Barbara Stanwyck (7 page)

So where is Stanwyck in all this? She's Ann, a newspaper columnist who gets fired in the first scene and pleads for her job. The newborn stilt-edness of the early thirties is gone; by 1941, she's a sleek, stylish dynamo in tailored suits and lusciously long hair. When she goes to her typewriter to write a last-ditch gimmick column signed by John Doe, an unemployed man bent on suicide, Capra frames her demonic-looking eyes over the clattering keys. In the movie's first hour, Ann is an unscrupulous go-getter whose sole purpose in life is to make money for her mother and her two cutesy sisters. We are told that Ann's father was a doctor who was always taking on charity cases, and her mother (Spring Byington) gives away any ready cash to needy people, so Ann's rebellious, selfish drive for lucre makes psychological sense, up to a point. When she delivers a lightning-fast spiel to Gleason on how to hire someone to play her made-up forgotten man, Stanwyck delivers her hard-sell lines in such a concentrated, breathless manner that she turns her “no sir” speech into an aria that merits applause for its technical virtuosity alone.

Ann is a jerk and an opportunist, and Stanwyck limns her unstoppable drive to succeed as funny but also alarming. When she first sees Cooper's highly exploitable face, her own face takes on the look of a wolf that has spotted its dinner; this seems to be a woman without any vulnerability. Stanwyck is playing the director-like heavy role that Sam Hardy played in
The Miracle Woman
, while Cooper is playing the Florence figure, a dupe who starts to believe in his own publicity. Identifying with Ann, Capra also seems to side with John's fellow hobo, Colonel (Walter Brennan), a nihilist (like Yen) who never buys the platitudes Ann puts into his friend's mouth. Yet in the end we're supposed to swallow and celebrate the smarmy, demagogic “love thy neighbor” bromides picked up by Doe's sheep-like, idiot audience. Capra obviously hates this audience, yet he feels forced to endorse it in his sell-out happy ending.

This is quite a complicatedly flawed movie. It's almost impossible to say where it goes wrong, because going wrong is all it does—in as many different directions as possible. To her credit, Stanwyck often looks apprehensive, glancing off-screen every now and then with an “is he actually on the level with this stuff?” expression. Capra gave her her start, and he gave her two and a half major films, but he prostitutes her talent in the last half hour of
Meet John Doe
, where he uses the rawness of her hysteria to paper over the holes in his scenario. It's a shame that they ended up mired in
Meet John Doe
instead of on the heights of
General Yen
, and it's a shame that Capra's talent led him to such a self-destructive place.

There's one suspiciously extended scene in
Meet John Doe
where John tells Ann about a dream he had about her and then goes on and on about how he spanked her. Ann looks tickled, but it's a little more than that, for Stanwyck herself seems tickled, too, so that the scene plays like a kind of private joke between former lovers. “He'd been kicked around,” she said of Capra, “maybe not as much, but he understood it.” That “maybe not as much,” says a lot about their basic honesty, their kinship, and the life-or-death connection that still burns bright in
Ladies of Leisure
, some of
The Miracle Woman
, and supremely in
General Yen
, which shimmers more ambiguously and profoundly every time I see it.

Night Nurse, So Big!, The Purchase Price, The Great Man's Lady, Lady of Burlesque

I
n the same years she was laying the groundwork for her career with Frank Capra, Stanwyck made several films with another director, William “Wild Bill” Wellman, an adventurous teller of tall tales so rip-snortingly vigorous and “manly” that in interviews he almost comes across as a parody of a take-no-prisoners brawler. His reputation as a filmmaker has always been shaky; he made movies fast and furiously and was not always well suited to the subjects he took on. Though his filmography is filled with missteps, it also contains neglected, hardboiled classics like
Wild Boys of the Road
(1933) and
Safe in Hell
(1931), an eye-openingly sordid melodrama about a hooker (Dorothy Mackaill) who gets sacrificed to male lust and corruption. Most intriguingly, his best-known film is probably the first official version of
A Star is Born
(1937), a property that was based on the embattled marriage between Stanwyck and Frank Fay, a union that Wellman was able to witness firsthand during the filming of the first three movies he made with her.

Their initial film together,
Night Nurse
(1931), is one of his best, a brutally concentrated dose of grisly working girl melodrama for Warner Bros., a studio that brought out Stanwyck's street smart, roll-with-the-punches style. The film opens with an ambulance bringing in a car crash victim. Inside a hospital, an expectant father says he hopes he has a boy, and his wife says she'll do her best. Wellman immediately plunges us into a world where girls are seen as expendable, which means that they'll have to work harder for a satisfying life and even play dirty if need be. Stanwyck's Lora Hart wants more than anything to be a nurse, but she hasn't been able to finish high school, and so the sourpuss matron in
charge of new nurses turns her down and literally coughs her out of the building.

A doctor (Charles Winninger) bumps into Lora outside, knocking her pocketbook to the sidewalk, and Wellman holds his camera low on Stanwyck's ankles as she impatiently taps her foot. The doctor looks up: Lora's face is sullen, closed-off. When she senses what's necessary, her eyes flicker slightly and she smiles at the doctor, and that's all it takes: She's hired. This is the most restrained vamping imaginable, played as if Lora knows that men are such dopes that she doesn't need to put any real effort into attracting them. Sex is an essential tool for the lowborn working girl of 1931 if she expects to get anywhere, and Stanwyck seems very Zen and stoically dignified about that reality.

There's a real flash of desire in her eyes—or at least a recognition of kinship—when Lora meets Maloney (Joan Blondell), a saucy, big-eyed blond who becomes her roommate. Wellman is forever contriving ways for Maloney and Lora to strip down to their lingerie so that horny interns can leer at them, but this gambit never feels exploitative because these girls can clearly look out for themselves and view the more outof-control male sex urges with detachment (Stanwyck) or amusement (Blondell). Frightened by a skeleton left in her bed by one of the interns, Lora hops into Maloney's bed to cuddle and they keep each other warm; it's as sweetly and suggestively dyke-alicious a bit as any in Stanwyck's career.

More happens in any ten minutes of
Night Nurse
than happens in two hours of most Warner movies of the forties, and Wellman thrives on the studio's patented, jam-packed scrappiness here, as does Stanwyck. There's room for on-the-fly inspirations, but there is also room for mistakes and carelessness, which occasionally mars even Wellman's best work—as if lingering over something to get it right might tend to dissipate the testosterone-fueled energy he valued so highly. The men are all horrors in
Night Nurse
, either treacherous villains or patsies (either Fay or Stanwyck's second husband, Robert Taylor, in fact), and Lora even seems disillusioned with Maloney by the end of the movie, when her pal proves too cynical. As they take their nurse's oath, Lora's eyes shine with happiness, but Maloney repeats the oath by rote; it's just a job to her, a way station until she can get some rich patient to fall for her. Wellman gives Stanwyck several nice silent moments here that let us know how much Lora values her work.

Stanwyck is at her best when she's sizing up a man, as if she's saying, “Alright, what's your angle?” Her natural skepticism is one of the most
likable things about her as a performer at this point. When she warms to Mortie (Ben Lyon), a cheerfully murderous bootlegger, Wellman gives her a few wordless “hmm, OK”-type close-ups to make her attachment believable; he knows she often does her best acting without any dialogue. Wellman deeply respected Stanwyck's toughness as a corollary to his own, but even he must have felt that hers was more truly earned. She had a certain knowingness, along with a capacity to be outraged and make that outrage seem like a point of honor.

In the film's freewheeling, casually scary second half, Lora has to deal with a plot to starve two little girls for inheritance money. When one of the girls says a sister of theirs has died, Lora says, “You mustn't think about her anymore,” a moment that Stanwyck makes personal by the gravity with which she says it. You have to forget about the mother who won't be coming home anymore to Classon Avenue, and the sooner the better, yet
Night Nurse
posits that having a mother like the proudly dipsomaniacal Mrs. Ritchey (Charlotte Merriam), who does nothing but drink while her children are being starved in the next room, is sometimes much worse than having no mother at all.

When Lora sees that Mrs. Ritchey doesn't want to think about her children's plight, she blows her top: “Why do poor little children have to be born to women like you?” she shouts, with a ferocity that seems to take in not just these two abused girls, but
all
abused children, including Ruby Stevens. This lost girl has an artistic forum now, and she has to speak out for all of her brothers and sisters, all the kids that never made it out of Brooklyn, and the ones who came out of deadbeat homes either physically or spiritually dead.

Lora tries to drag Mrs. Ritchey out of her stupor, but the other woman falls on the floor and passes out. “You …
mother
,” Lora sneers, making the slight hesitation mean both, “You? A mother?” and “You motherfucker!” Clark Gable's nasty chauffeur Nick socks Lora on the jaw at one point, and she gets her revenge by punching one of Mrs. Ritchey's libidinous men, delivering a heartening, symbolic blow to all the men who have physically accosted Lora in the film, all the men who grabbed at Ruby in the nightclubs of the twenties—and for all the women on earth who have had to fend off male violence with their wits (it's a moment, too, when I can't help but hope that Stanwyck herself landed more than a few punches that counted on the wife-battering, jealous Fay). The ending of
Night Nurse
is rather strange: By doing the right thing and standing up to Nick, Lora gets booted from her beloved profession and falls in with Mortie, who has had Nick rubbed out. This is a woman who needs
to work; she'll find a way to continue nursing somehow, just as she shouldn't have much problem rehabilitating her man.

So Big!
(1932), Stanwyck's next film with “Wild Bill,” was based on Edna Ferber's popular novel, one of her lengthy “through the years” sagas that Wellman gives a bracingly fast treatment. As a young girl, Stanwyck's character, Selina, is played by Dawn O'Day, who later acted under the name Anne Shirley and played the daughter in
Stella Dallas
. Selina has no mother and a charismatic gambler father. Over a fancy dinner, he tells the girl that no matter what happens in life, good or bad, it's “just so much velvet,” whatever that means. The film repeats this bromide twice, once in voiceover as Selina remembers him saying it, and once on a title card halfway through.

Selina is in thrall to her father, and when Stanwyck's grown-up Selina finds out that he's been shot, it's a kind of death for her, too. Approaching his dead body, Stanwyck keeps her face frozen and still. She draws back a coat covering the body to look at his face, makes a small movement forward with her hand, as if to comfort him, then withdraws it when she realizes that there can be no more contact between them: the enormity of death and separation, all in one precise physical movement, forward and back.

A girlhood friend secures Selina a job teaching boys on a farm run by Alan Hale, who will also play an important role in
Stella Dallas
. Selina says she thinks the cabbages on the farm are beautiful, and Hale laughs at her for putting on such airs. For this role, Stanwyck labored mightily to keep Brooklyn out of her voice, even when some of her “er's” are just dying to become “ah's,” a process that results in some line readings that sound like she's performing an elocution lesson. But such technical problems don't really stop her from creating a woman who couldn't be more different than Lora Hart, who's so close to the real Stanwyck.

In her early scenes, Selina is an innocent, untouched, immaculate sort of person, but when she gets married to a farmer, she seems to age rapidly. Wellman gets this aging across in just a few quick shots of her doing back-breaking work that seems to destroy her from the outside in. In one fleeting instance, Stanwyck looks up from scrubbing a floor with a pitiful, “Why?” expression on her face, another striking plea for justice.

Wellman's shorthand method in
So Big!
is far more powerful than a more studied, leisurely approach would have been. He makes us think about what's happened between scenes, while making each episode land with a jab or an outright punch. In Stanwyck, he has an actress who can convey the fact that Selina is tired of her husband with just one
split-second look (the director joins in his leading character's contempt by dispatching this husband with a shock cut, lasting only a few seconds, of a piece of black fabric on a door). When Selina is really old, Stanwyck lets her hair go wispy and grey, and she squints into the light like some old people do (later, she would age to more than one hundred for Wellman in
The Great Man's Lady
[1942]). The sense of time passing, one of the cardinal virtues of the novel, is here replicated by speed, which takes the place of Ferber's literary elaboration.

In the last half hour, Bette Davis enters the movie and gives it an electric jolt, but her energy is all over the place. Both she and Stanwyck were still a little green in 1932, though Stanwyck is far more accomplished at this point and would always be more focused than the flashier Davis. When Selina is being manipulative to get her son back on the right track in the final scenes, Stanwyck doesn't play the manipulation at all; she's too busy, unfortunately, being less of a person and more of an idealized heroine. And there's a big, unintended laugh: Selina is always saying, “How big is my little son, how big is my boy?” and her small son stretches his arms wide and answers, “So big!” When he's a man, Selina asks this question, and her son beams, “So big!” while measuring out the size of the average erect male penis with his hands (you can't tell me Wellman didn't stifle a laugh behind the camera).