Barbara Stanwyck (31 page)

Leisen and Stanwyck create an intense mood of static despair in this first flashback sequence, and they keep to this mood when Helen gets on her train. She's seated in an uncomfortable position and looks old and tired until Hugh Harkness (Richard Denning) offers her his more spacious seat. Responding to his offer, her face seems to grow years younger,
so that she seems like a grateful little girl: Ruby Stevens at twelve or thirteen, surprised by some bit of random kindness. When Hugh's wife Patrice (Phyllis Thaxter), who is also pregnant, asks about Helen's husband and finds out that there is no husband, she's embarrassed. “Funny, you never think, do you?” Patrice asks, so polite, so cheerful, so unmarked by life. “No, you never do,” Helen murmurs, in a way that takes in her own foolishness and Patrice's radically different ignorance, seeming to measure the enormous distance between the two and then melding the women together so that they can somehow share the same small space. It's as all encompassing a line reading as her, “That's it, we're smart,” from Leisen's
Remember the Night
, only much more beaten down and resigned. Lee Leander is still young enough to wonder at life, but Helen Ferguson is old enough that she has to do the hard work of continuing to exist, even though her existence has been given over to sordid repetitions that she can no longer truly learn from.

In the ladies' room, Patrice comes out with hearty American bromides like, “Don't let anybody tell you that Europe is cheap,” and she insists that Helen try on her wedding ring. There's a real ambivalence in these scenes: Leisen is alert enough to how grating Patrice can be, but he also sees how her basic kindness is something that everyone longs for, the kind of kindness that leads a man to not only give up his more comfortable seat to a pregnant woman, but also try to be friendly with her because she so obviously needs a friend. It's a more complex attitude, finally, than the Leisen/Sturges representation of the perfect family in
Remember the Night
, even though it doesn't last for long. We can intuit Leisen's ultimate feeling about this all-American couple, these non-outcasts, by the gleeful, abrupt way with which he dispatches them. Trying on Patrice's wedding ring, Helen looks into a mirror, and no sooner has Patrice insisted, “I couldn't have bad luck,” than the mirror shatters (upsettingly, given the consistent relationship on screen between Stanwyck and her mirrors), and the train flips all the way over.

The restroom set where Stanwyck played this scene with Thaxter was built inside a steel wheel. Leisen suspended a camera from a catwalk, and when the train was supposed to be hit, he rotated the wheel all the way around with both actresses inside doing their own stunts. The effect is unnervingly realistic in its violence. Helen is taken from the wreck on a stretcher, which leads to a shot from her perspective looking at a ceiling as doctors cut off her coat and save her baby through caesarian section. When she wakes up, Helen is suffering from a concussion, which Stanwyck suggests by making the emotions behind her eyes seem liquid,
unmoored to her mind. Leisen gives nearly Capra-esque attention to Stanwyck's plain, intensely girlish face in the hospital bed. After Helen realizes they've mistaken her for the dead Patrice, she tries to tell them the truth, but she's too ill and upset to do so. Stanwyck allows herself to be extremely vulnerable in these scenes, and Leisen is sensitive to every small shift in her expression.

Going to meet Hugh's well-off parents, Helen says, “It isn't too late, I can still back out!” several times in voiceover to the rhythm of the train's wheels on the track. Just as she spoke to us so tantalizingly after the opening credits, Helen's voice reappears every so often to tell us her thoughts. This is an interior sort of cinema, and it's saved from gimmickry because its experimental nature isn't stressed. Stanwyck's voice isn't exactly in sync with the train wheels—as it would be, say, in a Rouben Mamoulian movie from the early 1930s. It's enough here to suggest a correlation between things like outside sounds and inside worries.

Helen is met at the station by Hugh's mother, played by the stage star Jane Cowl (whose popularity in the twenties meant that Ruby Stevens became Barbara Stanwyck instead of Jane Stanwyck, according to the former Miss Stevens herself). Given that this is a Leisen movie, Helen's baby boy is soon placed on a plush satin pillow. It must be said that when the plot starts to get more contrived and improbable, the director seems to retreat into his own distinctive set design and lighting, which—because this is a melodrama with a noir patina—is much darker than usual.

Helen keeps making mistakes, of course; she's never sensible enough just to say as little as possible to Hugh's family (but maybe her concussion hasn't worn off yet). Helen is “passing” in these scenes, as Leisen and Woolrich had to, as Stella Dallas tried to. Helen Ferguson, living a lie! (Whatever the truth of the lesbian rumors about Stanwyck and her publicist, Helen Ferguson, who could be very motherly and controlling with her best client, Leisen may have had a private laugh over this character name). Everything up to the train wreck and hospital stay is effectively dreamy, but in this perfect house where Helen is passing, and where family members sit around the piano just as they do in
Remember the Night
, things start to get sleepy rather than dreamy. A part of the problem here is Lund, one of those movie actors from this period who seems to have been employed precisely because of his stolidity and lack of charisma. He's playing a man whose motivations throughout are a mystery, and Lund can do nothing to enlighten you.

Helen gets a threatening telegram. Of course, Stanwyck has to read it to us again on the soundtrack after we've read it ourselves, but it's more
dramatic when she reads it, so we can forgive the reiteration. The unsavory Stephen turns up to blackmail Helen, and Stanwyck has little to do but look worried. (Leisen shot a scene where Stephen slaps her around, and Stanwyck insisted on Bettger actually hitting her, naturally. But this scene was cut, probably because it was too rough, and so we're missing perhaps a key example of Stanwyck's masochistic “hurt me when I tell you to” streak). Stephen forces Helen to marry him (she's set to inherit money). Stanwyck gets a bright idea as she hears the section about “til death do us part” in the marriage vows; you can almost see a thought balloon that says, “I know, I'll kill him!” at this moment. Stanwyck milks the moment as if she's decided to play this one scene comedically—if they weren't going to give her comedies anymore, she'd just have to make her own opportunities. This wild choice punctuates the overly languorous mood of the film quite nicely.

Helen goes to kill Stephen. He's already dead, it seems, but she fires the gun anyway and then gets the weirdly loyal Bill to dump Stephen's body off a bridge. This is another shot, like the train crash, where Leisen surprises us by not cutting away when we expect him to; he lets us see the corpse as it flops over in the air on its way down. “God forgive me,” Helen whispers, finally, and Leisen lets her off the hook with an ending in line with the blonds equal danger theme running through Stanwyck's career. Like many of her movies of this period,
No Man of Her Own
is uneven, but it deserves a lot more exposure and comment than it has received.

Actor Joe DeSantis remembered that there was much tension and “personal unhappiness” on the set of
The Man with a Cloak
(1951), an atmospheric period thriller shot right after the ordeal and humiliation of Stanwyck's divorce from Taylor. It begins promisingly, with David Raksin's ominous score under the credits and some tense low angle shots of 1848 New York, where the saturnine Dupin (Joseph Cotton) observes the arrival of gamine Madeline (Leslie Caron), a French girl who has come to win some money for her fiancée from his reprobate grandfather Thevenet (Louis Calhern). Stanwyck makes her star entrance walking down some stairs in the Thevenet household, her face a mask with little glimmers of contempt burning away underneath, her voice precise and false. She plays Lorna Bounty, a once-celebrated stage actress reduced to keeping house. Lorna is a schemer, almost a Mrs. Danvers type, a stone butch eying young Madeline's Paris lingerie with Sapphic bemusement. Stanwyck parcels out some of her behavioral modes here like individually wrapped gifts, then pulls back into a steady, watchful look.

Recalling her work on this film, Caron remembers the star as a steely pro who tried to deliver the goods on the first take. “Barbara Stanwyck
was very steady and always ready with her lines,” Caron says. “She was sure of herself and acted with conviction. She had chosen her interpretation and stuck to it—I don't think she ever needed more than one take or two. The second take might have been for the soundman or the camera operator, but rarely for her. Of all the actors I've worked with she was probably the one who had the least nerves. She was immensely disciplined.”

At times in this film, there's almost a feeling of a pretentious Albert Lewin movie, but
The Man with a Cloak
is really only interested in being a mystery story with an inane twist at the end, one which reveals Dupin's future identity as a famous writer (an increasingly bored Cotton gives no indication whatever that he might be playing the author of “Annabel Lee”). In its first half hour, the movie has a chamber music quality that is not uninteresting, and Stanwyck's own sorrow on set deepens some of her effects while making others muddier; when she sizes up Dupin, this familiar Stanwyck action is opaque and unreadable. Fletcher Markle, the director, reported that Stanwyck rejected a change that would have made her sinister character more sympathetic, clinging to the integrity of her original conception.

There are some exchanges here where all Stanwyck plays is, “I'm a cool customer.” But this choice pays off in a scene toward the end (which must be the one Markle was referring to) where Lorna explains herself a bit and tells some of her sad history in a way that's so crisp and good-humored that it becomes briefly exciting, delivering a small frisson of “the past can't hurt me” that might have given Stanwyck herself some relief from her own suffering. A scuffle between Dupin and DeSantis's butler at the climax verges on slapstick, but there are moments of value in this picture.

Jeopardy
(1953) was originally a twenty-two minute radio play, and it was expanded enough to make a sixty-nine minute feature, directed for no-frills action and impact by the reliable John Sturges. “Traveling the United States is wonderful,” says Stanwyck, in a voiceover at the beginning, and she goes on to extol the highways and then Tijuana as a travel destination. There's a faint air of condescension in this narration, but to the film's credit, it's this same condescension that will get Stanwyck's character into a jam. She plays Helen, a happy wife and mother of a small boy, for the first pedestrian fifteen minutes or so, but once her husband (Barry Sullivan) gets caught under some pilings from a rotting peer, Sturges and Stanwyck leap into action.

In a few hours, the tide will be coming in and the husband will be drowned. It's been established that this woman doesn't react well in
emergencies. When she tries to ask for help from some Mexican locals, she mispronounces the Spanish word for rope, which her husband had told her; the locals want to assist her, but they can't understand what she's saying. Arriving at a rest stop, Helen runs around a bit (Stanwyck is compellingly panic-stricken) and finally finds some rope. She turns, and as she does so, Sturges frames a hulking man (Ralph Meeker) behind her. Helen runs to him—she sees that he's an American and blindly trusts him, but he turns out to be Lawson, a killer on the run.

Sexy/scary Meeker gives the film a boost of energy. He gets a rise out of Stanwyck, trading slaps with her in his car and leering at her until she realizes that the only way she can save her husband is if she can seduce Lawson. Helen wonders aloud if “every wife” wonders what she would do in a situation like this, a query she repeats at the end of the movie. Earlier, looking out at their deserted vacation spot, she had said, “I hated that jetty the minute I saw it.” These lines reek of bad radio drama—and that isn't the only problem here.

When this woman starts lighting her cigarettes and staring down the convict next to her, Stanwyck loses whatever character she was playing and substitutes one of the strongest aspects of her mature star persona, the Tough Broad Who's Seen It All. This persona doesn't remotely gibe with the weak-willed woman we've seen up to this point; in fact, the gap between where she starts and where she ends is so great that it winds up being rather funny, while also confirming just how large Stanwyck's range was. So she got tired of playing this mousy ‘50s wife; who can blame her? “Savin' your kisses for your husband?” snarls Meeker, as he takes Stanwyck roughly in his arms. Helen puts out for this guy, but we get no sense of what she really feels about this capitulation and what it costs her. The last scene features two unlikely changes of heart for both Helen and Lawson, so that the only thing left to do is admire how Sturges puts over the suspense mechanics of this skimpy drama.

There are several pluses attached to another skimpy movie of this time,
Witness to Murder
(1954), an independent production by screenwriter Chester Erskine for United Artists. The biggest plus is George Sand-ers's hilarious villain, Albert Richter, an ex-Nazi still spreading fascist propaganda in post-war Los Angeles. In the peremptory opener, Stanwyck's interior decorator, Cheryl, awakens from a restless sleep, goes to her window and gives a start. In a reverse shot, we see Richter across the way strangling a blond, ringing her neck until she falls down dead. Erskine's name then appears over the murder window, and his name has pride of place in the end credits, too; he's listed before director Roy
Rowland, who stages the various scenes set in offices very lazily, having the actors just line up in front of desks to spout their boilerplate lines.