Dreams of starting over: Molly Haskell on Barbara Stanwyck

The line from Preston Sturges’s great screwball comedy not only serves as a rebuke to all who would cast women into comfortable either-or categories, bad girl/good girl, vamp and virgin, but it so beautifully underlines the amazingly fluid blend of noir and blanc, innocence and experience, in Stanwyck’s astonishing career.

Over the course of 80-plus films (not counting television), she played ingénues, felons, gun molls, career women, women of the church (both phoney and sincere), doting mothers and femmes fatales of varying stripes and degrees of waywardness. And yet we feel in all of these a central core, something consistently Stanwyck.

Unlike Joan Crawford, an up-from-nothing contemporary who also started out in New York (they actually knew each other) and clawed her way to stardom, Stanwyck possesses a centredness, and even at her most frenzied and hectic, we’re pulled into her emotional orbit.

Start with the voice, which, as I once wrote, seems to have been around since the world began: rich and low, weary, tender, angry, rueful, “ranging nimbly between hard and soft. It could be metallic, mannish and brittle (think Forty Guns) or gentle as a down pillow” – sometimes within the same film, as befits an actress who was at ease in every genre, from women’s melodrama to the western, comedy and film noir.

A Stanwyck character is often on the make; life has given her a bad deal and she’s willing to go to any lengths to better herself, get out of a hole. These tough birds draw on a fund of bitterness that the actress came by naturally: born Ruby Stevens into a poor Brooklyn family, she and her brother and sister were orphaned at a young age by a mother who died of septicemia and a father who abandoned them.

They were separated, but eventually the older sister introduced her to the world of show business: radio, vaudeville, burlesque – she even did a stint in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. She acted in several plays, and impressed the critics with her emotional intensity. She also met the man, vaudevillian Frank Fay, whom she would marry and accompany to Hollywood.

The nocturnal world and raunch of roaring 20s New York, of gangsters and showgirls, would make its way into those early talkies, raw and sexy in ways that would be sanded down by the Production Code. The list of taboos drawn up by the Catholic Legion of Decency were already on the books, but in 1934 the studio-sponsored Hays Office began enforcing them, reading every script with an eye to excesses of sex, violence and profanity, and dictating punishment to evil doers.

Until then a moral flexibility reigned and gave actors a wide berth in portraying sassy, sexy, even unsavoury. (In an ironic twist of fate, the daring content and freewheeling antics of the early 30s might have rough sledding in an internet-weaponised atmosphere of censoriousness.)

Stanwyck, newly arrived in Hollywood with a husband who had a contract with Warner Bros and wanted her to be a stay-at-home wife, was miserable. Finally Fay realised she needed to work to be happy, and argued on her behalf to Harry Cohn, president of the upstart Columbia Studio, who put her in an early talkie (Mexicali Rose, 1929).

She didn’t want to do the movie, it wasn’t good, and she was ready to quit Hollywood – especially after a disastrous meeting with Frank Capra. According to Victoria Wilson, her biographer, he asked her to do a screen test and she refused: a deal-killer. He described her as a “porcupine”, and went on to say, “She came in with a chip on her shoulder and went out with an axe on it.”

But at the urging of Fay, Capra watched a screen test that Alexander Korda had directed, and was smitten. She got her real start in Ladies of Leisure (1930), her fourth movie and the first to be directed by Capra. They would make four pictures together, three pre-Code and the tendentious Meet John Doe (1941), that paean to the little folks with Gary Cooper in which Stanwyck deploys none of the savviness and moral complexity she would later come to command – some of it under the tutelage of Capra himself.

In her pre-Code movies, she could vamp outrageously, skirt censorship, play aggressively sexual. In Baby Face (1932) she’s the Nietzschean opportunist who seduces her way up the corporate ladder – a vertical ascent denoted by an upward pan of the camera, but in a horizontal position.

In Ladies They Talk About (1933), she goes to prison, not for the first time, and – also not for the first time – is eventually saved by a man of virtue. But the sweet paradox of her grifting is yes, the men ‘save’ her from venality, but she saves them too, from priggishness or conceit, from male smugness.

One striking exception in her pre-Code films is the stunning and atypical Capra film The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), in which Stanwyck plays a young and idealistic missionary in China during its civil wars. She’s being held hostage by a dashing warlord (Nils Asther) in one of the most erotic pairings in cinema.

With its opulent sets and costumes, shimmering cinematography (Joseph Walker) and worldly outlook (the Christians are fatally naive), the movie edges into Sternberg-Dietrich territory. Stanwyck has never seemed so young and vulnerable as she tries desperately to escape the magnetic Asther in order to reunite with her stodgy fiancé, while inwardly she is crumbling with desire.

One of the movie’s most memorable scenes is a rendering of Stanwyck’s tortured inner conflict through a dream: as she reclines in the moonlit boudoir, Asther, in full ‘yellow peril’ guise (black garb, long fingernails and pointed ears) attacks her. As she recoils in terror, a man in jacket and hat enters from the balcony, presumably her fiancé. He strikes a blow and fells the attacker; then as he embraces Stanwyck, the hat and jacket melt away, it is Asther in Western dress. What could more beautifully capture the ambivalence of woman’s love-lust contradiction than this extraordinary fantasy, wanting to be ravished and rescued simultaneously.

This was closer to the sultry terrain of some of her fellow pre-Code stars, but unlike more exotic contemporaries – Garbo, Dietrich, Mae West – she would never become ‘box-office poison’. Women who exuded strength, larger-than-life personalities (eventually Katharine Hepburn would be added to the list), began to tire audiences (of whom a majority were women).

This was the Depression and those goddesses were too rich for many people’s blood. Stanwyck could seem modest, even mousy compared to those megawatt icons, but a slow-burn personality gave her both flexibility and longevity. She would never freeze into a type and would slide easily into down-to-earth, hard-up women more in tune with audiences of a different era.

She could be throbbingly emotional. The Miracle Woman (Capra, 1931) opens with Stanwyck delivering a sermon from the pulpit previously occupied by her pastor father. She stops in the middle of a sentence, where he stopped when he died, and proceeds to excoriate first the deacons for their hypocrisy, and when they flee, the rest of the congregation.

“You’re a born preacher,” says the con man (Sam Hardy) who persuades her to go on the road as Sister Fallon, a phoney evangelist. Her outlandish scenes in the lions’ cage could rival Mae West’s, while the moments showing her growing love for the blind man (David Manners) whose suicide she has prevented are some of the most poignant in her career. The critic Andrew Sarris suggested that if The Miracle Woman had been made at a major studio, it would have been the breakthrough for Stanwyck and Capra, who instead had to wait, respectively, for Stella Dallas (1937) and It Happened One Night (1934).

The great Stella Dallas may be one of the most full-bodied weepies ever made, and she and director King Vidor hold nothing back. Even so, that doesn’t prevent an opening for irony and even comedy: the famous birthday party scene to which nobody comes has become a touchstone for party-host panic over the years, the humour and the humiliation of the situation in exquisite balance.

No other actress could turn on a dime and convince the audience the way Stanwyck does. In the Liebestod – or lust-stod – denouement of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944, from the James Cain novel), she and Fred MacMurray are locked in their murderous embrace. Tough and unscrupulous, possibly the nastiest of all femmes fatales, she admits she has never really loved a man… until now. Which is why she couldn’t shoot the fatal bullet. And, amazingly, we believe her.

These days, women performers have been getting niceness out of their systems with a vengeance and we’ve grown accustomed to ‘transgressive’ protagonists who flaunt bad behaviour as earlier actresses might have flaunted jewellery and fur coats.

Cold and cunning Phyllis Dietrichson out-bads them all, yet even here, we get the sense that her whole life has been a kind of performance. She’s someone who never had a ‘real’ home and background to give her support, so life is a battle for survival, sex a weapon.

That audaciously false blonde wig is part of her get-up, but it is also funny. As dire as is the situation in this darkest of films, with the law closing in on the murderous pair, the dialogue between MacMurray and Stanwyck carries a whiff of screwball competition. (This could be partly the Brackett/Wilder script – they also wrote Ball of Fire). “We’re both rotten,” she tells MacMurray. “Only you’re a little more rotten,” he replies.

Unafraid of going over the top and beyond, of playing for humour, even ridicule, she allows comedy in the midst of pathos. She also injects more than a touch of malignancy into the funniest movies. In this cross-fertilisation, she illuminates something important: just as good girls and bad girls overlap and intertwine, so screwball and noir, far from being mutually exclusive, each contain elements of the other.

There’s real cruelty in the abuse she visits on the heroes of Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve. In the former, Gary Cooper and his seven dwarves of encyclopedia compilers are hoodwinked by their glamorous visitor – seemingly a showgirl who can provide them with up-to-date slang for their lexicon, but who in reality is a gangster’s moll hiding out from the cops. She lets Cooper (and the others) fall in love with her before fleeing to her lover. In the end, she has to come to terms with her own shabbiness and avarice, but Cooper has to climb out of knee pants and become a man.

In screwball comedy man and woman evolve and change, define themselves anew in relation to the other. The punishment Stanwyck inflicts on the rich Fonda in The Lady Eve, beginning with the apple gambling Jean symbolically throws at him early in the film, and ending in the impersonation of a wanton English aristocrat, a Lady of the Chatterly sort, are wince-making and almost unforgivable. Almost. Because he deserves it.

An emotional tightwad, he has refused her first plea for forgiveness, and her hurt must be avenged. No man who calls himself a man has any right to be so innocent and infantile, such a moralistic prude. Not to mention a nerd and a square. Not only does he travel with a pet snake, he does card tricks!

The danger of innocence is a great theme of Sturges. The good men aren’t as good as they – or you – think they are. Stanwyck will lead them, or shake them, out of their prelapsarian tranquility into the world of sin and sex. She’s the aggressor, taking the initiative, as is the prerogative of screwball heroines: “If you waited for a man to propose to you from natural causes,” Jean says, “you’d die of old maidenhood.”

In Remember the Night (1940) which Mitchell Leisen directed from a Sturges script, she puts it this way to Fred MacMurray: “People have different ways of looking at things.” In this lovely and too little-known romantic comedy, she’s a shoplifter, he’s the prosecuting attorney. Of course she’s a criminal and must pay for it, but she thinks what he does – throwing people into jail – isn’t anything to brag about. With weary resignation she concedes, “I guess somebody has to do the dirty work… too bad it’s someone like you.”

And she has her principles. When he suggests she plead kleptomania, she says no, she would then lose her amateur status. And there’s some truth to the line uttered by her con man father (Charles Coburn) in The Lady Eve, chastising her for a coarse remark: “Let us be crooked, but never common.”

One of the comic motifs of The Lady Eve is Fonda’s ‘line’, to her, how he sees her in his mind’s eye as a little girl, how she takes him back to his own youth. It’s part pick-up poppycock, part longing, part prophecy. It’s the dream of starting over, a first principle of screwball (dubbed by the philosopher Stanley Cavell the “comedy of remarriage”), but the very soul of a Stanwyck film.

She has a ‘past’ but there’s this other part of her, a longing that speaks to a desire for something finer, for cleansing. She wants to be what he wants her to be. There’s always that ghost of reflection, a suggestion that there are two ways of looking at anything. This may be an odd comparison since they are such very different types, but she reminds me of Celia Johnson, another woman whose beauty was by no means conventional, whose brooding eyes seem to look deeper into things than everyone else’s, and whose allure comes from a mysterious inwardness. When they’re in a room, you can’t look away from them.

Off camera it’s a different story. Stanwyck was a workaholic who rarely made the ‘scene’ in Hollywood, even during her second marriage to the actor Robert Taylor. She was press- and publicity-shy and didn’t like going out to Hollywood nightclubs where she feared she’d suffer by comparison to the glamour gals – Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard.

There’s the wrenching story of her attending a premiere on the arm of her beloved Robert Taylor and being mistaken for a fan clinging to him. But this same under-the-radar quality allowed her to develop that inwardness, that intense connection to the audience that eluded many of the more imperious dazzlers.

In the 50s, she was still going strong and made some of her best movies. Now the Stanwyck heroine has had more time for retrospection, for regret. She knows the score, there are no tears left. And yet… Out of a mixture of hope and desperation, of no time left and there’s always tomorrow, she gives wrenching performances in noir (Robert Siodmak’s The File on Thelma Jordon, 1949) and noir-ish (Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night, 1952, from a play by Clifford Odets), and in Douglas Sirk’s heartbreaking melodrama (There’s Always Tomorrow, 1955).

In all of these, a world-weary woman of some maturity (though in Clash she plausibly has a baby!), returns to a place associated with her youth, or with the hope for a new beginning, but the hope is girded by melancholy, by a sense that it may be too late. What happened to you, asks her brother in Clash By Night. “Big dreams, small results,” she replies.

In the beautiful There’s Always Tomorrow, she looks up her old boss (played by MacMurray), a successful toy manufacturer surrounded by the picture-perfect family – only the picture is shot through with misery, the wife and three children are too busy with their own activities to notice him. He might as well not be there, while she, also successful, is lonely, having carried the torch for him for 20 years.

Sparks ignite between the two, and not just sexual – they are excited by their work, by exercising their imaginations. Their brief reconnection may be one of those mid-life crisis flings, but it’s not just a diversion. In the movie’s bleak ‘happy’ ending, we come to feel that MacMurray married the wrong woman. Stanwyck has made the decision, sent him back to his family, does the right thing… but is it?

In Clash by Night she also makes the wise decision, to stay with Paul Douglas and the baby rather than run off with bad boy Robert Ryan. But this time it does seem right: she has finally stopped looking to a man to give her confidence. By accepting responsibility, by not running away, she has found peace and self-esteem.

In The File on Thelma Jordon, she’s come to stay with her rich grandmother, and needs a stooge for her felonious plans, so entices an alcoholic assistant DA (played by Wendell Corey) to fall in love with her. He’s perfect in the part, well-intentioned but weak, married but vulnerable to this interloper’s charms.

She’s given up on men, and more or less given up on herself, but gradually something real develops between them, something that both weakens and saves her. Fleeing the scene in a getaway car she is driving with her nasty hoodlum sidekick, she deliberately crashes. Having barely survived, she is on her deathbed in the hospital when the good girl emerges briefly from a coma: “You said I was two people. Just let half of me die…?”

But can we really spare half of her, however wicked? That’s the enigma of Stanwyck: we want the good girl, the bad girl, and everything in between. Florence Fallon or Sister Fallon? Jean or the Lady Eve? Different people or “positively the same dame!”