Barbara Stanwyck (8 page)

The ending of
So Big!
is inconclusive. We're told in dialogue how beautiful and fulfilling Selina's life has been, but what we've mainly seen, and sensed in between vignettes, is that this is a story about ceaseless physical work breaking a woman's spirit. In the last scene, Selina tearfully shrugs and says that she doesn't care about never really seeing the places she wanted to see when she was a girl. But Stanwyck puts a tiny oomph of hurt in her eyes as she says it, and it's details like that that always make her worth watching as closely as possible.

For their follow-up, Warner Bros. found Wellman and Stanwyck another “back to the land” script,
The Purchase Price
(1932). It begins well, in a naughty nightclub, where Stanwyck's torch singer, Joan, decked out in a dress that sits lazily around her shoulders and seems about to fall off, haltingly croons a song called “Take Me Away.” Stanwyck could just barely carry a tune, and she looks like she's about to crack up; it's not clear if she's embarrassed to be singing, or if her character is just amused by the song. Joan saunters over to a ringside table where she easily seduces a chump male. Back in her dressing room, she takes off her make-up with cold cream (Stanwyck made a career out of putting on make-up and wiping it off before a mirror) and goes into a well-written
speech about how she's been on Broadway since she was fifteen, just like Ruby Stevens had been. “I've heard all the questions and I know all the answers,” she says, “and I've kept myself
fairly
respectable through it all.” I love the way she says “fairly,” as if she's gained enough distance to be good-humored about all those men and their messy advances.

In one early scene, Stanwyck trips slightly when walking through a hotel lobby door, but she keeps on going in order to sustain the Wellman speed of this period. (After a Turner Classic Movies showing of
The Purchase Price
, Wellman's son explained that his dad liked to shoot only one or two takes at most and didn't do a lot of coverage, so that his films were “cut in the camera,” and couldn't be tampered with in the editing room). Stanwyck has some amusing moments here, especially when she waves away her married lover (Lyle Talbot) so that the gesture reads as, “Bye … bye … screw you!” And when her maid Emily (Leila Bennett) talks about getting a husband and confides she'd like to “try the goods” before she buys them, Stanwyck says, “Emily!” in a very funny, mock-shocked manner. She's lighter here in these opening scenes, playing a woman who seems well adjusted.

When Joan becomes a mail-order bride to a farmer (George Brent) in order to get out of town, however, the film sputters and dies, and Joan herself starts to take on a masochistic tinge. Brent plays this man as a bumptious moron, so that when he goes after Joan on their wedding night and she slaps him away, we can't blame her. Then, for the rest of the film, Joan tries to win him back, for reasons that remain mysterious. Her lover shows up on the farm toward the end, and he explains her behavior by calling Joan “a natural mud lark” (the title of Arthur Stringer's original story was
The Mud Lark
), and that explanation will have to do. Joan chasing after this dumb lug farmer for so many reels makes about as much sense as Stanwyck staying loyal to Frank Fay. These things happen in life, alas; they shouldn't have to happen on screen, too. For the final scenes, set during a fire, Stanwyck did her own stunts and got her legs burned as a result. She wore her burns and falls and physical blows on set like medals of her professionalism.

Nine years later, Stanwyck reunited with Wellman for another through-the-years saga,
The Great Man's Lady
, which is at least as episodic as
So Big!
, but far less effective. The film was contrived by Adela Rogers St. John and Seena Owen from a Vina Delmar story, though the screenplay is credited to a man, W.L. River. The basic material is magazine-like, and Wellman does nothing to flesh out the various crises in the life of Stanwyck's “woman behind the man.” The film opens with an obnoxious
title card about all these little women the world over and how they've helped their men. And then Wellman indulges himself with a crane shot up from a rocking chair, up, up, up over a town until we dissolve to a newspaper office, where an editor bemoans the little old lady of the title, centenarian Hannah Sempler (Stanwyck), who might or might not have been married to the man who founded the town, Ethan Hoyt (Joel McCrea). There's a wipe to a room where a reporter sits surrounded by female wax dummies, suggesting discarded wives, mistresses, daughters, and other women associated with all the world's so-called great men.

The press gathers around for the unveiling of a statue of Hoyt, and a pretty young Hoyt biographer (Katharine Stevens) beams as the figure is revealed; Wellman then cuts to another reporter yawning. The press all convenes on Hannah's house to ask questions, and Stanwyck makes her first entrance in long shot, heavily made-up. “To what do I owe this peculiar honor, may I ask?” she says, making a nice “sh” sound on the word “ask”—as if Hannah were wearing dentures. So far, so good, but that first line of Hannah's is an initial indication that there are going to be problems here: creaky lines, foggy motivations. This type of advanced old age is probably beyond the reach of any actor, even one as resourceful as Stanwyck. Her lines sound dubbed in later, and she has to deal with Stevens's inane cheerfulness in all their scenes together (and the fact that Stevens's name is so close to that of Ruby's dead mother).

“The year was 1848,” reminisces Hannah, standing by a window in her bedroom, and Wellman dissolves to a young Hannah in the exact same position by the window. Stanwyck's youthful enthusiasm as this sheltered, girlish version of Hannah is slightly overdone. She giggles at one point, an odd sight—but at least she's willing to try new things out, even if they fail. Back at the window, looking down at her beau Ethan, Hannah asks, “Are you mad?” and he replies, “Stark, staring mad!” There's really nothing any actor can do with lines like that, so Wellman just speeds the pair along into an elopement behind some covered wagons on an obvious soundstage prairie. There's almost no location shooting here, which hurts the film. Wellman takes advantage of the studio setting just once. Sitting in front of a landscape, Hannah and Ethan talk about the city he wants to build, and it magically appears behind them, a charming, F.W. Murnau-like effect.

Wellman's movies are filled with pictorial grace notes, but sometimes these inventions seem extraneous to the film itself. When he stages a confrontation between Ethan, Hannah, and Steely (Brian Donlevy), an inexplicable third romantic wheel, he has the actors play it all in
shadowed silhouettes; this just seems like a way of keeping his interest up visually because he's not involved in the story. When Hannah loses her two babies in a flood, Wellman could be expected to give Stanwyck a proper moment to grieve, but as she drags herself out of a river, he keeps her in long shot, and Victor Young's gloppy score kills any genuine emotion we might feel for this woman.

If Wellman is mainly indifferent, Stanwyck is not (she believed in this movie and was disappointed when it wasn't a success). Steely finds Hannah again when she's middle-aged, with white streaks in her hair, stiff-backed in a chair. “I thought you were dead,” he says. “I am,” she replies, so simply that she wakes the film out of its stupor. Her grief is so intensely centered in this scene that it stands as a prime example of the hypnotic way Stanwyck could draw us into her moods on screen. When Hannah becomes the queen of the roulette table (this story leaves few clichés untried), Stanwyck wears a doozy of a black Edith Head dress with what look like silver seahorses studded all over it (Head said in her memoir they were birds). We return to Hannah as a centenarian, and Stanwyck's performance has deteriorated into little old lady “harrumphs” and fussy business. Although she's a far more accomplished actress here, her portrayal of age in
So Big!
is superior.

From this prestige production, the team then unexpectedly moved to the lower depths of show business for their last film together,
Lady of Burlesque
(1943). By this point, Stanwyck was one of the highest paid women in movies and an established, distinguished player, so it feels more than a little perverse to have her play a striptease artiste wrapped up in a murder mystery plot courtesy of real-life stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, who wrote the source novel,
The G-String Murders
. Wellman shows us the outside of The Old Opera House, which once presented famous singers but is now exhibiting “50—Fifty—50 Beautiful Girls” and promising “Laffs” by cut-rate comics. “Girls, that's what the public wants,” says a manager outside, and inside Wellman plunges us into a world of rump-shaking tawdriness and overall 1940s tackiness (one girl looks bored with her dance routine, then glances at an energetic chorine next to her and swiftly remembers to plaster a fake smile on her face). As a finish, the burlesque girls present their rear ends to the camera, and we cut to an audience of dirty old men enjoying the rock-bottom program.

A crooner comes on, and the girls parade a bit before Stanwyck's Dixie Daisy makes her entrance for her solo number. A lone violin saws away in the pit. Cut to Dixie's bored, “something stinks in here” face, as she cleans her teeth with her tongue. “Beautiful, junior,” she snaps, “but it's
not fuh me.” Then she starts her song, an inspired little ditty called “Take It Off The E-String, Play It On The G-String” (apparently, most of the public at this time didn't know what a G-string was, which is why they changed Gypsy's forthright original title).

“If this gives you a thrill,” Dixie sings, huskily, “it's happening much against my will,” as succinct a line about Stanwyck's relation to her male audience as we're likely to get. When Dixie warns she sometimes starts “breakin' in bumps,” the camera cuts away from her gyrations and stays on the orchestra leader's inflamed reaction. But such censor-pleasing tactics are soon dropped: Stanwyck shakes her upper body so that her breasts jiggle in her scanty Edith Head outfit, and Dixie stops her song for a very funny spoken plea: “For listen, broth-uh, I've got a moth-uh, old and grey … I support her this way!” she shouts. “Just by shakin' this way … four shows a day!”

Dixie grabs the stage curtain and starts wielding it back and forth like a sword while the music sizzles and heats up to a horn blast, “duh duh duh duh duh,” followed by two dirty drum beats. During these beats, the camera moves in for a close-up on Dixie's face as she twice mimes a classic stripper bump. It's a tantalizing shot because, for a few moments, Stanwyck communes with herself and takes a kind of autoerotic pleasure in her own sexuality, just for itself, not for the men in the film audience or the audience watching this movie. It's a glimpse of a kind of sexuality that you rarely see in films. Rita Hayworth displays this private sort of self-enjoyment for a few scalding moments when a man tries to undo her dress at the end of her “Put the Blame on Mame” number in
Gilda
(1946), but with her it's taunting, pissed-off. Strangely enough, in this “bump bump” Stanwyck close-up, we don't feel any anger or resentment coming from her, as we would have had she played this role in say, 1933, instead of 1943. Instead, we see a mature, fully-blossomed woman and performer casting a look back to where she came from, contrasting it with what she is now, and enjoying the contrast, because the past is truly past.

“G-String” is a tasty, memorable number, but the rest of the film doesn't live up to it. The other strippers are a rather dreary, mean lot, and Wellman is totally uninterested in the murder plot, so that the interrogation scenes in the girls' dressing room seem interminable. The film is staged unimaginatively, and there are none of Wellman's usual visual flourishes (though it can be hard to judge this aspect because
Lady of Burlesque
has been floating around in spliced public domain prints for years). In the middle of the low-concept narrative, Stanwyck's Dixie is
involved in another stage performance, and it's amazing. She does a full-throttle jitterbug—complete with splits—a Russian dance, and then an expert cartwheel, so that we're left wondering if there's
anything
Stanwyck can't do. As she performs all these unlikely things, there's a look of purely childlike happiness on her face. Wellman understood Stanwyck as a person and as a performer in a more direct way than Capra did, and if this superior insight made for less dreamy idealizing, it also made for a tough-minded consolidation of what she stood for.

Illicit, Ten Cents a Dance, Shopworn,
Ladies They Talk About, Baby Face

T
here's been a lot written about movies made before the censorious Production Code cracked down on Hollywood in 1934—probably too much, so that the talkies made from 1930–34 are now endlessly packaged at New York's Film Forum repertory theater and on DVD as “dirty” old movies, quaint novelties that hint about the more relaxed sexual mores of the time, a relaxation that really began in the twenties, with the first flappers, women like Colleen Moore and Clara Bow. In her early years on screen, Stanwyck found herself in several of these so-called pre-Code items, one of which,
Baby Face
, is practically synonymous with this whole quasi-genre.

Right after she filmed
Ladies of Leisure
for Columbia, Stanwyck made
Illicit
(1931) for Warner Bros., testing the waters for the kind of independent hopscotch between studios that let her have more control over her career. Ann, the girl she plays in
Illicit
(which is based on another perilously outspoken play co-written by Robert Riskin), is the independent type. In the first scene, we see her relaxing in a loose robe with her hair down and picking up a love song from rich boy Dick (James Rennie). Ann is in the kitchen preparing what is clearly a post-coital meal; it's nighttime, but she's whipping up some breakfast. Stanwyck works up a nice natural chemistry with Rennie, and then he drops the other shoe: “We really ought to be married,” he says, a cue for the 1931 audience to gasp happily. They're living in sin, though they keep separate apartments.