Barbara Stanwyck (32 page)

If anyone, aside from Sanders, deserves some credit here it's cinema-tographer John Alton, who expertly frames the shadows in the opening scenes as Richter tries to hide the body, then startles the eye with a bright shot through a chandelier when the police, headed by Lawrence Mathews (Gary Merrill), come to investigate Cheryl's story. “Writer, huh?” asks Lawrence, when he spies one of Richter's books. “That's one crime of which I am guilty,” Richter replies (Sanders gives him a hoot-worthy little shiver of false modesty).

“A mash of Nietzsche and Hegel,” says Lawrence of Richter's work after having him investigated. When this villain's true colors come out toward the end, his ideas sound like a mish-mash of something, but of what I can't be too sure. Alton lights Sanders satanically as Richter confronts Cheryl in her home, and the naughty actor actually widens his eyes with bloodlust before going into a paroxysm of shouted German (you really do have to see this to believe it). He then grabs Cheryl up in his arms and natters on about how there is hate in love, or love in hate, until she struggles free and runs shrieking for the door.

Stanwyck does a lot of shrieking and running for the door in this picture, and she doesn't get to have even a fraction of the fun that Sanders is having. Cheryl is so weak-minded that Richter easily railroads her into a stay in the bughouse, where she encounters a fearsome Juanita Moore, nursing slashed wrists and a broken heart, and an exhibitionist blond played by Claire Carleton, who can't remember taking her clothes off in the street. Even these cameo players are given more to chew on than Stanwyck, whose character foolishly runs away one more time so that we can have a climax atop a half-finished skyscraper. Her docility with an insulting asylum doctor is particularly hard to take, even if Cheryl is trying to please him to get away from the scene-stealing lady crazies. This is a woman who needs to put on her white gloves before rushing out to find clues about her tormenter, and Stanwyck looks like she knows what a simp she's playing.

Crime of Passion
(1957), a confused but often intriguing crime thriller, comes toward the end of Stanwyck's starring career in movies, and she seems rather burned-out in it—even if there are still some smoldering embers looking for a place to rest and singe us. Her face looks much heavier than usual, even swollen, and when she goes into one of her trademark hysterical tirades, it seems like she's just switching on a faucet and letting the water splash wherever it will.

We first see her character, Kathy Ferguson, reading over some mail. She's a newspaper writer who specializes in advice to the lovelorn. “There's gotta be some happy people left in San Francisco,” says her flunky, also reading her mail. To which she croaks, “Not if I can help it.” He reads her a letter from “Foolish 17,” who is in love with a married man; what should she do? “Forget the man, run away with the wife,” says Kathy boldly, setting up the next few scenes, where this Stanwyck woman is as close to a lesbian character as she gets before
Walk on the Wild Side
(1962).

Her last name is Ferguson, of course, the last name of Stanwyck's publicist den mother, Helen, so that it seems like scriptwriter Joe Eisinger might even be coding this role and throwing a bone to Stanwyck's Sapphic fans. When Kathy gets involved with a murder case (a husband killed by his wife), she comes up against the sexism of policeman Alidos (Royal Dano), who bluntly tells her, “Your work should be raising a family, having dinner ready for your husband when he gets home.” Kathy reacts dreamily and uncertainly to this chauvinist junk, but she still manages to get back at the cop by obtaining the address of the murderous wife, and then withholding the information from Alidos. We expect a little more feistiness from Kathy in these early scenes, but Stanwyck needs to prepare us for what's coming, so she walks a shaky line between satisfaction and skittishness (in the newsroom, director Gerd Oswald gives her several close-ups to register her distracted unrest with the boss at her paper, who runs articles twice because he thinks no readers will care).

Oswald then delivers a montage of women reading Kathy's column. We see a wife in bed, staring unhappily at her sleeping husband in the twin bed next to her, followed by an image of two girls cuddled up together blissing-out over Kathy's woman-on-woman copy: “Where can we turn, except to the heart and understanding of another woman?” Where indeed? Two B-girls at a bar commiserate over Kathy's newspaper come-ons, and two extremely butch female cabbies nod their heads over it, as if Oswald is about to stage a lesbian revolution.

No such luck, of course, but at least the film includes such options in its opening half hour. When cop Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) talks to Kathy over dinner about the virtues of a home and family for a woman, Kathy quite rightly shuts him up by saying, “Propaganda, not for me.” Oswald then gives Stanwyck a lingering close-up, as Kathy talks about wanting to go to sea (just as Lee Leander did in
Remember the Night
). In this scene, where she looks so sad, so heavy with sorrow and marking time, Stanwyck gets across an entirely new and very painful sense of
nihilism and foggy hopelessness, a far too strong and upsetting emotional coloration for the larval narrative that follows.

Kathy marries Bill, for reasons that seem purely self-destructive, and then she tries to adapt to being a housewife. She says that she wants to be “a good wife,” as if the repressive mores of the time have finally gone to her head, and she's grabbing at them like a drowning woman grabbing at a lifejacket. Maybe she's gone a little crazy; how else to explain a Stanwyck character who says, even in the late fifties, that she wants nothing more than to darn a man's socks?

Right away, Kathy is completely lost in Bill's working-class milieu. The women chatter inanely about their TV sets, while the men talk about salary hikes. The worldly Kathy is knocked like a pinball between two opposing hells, not at all right with the women and not accepted by the men. Neither group is worth trying for, but Kathy's identity crisis has her gravitating naturally to men—even unworthy men—over women. Is Kathy a completely repressed, never-active lesbian? And could Stanwyck identify with that uncomfortable state?

Crime of Passion
raises all kinds of questions like this, but it can't begin to answer them; to do so would have been impossible in 1957. So why does Oswald set up those obviously lesbian cabbies as a kind of visual alternative for Kathy? In the pre-Code
Ladies They Talk About
, the film sets up the presence of a butch lesbian who likes to wrestle and Stanwyck's layered, almost impressed reaction to her. These characters and her relation to them set Stanwyck up as a lesbian icon; it doesn't matter if she never did anything sexually with a woman off-screen. On-screen, especially as she got older and her voice lower, Stanwyck could sometimes throw subliminal, perhaps subconscious hints out to the girls. To be a great actor and a great star, you need androgyny—not too much, but just enough to keep everyone on their toes.

Another montage shows how the vapid talk surrounding Bill's friends and their wives makes Kathy sick, and
Crime of Passion
begins to seem like a feminist nightmare, short on sense and rhetoric, but long on suggestions of despairing mood and feeling. Kathy rails against the “mediocrity” she sees around her, and it's easy to feel that this is Stanwyck herself passionately condemning a conformist culture that is about to put her out to pasture on television—that little box that all the dull housewives here chat about. But when Kathy starts to scheme and wheedle to get Bill promoted, it becomes an open question whether she is “unnatural,” in this film's terms, because of her drive and her need to work, or if the sexist society she lives in is entirely to blame.

The film wants to have it both ways, so that most audiences in 1957 could see Kathy as just a misfit, yet when we see this film now, it's impossible not to think she's being driven crazy by a sick, unfair society. What is Kathy's damage? We never really learn, and when she tangles with Raymond Burr's police bigwig, this encounter further muddies the waters. He lays Kathy (which is almost laughably unconvincing, given their lack of chemistry), and then says he's going to give a good job not to Bill but to the odious Alidos, who started this whole mess with his sexist challenge. It all ends in murder, of course, and the incarceration of a woman who would have been far happier meeting up with, say, Agnes Moorehead or Jan Sterling at a bar and setting up house afterward.

Sorry, Wrong Number

B
ecause Stanwyck never worked at one studio for long, she never had studio backing in the annual Oscar race, and so she went home empty-handed four times, the last time for a movie version
Sorry, Wrong Number
, an expanded adaptation of Lucille Fletcher's well-known radio play. Stanwyck made no bones about her disappointment at not winning an Oscar. When she lost in 1937 for
Stella Dallas
, she was quoted as saying, “I put my life's blood into that one. I should have won.” Certainly she should have won over that year's winner, Luise Rainer, for her mostly silent, victimized Chinese wife in
The Good Earth
. But Greta Garbo never won an Oscar either, and I'd probably give it to her for her career-best work in
Camille
that same year. Stanwyck's 1941 nomination for
Ball of Fire
was a surprise and must be counted as a nod for her work in
The Lady Eve
, too. She lost to Joan Fontaine in
Suspicion
, an uncertain performance that was rewarded to make up for passing over Fontaine's far superior work in
Rebecca
the previous year. At least Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson lost to Ingrid Bergman in
Gaslight
(1944), a performance that was at the very least competitive and given by an actress who was in the same league, talent-wise, as Stanwyck.

Stanwyck's work in
Sorry, Wrong Number
strikes me as an attempt to do something the Oscar voters might like, for the showy role of bedridden neurotic Leona Stevenson calls for something more along the lines of the scenery-chewing style of a Bette Davis or a Joan Crawford than it does Stanwyck's best life-or-death realness. She lost to Jane Wyman's sweet, victimized deaf mute in
Johnny Belinda
(1948), the polar opposite of Stanwyck's strident Leona, who mostly victimizes herself. If I had my druthers, I'd give Stanwyck an Oscar for
Ladies of Leisure
in 1930 (Norma
Shearer could definitely do without her award for
The Divorcee
), and another for
The Lady Eve
in 1941. As for her high-pressure work in
Wrong Number
, I'm glad she didn't win for this atypical, sloppy picture; it's not at all representative of her talent, her artistry, or her overall style.

Agnes Moorehead began her career in radio with Orson Welles, and she started her film career with him in
Citizen Kane
(1941), playing the mother of the future tycoon. She also appeared in Welles's
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942) as the hysterical Aunt Fanny, one of the greatest performances in film history. Moorehead is huge and histrionic in
Ambersons
, but she makes us painfully aware that Aunt Fanny herself knows about her own self-indulgent shortcomings and can't do a thing about them. That awareness, too, is key to her performance in the radio version of
Sorry, Wrong Number
, first broadcast on a show called
Suspense
on May 25, 1943, and then reprised on the radio, by popular demand, seven times before 1960.

Fletcher's play runs a little over twenty minutes, and it makes spooky use of telephone sounds; every dial tone and rotary click ups the chiller ante. Moorehead's original performance in 1943 is her most human and relatable; she emphasized the shrewish nature of Leona as she continued to perform the role over the next twenty years, but she usually began on a quietly whiny note, as if Leona talks just to hear herself speak. Her voice sounds thin, like a querulous spinster's, and she scolds her interlocutors like a prim spinster would after accidentally overhearing a murder plan over a crossed telephone wire.

Leona is given to telling everyone that her health has been poor for twelve years (so that we quickly suspect she's suffering more from a psychosomatic or psychological ailment), and she is easily flustered, a weakness that will be her ultimate downfall. Her thin voice rises up to high, fluting tones when Leona gets imperious; Moorehead excitingly adds some quivers to her middle register as Leona starts to get scared (the best, or at least the most virtuosic, performance she gave of this play was the one she did in 1945). When she calls the police, they reason with her, but she hangs up on them, and then says, “Why did I hang up the phone like that? Now he'll think I
am
a fool.”

Moorehead's Leona is capable of briefly seeing herself for what she is, a professional nuisance, but she's unable to change—not in the twenty or so minutes she has left before she's murdered by the same man she overheard on the crossed wire. She's sick, all right, but sick in her mind, and we can't blame her husband too much for wanting to murder her; she is obnoxious, and exhausting. The achievement of Fletcher's play,
which was written purely as an exercise in radio suspense, and Moore-head's tour-de-force performance, is that we don't want Leona to be killed, no matter how annoying she is. We recoil from her, then identify with her rising panic—quite a feat to pull off in such a limited amount of time.

Moorehead is more than a little hammy, but this part doesn't call for restraint; the role of Leona requires an actress to go as all-out as Moore-head does, with her symphony of gasps and rasps and arpeggios of hysteria up and down the vocal scale. It's a tribute to her work that it's hard to imagine seeing this Leona; she exists as a voice, and Fletcher taps into the fear associated with this disembodiment. On the telephone, we're all verbal consciousness and no body, just as radio voices are Beckett-like instruments talking to themselves, just as Leona does.