Barbara Stanwyck (38 page)

Forty Guns
is a Cinemascope marvel, Stanwyck's only real widescreen movie, if we don't count Sirk's
There's Always Tomorrow
. It begins with a view of the sheer immensity of the western landscape; in another shot, we see the hugeness of the sky, reflecting Fuller's lust for size and hinting at all the happy jokes to come at the expense of male pride. We hear the thunder of hooves; the editing has a kind of musical rhythm as Jessica and her army of men rumble down a hillside to intimidate the Bonnell brothers, whose leader, Griff (Barry Sullivan), has come to clean up Jessica's empire. Fuller uses every inch of the Cinemascope frame to grab and hold not just our attention but all of our senses (this film really needs to be seen on as large a screen as can be found).

The brothers ride into town, and Griff talks to a man who's being menaced by Jessica's bad seed brother, Brockie (John Ericson). The man is nearly blind, and Fuller shows us several frames from his blurred perspective, providing an alienation effect that contrasts with the clarity of those opening shots out on the prairie. Fuller soon switches moods again; we hear a man's voice singing the theme song, “Woman with a Whip,” crooning about how Jessica is “a woman that all men desire,” but no man can tame. Songs were standard on the soundtracks of movies in this period, especially westerns, but Fuller confounds our expectations when Barney Cashman (Jack “Jidge” Carroll) walks into the frame, and we see that he's singing the song for us—or lip-synching it, at least—as the camera follows him in one of the film's first punishingly long tracking shots. The tone here is blunt and outrageous, close to that of Mel Brooks's
Blazing Saddles
(1974), yet it's married to the most sophisticated visual technique imaginable. Fuller possessed exactly the sort of dichotomous sensibility to make a grand filmic swan song for Stanwyck, who made so much of her career by verbally bridging yawning gaps between disparate ways of living and looking at the world.

This is a film about sex on the range; every gun is phallic, and a lot of the dialogue consists of impudent double entendres. “Ah-yah!” Jessica cries off-screen (it sounds guttural and ugly every time she does it). We then see her striding into jail to ask about her brother Brockie, who has shot the nearly blind man. Stanwyck has a wolfish look here and she speaks harshly, but her long ponytail provides a fetchingly incongruous
physical touch (Stanwyck lost a lot of visual mobility after she cut her hair in 1948).

When Griff intrudes on a dinner set for Jessica and her forty guns, Stanwyck puts on such a knowing face that she's obviously decided to play these next moments for laughs—and she gets them. Fuller frames her sitting very still in her chair, and she dominates the wide frames with her stillness, just as Robert Ryan does playing the criminal mastermind of Fuller's
House of Bamboo
(1955). The hair around Stanwyck's face is its by now familiar grey, but something about Fuller's direction has clawed away all the cobwebs that had grown over her on-screen sexuality, so that she's as hot-to-trot, don't-give-a-damn sexy here at fifty as she ever was in her twenties (what a contrasting double bill this movie would make with Capra's
General Yen
). Her Jessica is a totally plausible matriarchal dynamo and born ruler, and we can feel Stanwyck's relief at finally being cast correctly for her age and fully ripened experience (Fuller wanted to make another movie with Stanwyck as Evita Peron, and surely that would have been potent stuff, too).

Jessica asks Griff what he's heard about her and then bites her lower lip and lowers her eyes before ordering all of her men out of the room. Once they are alone, Jessica offers Griff a job; he says that such a job wouldn't be his size. “It could be any size you want it to be,” Jessica purrs, and Stanwyck leaves no doubt about what she's really getting at. Griff takes out his gun. “May I feel it?” she asks. “Uh-uh,” he demurs, not willing to give over control to her. “Just curious,” she says, tauntingly. “Might go off in your face,” he warns. “I'll take a chance,” she near-whispers, relishing Fuller's absolutely filthy double entendre (this is the best dialogue she's had since
Double Indemnity
). She lets out her “whatever” sigh when she handles his gun, tossing it contemptuously in the air. This is a woman who outright owns the guns and the manhood of forty men, and she's not easily impressed.

Later, on the range, Griff wonders if Jessica feels “naked” without her army, and then tells her that one of her men has been misbehaving. “You want to spank him?” he asks her. “I just want to see if you can
take it
,” she says. There seems to be no end to their sex talk, all done barely in code. He tells her she looks upset. “I was born upset!” she declares, one of Stanwyck's best lines, a line that shows just how deeply Fuller understood her; it reverberates back over the whole length of her against-the-odds career and life.

After she's been dragged by her horse and survived that twister with Griff, Jessica rests up in a barn and outlines her past in some detail. As
a kid, she had to deliver her own brother, and when her mother died in childbirth, Jessica buried her and then took care of Brockie. At fifteen, a man “tried to get rough” with her, and when her father intervened, he got shot. At eighteen, Jessica says, she was “the boss of my own spread.” Stanwyck delivers all this back-story in the most matter-of-fact, Olympian of tones; she's a winner, “the best of all,” and so is Jessica. There's no room here for the self-pity of Lily Powers, or what's left of Ruby Stevens.

“You've come a long way,” says Griff. He could be talking to Stanwyck herself, but Jessica is done cantering down memory lane. “My throat's dry, I'm talking too much,” she croaks, leaning in for a kiss, as if to say, “Screw the past, lets grab what's good
now
.” This is Stanwyck's last hurrah, her summing up, and it is indeed a long way from Capra's gentle early talkie world to Fuller's curious modernism. “They don't normally write parts for women my age because America is now a country of youth,” she told a reporter who asked her about the four-year gap between
Forty Guns
and
Walk on the Wild Side
(1961). “Something is gone,” she said, rightly, and spoke of her more “romantic” films. “Now we've matured and moved on. The past belongs to the past,” she said, sounding like Jessica Drummond.

Forty Guns
is mainly a rollicking western sex comedy for about the first hour of its running time, but then Fuller switches gears, in his ballsy way, into something more serious—all in one dazzling six-minute take. “Am I talking too much?” asks Griff, as he sits with Jessica at her piano; they're both worried about boring the other with small talk about the past. He keeps telling her how he feels about killing, and she listens to him with an abstracted look on her face as the camera starts to prowl ominously closer. Shots are fired from the back of the room; they take cover. Jessica's loyal retainer, Ned (Dean Jagger), walks in and says that he had to shoot Griff, and then Griff moves forward and disarms him. After this embarrassment, Jessica stands stock still at the right of the frame as Ned pitifully confesses his love to her. Jagger, never the most subtle of actors, opens himself up very purely and simply both to the camera and to Jessica.

Jessica listens to Ned talk so intently that the film seems to be holding its breath with her, taking in his words. She sits down to write Ned a check to pay him off. “I'm sorry, Ned,” she says, her face impassive, her voice stony and unforgiving. This is a telling choice for Stanwyck; it would have been so easy to act touched by Ned's sorrow. But she makes us see that Jessica, and people like her who have made themselves winners, can't afford to sympathize with such abject weakness, even needing
to look on it as a kind of contagious disease (it should be remembered again how much Stanwyck admired Ayn Rand and her objectivist philosophy, and how much Lily Powers learned from Nietzsche).

Ned exits from frame left, dropping the check on the ground. Jessica goes to Griff and kisses his hand, mouthing her devotion to him. They hear a thudding noise and move to investigate; Ned has hung himself. Denied love and sex and given money instead, he sees no more reason to live. Is he somehow a necessary casualty? I can imagine Stanwyck answering “Yes.” It's survival of the fittest: first in Brooklyn, then in an abusive first marriage and a humiliating second attempt, and then in that most embarrassing of roles, the aging actress, lucking into one more seminal film, a film that was loved and admired by the burgeoning French New Wave.

Brockie kills Griff's brother as he walks out of the church with his bride. Barney croons another song as the now-widowed bride stands in her mourning black on a hillside; he sings that “God has his arms around me, and I'm not afraid,” another drastic switch in tone that works because of Fuller's “take it and like it” long takes. As the plot starts to resolve itself, Fuller freezes Stanwyck's Jessica into a still photo under a dissolve to her forty male guns on horses and zooms slowly into the lingering photo, a surprisingly lyrical effect (this movie is always surprising us). “You could still be the boss, if you wanted to,” says her lawyer, but Jessica is about to abdicate, just as Stanwyck herself is pretty much at an end as a star performer.

The lawyer tells her that she'll lose everything, “everything you've built up,” and Stanwyck stares out at us, plunking a melody out on a piano with her finger. At this point, we're ready for one of those looks of recognition she used to honor us with, but those are gone now. What's left is an indescribable look, something so deeply personal and labyrinthine that there's no following it or guessing where she could possibly be in her mind; there's a kind of psychic wilderness in her face. Stanwyck was always smart enough to perceive what was coming for her, but who can really be truly ready for death, which to her meant retirement from the movies? In this scene, her face says all of this and more that can't be ascertained, no matter how long we think about her trajectory as a woman and as an artist. “There was a scene loaded with a page of monologue and she knew it perfectly,” said Fuller. “I asked her, before the take, to eliminate the gibble-gabble and show the words in her face.” I'm willing to bet that this is the scene he was talking about.

Fuller had wanted to kill Jessica off, and that would have been more than appropriate, but the studio insisted that she live. She survives a gunshot (crying out, “Oh!” in an orgasmic way as she takes a bullet), and is last seen inanely running after Griff. The more telling moment in these last scenes is when Jessica tries to comfort the blond widow: “You have one thing in your favor,” she says, “Youth.” A reviewer for
Picturegoer
saw
Forty Guns
and wrote, “Even the most tactful of picturegoers would have to admit that Barbara Stanwyck is no longer a youngster,” bestowing the kiss of death on her career. It would only be resurrected, in an often bastardized, sentimental form, on television, a cruel kind of shrinkage after the Cinemascope glories of
Forty Guns
where, Prospero-like, her powers were celebrated and then relinquished.

The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Walk on the Wild Side, Roustabout,
The Big Valley, The House That Would Not Die, A Taste of Evil,
The Letters, The Thorn Birds, The Colbys

W
hen film roles started to grow sparse in the late 1950s, Stanwyck was eager to get into television with a western series. She appeared on several Zane Grey Theater presentations, but the networks wanted her to parrot Loretta Young's successful anthology show, where Young swirled on camera in a designer gown, introduced each episode, and then proceeded to act in most of them. For the 1960–61 TV season, Stanwyck succumbed and attempted a similar format with
The Barbara Stanwyck Show
. The worst part of the format was that she had to introduce each story as Young did; deprived of mobility. Stanwyck turns to the camera in a stiff model's “pose” before the title comes on, and the effect is less Young-hostessy than taunting-forbidding, as if Stanwyck is saying, “I dare you to watch!” She had to read her intros off a teleprompter and was expected to make little jokes and plug the sponsors; she was very unhappy doing this. There were thirty-six episodes in all, of which she appeared in thirty-two. She won her first Emmy for the show, but it was cancelled after only one season.

Almost all of the episodes are so poorly written that Stanwyck can't sustain much interest in them. She's hit with more than a fair amount of sexism on this show, playing a lot of “career women” who have to learn their place. And she deals with lots of juvenile delinquents played by Method actors like Vic Morrow; she looks at them as if she'd like to understand what they're trying to do, yet she's the one who seems natural and real, while their Actors Studio style has dated. There are several episodes where Stanwyck has to interact with actors who are so inept
that they would never have been employed for a motion picture; it's distressing to see her try to perform with these amateurs.

When she does get a good subject, as in “Confession,” a murder story that pairs her excitingly with Lee Marvin, the half-hour format leads to jerky writing and abrupt editing that mitigates both the sexual chemistry she has worked up with Marvin and the convincing degeneration of her character as she's holed up in an apartment overlooking a noisy merry-go-round. “She lives only for two things, and both of them are work,” said Jacques Tourneur of Stanwyck (he directed a few of these shows for her, including “Confession”). In several episodes, she plays Josephine Little, an import/export dealer in Hong Kong who does battle with Red China. “You keep your cotton-pickin' Red hands off my country!” she cries in “Dragon by the Tail,” which was praised in Congress by Francis E. Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. When she was cancelled, Stanwyck made some cracks at her sponsors' expense: “I never even got a free shampoo,” she complained.