed me impatiently aside. I didn't mind, for I was sure she knew what she wanted to do.” Judging from her rote work in
Thelma Jordan
, it's a shame that Stanwyck gave Siodmak the brush-off. He was often an exceptional director of actors, and he could have helped her deepen parts of this character that needed deepening, especially the sense that Thelma is a frustrated actress, which never really comes through in Stanwyck's performance. You'd think it would be catnip to her as a performer who, at her best, was always aware of the levels of role-playing everyone engages in.

Things improve slightly when we get to court, where Thelma is tried for murder, even if there are unwelcome echoes of
Remember the Night
,
a far superior film, as Cleve deliberately throws the case out of love for his mistress. When Cleve shows Thelma a photo from her gambling girl past, we see Stanwyck in a blond wig, usually a scary sight, but here it looks so fake that this photo reveal gets another unwanted laugh. There's a good scene with Thelma's crooked lawyer (Stanley Ridges), where he details his crookedness from the shadows; this is the only point where Stanwyck seems genuinely engaged in the film. The climax gives her a nasty bit of business with a cigarette lighter in a car, and then a tearful bedside confession where she talks about her good/bad nature and wonders, “You don't suppose they could just let half of me die?” before expiring. We are left to wonder what Stanwyck might have accomplished with Siodmak if she had been more open to him and if Frings's script had been more concise.

As it is,
Thelma Jordan
is the kind of movie that can be viewed several times without any memory of past viewings. Perhaps Stanwyck was suffering from noir fatigue: “My God, isn't there a good comedy around?” she asked at the time. “I'm tired of suffering in films. And I've killed so many co-stars lately, I'm getting a power complex!” Screwball comedy with feelings, for Preston Sturges, had been much more agreeable to her than noir and its restrictions, but she never did get another comedy role (it's a shame she didn't work for Hawks again in the early fifties, or for Blake Edwards in the early sixties).

Stanwyck had much more enthusiasm for
No Man of Her Own
(1950), which reunited her with Mitchell Leisen. Director Leisen, who got such exceptional work from her in
Remember the Night
, gave her a book he was interested in called
I Married a Dead Man
by Cornell Woolrich (written under the pseudonym William Irish). She was so taken with its morbid plot that she insisted to Paramount that it be her next picture for them. Woolrich stories have been made into many fine films, most notably Hitchcock's
Rear Window
(1954). This Hitchcock-type material is sometimes not in Leisen's comfort zone, yet he manages to personalize a lot of it (Woolrich was gay, as Leisen was, and there's a sensibility at work here that makes their outsider status plain).

The opening scenes, which were written by Catherine Turney, are inventively done: Leisen begins with an image of an idyllic suburban street, as Stanwyck starts to talk to us on the soundtrack: “The summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield. They smell of heliotrope and jasmine, honeysuckle and clover.” She pitches her voice higher here, which suits the woman she's playing, Helen Ferguson (the same name as that of Stanwyck's longtime publicist and special friend, a former actress who sometimes lived with Stanwyck and protected her from the press).

Helen urgently describes the hush of the evenings, the stillness in a place like this. “The summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield,” she says, “But not for us. Not for us.” She will repeat this “not for us” mantra again. It refers specifically to her and her boyfriend Bill (John Lund) as they ponder what to do about an inconvenient murder. But in Stanwyck's reading the line also speaks to the outcasts of this world, the people who aren't welcome in homes like this, the Lee Leanders, the Mitchell Leisens, the Cornell Woolrichs—and the Barbara Stanwycks, of course. She was as secure as she'd ever be in Hollywood in 1950, and as socially accepted. She was politically conservative, so she had no fear of the blacklist of that time. But some worldly people can only go so far in their pursuit of a happiness that stems from a feeling of unthinking security, and her Helen Ferguson discovers as much—just as Lee did, and just as Stanwyck did.

Leisen takes you inside a large, comfy house, and Helen talks about the cleanness inside (“the smell of
wax
,” Stanwyck emphasizes, so forcefully that you begin to smell it). We see Helen sitting across from Bill with a blond-headed baby boy in her lap. The couple seems to be at the end of an argument, locked in stalemate. “This is a thing apart,” says Helen, “this is murder.” She goes upstairs to put the baby to bed, and Leisen darkens his frame so that we can only see Stanwyck's eyes glowing from the shadows. Helen's voice continues on the track, leading us into a flashback. She says she was desperate, and we see her in a phone booth, down to just a few pieces of change, pregnant and stranded in New York.

In this flashback, Stanwyck makes her face into a stony mask with a shining forehead; she wears little or no make-up. We see Helen dragging her pregnant bulk up some stairs, and then she begins to cry desperately at a closed door. We see her betrayer, Stephen (Lyle Bettger), and his new woman, a blond (Carole Mathews). Helen has begged there before, for she has nowhere else to go, and Stephen slips some money into an envelope and slides it under the door to her. Helen opens the envelope and pulls out a train ticket to San Francisco. She thinks for a moment and finally accepts the situation with Stanwyck's familiar stoicism, grown a bit grim with time. Leisen shows us Helen lumbering back down the stairs of the rooming house, then pulls back so that we see the money left on the landing. She still has some pride, it seems.