Barbara Stanwyck

by Dan Callahan

  In her last scene, waiting for a showdown in her darkened house, Phyllis is cool and tough. “We’re both rotten,” she admits. Walter says that she’s a little more rotten, but that isn’t true; he has a choice between righteous Keyes and bad apple Phyllis, and he chooses her way. She has no choice; she is what she is. When she throws a cigarette away, poised to go into action and shoot Walter, Stanwyck moves uncannily like a snake—an “Irrawaddy cobra,” as Cain puts it—as she slithers up and fires her gun at her prey.

  She hits Walter, but not fatally, and he sidles up to her. She can’t fire the second shot to finish him off. Why? Is it, like she says, because she suddenly feels love for him, the same love she seemed to feel when they were planning to make her treasured murder fantasy a reality? He isn’t buying it. “I’m not asking you to buy, just hold me close,” she whimpers. He shoots her, and she falls limp in his arms in her white dress, a vanquished snake about to shed its skin, embodied by an actress who always makes “sincerity” seem a Byzantine concept. Now you see it, now you don’t.

  Stanwyck Noir

  The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The Two Mrs. Carrolls,

  Cry Wolf, The Lady Gambles, The File on Thelma Jordan,

  No Man of Her Own, The Man with a Cloak, Jeopardy,

  Witness to Murder, Crime of Passion

  Double Indemnity heralded a new era, one where Stanwyck dominated many a shadowy thriller, some of them failures, some of them overlooked gems, and some like The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), which is a qualified success on its own limited terms. The ad campaign for Martha Ivers implores us to only “whisper her name!” If that sounds a little corny, it suits the serpentine, simmering yet often ramshackle movie itself, directed by Lewis Milestone, with a script by Robert Rossen, who later directed Body and Soul (1947) and The Hustler (1961).

  Rossen worked his way up writing socially conscious Warner Bros. melodramas, and his tentative leftism sometimes shows up in Martha Ivers, with its schematic view of the greedy rich and the tough working class. The film starts out with an astringent sixteen-minute prologue, set in 1928, that acts as a kind of appetizer to the melodrama feast to come. Janis Wilson, the memorably neurotic little girl from Now, Voyager, plays Martha Ivers as an unhappy teenager longing to get out from under the influence of her aunt, Mrs. Ivers (a sinister Judith Anderson). The girl was born Martha Smith, the daughter of a working-class father and a rich Ivers mother. Mrs. Ivers has had her name legally changed to her mother’s maiden name, but this authoritarian aunt can’t change her niece’s character.

  Martha tries to run away with bad boy Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman) during a thunderstorm, and Mr. O’Neil (Roman Bohnen), a schoolteacher ambitious for his son Walter (Mickey Kuhn), makes sure that Martha is caught and brought back to Mrs. Ivers. When Mr. O’Neil says that he wants his boy to go to Harvard, Mrs. Ivers wearily tells him that Walter would probably be happier driving a truck, a touch of 1930s leftism that sounds strange coming from her aristocratic lips. Mrs. Ivers, it seems, owns everything in town (it’s even called Iverstown). After Martha is brought back to her, she slaps the girl and says that the best thing her father ever did for her was to die, whereupon Martha snarls out some hatred.

  This is a heavy-spirited movie in which it always seems to be raining, as the characters circle their opponents steadily and slowly like boxers until they rush at each other and go in for the kill. Planning to run away again, Martha loses sight of her pet cat. When she sees Mrs. Ivers beating the animal with her cane, Martha pulls the cane out of her aunt’s hand and bops her lightly on the head. Mrs. Ivers then falls down some stairs, dead. This sequence of events is all quite weirdly shot and put together, like a macabre silent film set to Miklos Rozsa’s hard-driving, ever-percolating score, but it suits the movie’s dreamlike unreality, putting us inside Martha’s head and the way she sees and experiences things.

  We jump to 1946 and our first course on the Martha Ivers menu, which involves the grown-up Sam (Van Heflin) and his relations with Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott), a sultry ex-con. Scott is one of those curious ersatz figures of this period who talks like she’s seen a lot of movies and is trying to fit herself in with her hissing, sibilant line readings and curdled, tough-girl smiles and tears, both of which make her squinch up her face beseechingly. She’s 100 percent artificial. Because of her lack of authenticity, she is the embodiment of some late 1940s films, a collection of movie signs that can only be read legibly if you are immersed in the style she’s aping.

  Heflin usually didn’t play parts as cocky and lover-boyish as Sam Masterson, and he has a lot of fun here, especially when he’s roughing up the grown-up, alcoholic Walter (Kirk Douglas), who’s now a politico married to Stanwyck’s Martha. This is Douglas’s first movie, and he’s expert at playing Walter’s weakness, but he tends to be hammy and too aware of his own charisma (though he had wanted Heflin’s role, he took to the weakling like a duck to water).

  Martha Ivers was made during a set decorators’ strike. Sometimes, in order to go on working, everyone would have to stay at the studio (they couldn’t cross the picket line without the risk of being hurt), and Milestone sided with the strikers, so that some of the film was directed by Byron Haskin. Martha Ivers does have a patchwork quality at times; there are some careless, abrupt cuts here and there, and even some dissolves which seem uncommonly rushed. “Everyone had told me how nice Barbara Stanwyck was,” Douglas wrote in his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, “so I was looking forward to working with her in this hostile environment. The crew adored her. They called her ‘Missy,’ and when she came on the set she went around hugging them, asking about their wives and children by name. She was a professional, she was there, always prepared, an excellent actress. But she was indifferent to me.”

  Later on, Stanwyck noticed that Douglas might be an up-and-comer. “I could see it happening,” he wrote, “like the lens of a camera turning into focus. She looked at me, made eye contact for the first time. She said, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good.’ I said, ‘Too late, Miss Stanwyck.’” Off-camera, Stanwyck in this peak period could be as ruthless as the characters she played. At Milestone’s suggestion, Heflin had worked out a complicated maneuver with a coin moving over his knuckles to show that Sam is a professional gambler, and Stanwyck took this in, warily. Then, like Martha, she went in for the kill: “Van, that’s a wonderful piece of business,” she said, “but if you do that during my important lines, I have a bit of business that will draw attention away from yours.” Holding Heflin’s eye, Stanwyck pulled her skirt well above her knees. “Any time you start twirling that coin, I’ll be fixing my garter. So be sure you don’t do that when I have important lines to speak.”

  Forewarned, Helfin only does the coin trick once in her presence, when Martha is supposed to be flustered by Sam. Assured of her power, Stanwyck also supervised her own lighting, for she had “her own favorite key light,” at this point. She was now a far cry from the wholly vulnerable girl who let Capra take care of everything for her. The “pro” of Martha Ivers is estimable, of course, but sometimes one longs for the still unformed and open Stanwyck from 1930 to 1934 or so.

  Stanwyck’s first scene with Douglas inaugurates the main course of the movie, which starts a half hour into the running time. To counteract, or combat, Douglas’s embroidering style in this scene, Stanwyck holds back and lets him manage everything, keeping a poker face and a ramrod posture (Edith Head costumes Martha in clothes that look suffocating and slightly off-center, with hoods and furs piled on for protection). Then, when she sees her opening, Stanwyck bares down on him, bending slightly at the waist and snapping out, “When did you get drunk, where did you get drunk, why did you get drunk,” in one continuous, punching fashion: BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. When she’s made her impact, this stiff, practical woman seduces him a bit, in Stanwyck’s lightest, most distracted seduction mode; Martha knows that she doesn’t have to expend too much energy keeping Walter in line. They’re joined together by guilt: Walter’s f
ather, Mr. O’Neil, had them send an innocent man to the gallows for the murder of Martha’s aunt, and when they learn that Sam is back in town, they worry that he’s there to blackmail them.

  Far too much time is spent on Scott’s Toni, who looks less like she got out of the jug and more like she just came from the beauty parlor. And Stanwyck seems to sense that this isn’t a particularly serious movie, so she mainly takes it easy and doesn’t do any of the character work that might spoil the overall atmosphere of unreality. She sets off one tiny flare behind her eyes when Sam tells Martha that he doesn’t really know her, and instead of the all-encompassing moment of recognition Stanwyck achieves in her heavy-hitter roles, she shows Martha thinking, “I hardly know myself.” In her confrontation scene with Heflin, where Martha talks about killing her aunt and then realizes that Sam didn’t see her do it, she makes her eyes shine like a wild animal as she comes at him with a burning branch. Stanwyck stays well within the parameters of her role throughout, using just enough of her talent to make us believe in Martha without overselling the part, which could have been disastrous. She’s playing here for entertainment rather than acting out the reality of Capra or Ford or Vidor or Sturges.

  In another slow-burning scene with Douglas, this time with Heflin standing between them as referee, Stanwyck excitingly chooses to shout him down and then pound on a desk and cry, “Then let go!” in a high-pitched voice. This action shuts everybody up for a moment. Walter at one point calls Martha “a little girl in a cage, waiting for someone to let her out,” and the same could be said for Stanwyck the actress, who is only unleashed briefly at the end. Walter has fallen down the stairs (at least Milestone doesn’t have another thunderstorm roaring in the background), and Martha encircles Sam with her spider-like arms. “Now, Sam, do it now,” Martha urges, in Stanwyck’s airy purr. “Set me free, set both of us free.” She switches to a harsher tone: “He fell down the stairs and fractured his skull, everybody knows what a heavy drinker he was!” Then she goes back to purring, “Oh, Sam, it can be so easy ….”

  Rozsa’s score works itself into a fine frenzy as Sam walks down the stairs, and then the camera holds Martha in a close-up as she waits for him to kill Walter, her glistening lips open suggestively in anticipation of the crime. But her face falls in disappointment when she realizes that he won’t do what she wants. “Your whole life has been a dream, Martha,” Sam says. The best parts of Martha Ivers emphasize the dreamlike quality of the title character’s mind, which Stanwyck physicalizes whenever she has the chance. She pulls a gun on Sam, but she can’t shoot him; when he leaves, Walter holds the gun to her waist, and she pulls the trigger for him. “Ivers, Ivers,” rings out a male voice on the soundtrack, and Martha murmurs, “No … no … Martha Smith.” According to Rossen, Martha probably would have been happier driving a truck, or married to a truck driver. This isn’t a movie or performance that can stand too much scrutiny, but both have their moments.

  The same cannot be said for The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), a dreadful adaptation of a derivative stage chiller, non-directed by Peter Godfrey. Stanwyck was such good friends with Godfrey off-screen that she even helped bring up his three daughters when he and his wife passed away, so she may have been blind to his faults; his Christmas in Connecticut is often poor, but Carrolls reaches a whole new level of miscalculation and incompetence. It suffers from a precocious child (Ann Carter) who keeps spouting “adult-sounding” dialogue at a lugubrious pace, from Franz Waxman overdoing his stormy score, from Nigel Bruce overdoing his drunk friend, and from Humphrey Bogart embarrassing himself as a lunatic painter, widening his eyes amateurishly whenever he feels a crazy spell coming on. As his wife, Stanwyck is incongruously chipper in her first scenes, as if she thinks she can save some of this mess by being “starry.” But she’s also lazy here; when Alexis Smith starts coming on to her husband, it’s hard to tell, at first, whether Stanwyck’s character is amused by Smith’s man-eating or just oblivious, or both. And later on Stanwyck gives some of her lines a distracted, stilted reading (you can’t blame her if her mind is on something else, for she often seems to have wandered onto the wrong set and behaves as if she doesn’t want to be noticed).

  Bogart keeps trying to do her in with some poisoned milk, à la Suspicion (1941); he even offers some milk to the cops who lead him away, an insultingly obvious curtain line. It smells like a stinker from the start and only gets worse, and it’s a crime that Stanwyck and Bogart couldn’t have collaborated on something more appropriate. She would have made an ideal Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941), though it’s hard to begrudge Mary Astor one of her best roles.

  Compared to the travesty of Carrolls, Stanwyck’s third and thankfully last picture with Godfrey, Cry Wolf (1947), at least gives her something to do. As a woman trying to find out the secrets of an old dark house presided over by a seemingly bored or hung over Errol Flynn, Stanwyck rides horses, runs down dark hallways, makes use of a dumbwaiter to enter a secret laboratory, and skitters around on rooftops. There’s an effective scare or two, but the movie is mired in exposition and that deadly Godfrey pacing.

  In the immediate post-Code era, Stanwyck was a noble gambling lady, but in the lost weekend of the late forties, in The Lady Gambles (1949), she was asked to offer a case study in addiction. She does so admirably, even daringly, all along the way, until the script descends into textbook psychobabble (director Michael Gordon said that Stanwyck hesitated about accepting this role and needed a bit of persuasion to take it, for she had just run the histrionic gauntlet of Sorry, Wrong Number [1948]). When we first see her Joan, she’s a blondish woman blowing on some dice in a dark alley, deep in noir land. The men she’s with soon scatter, and two other men beat her up, pretty violently. We see her wheeled into a hospital on a gurney, passed out, her face bruised, as her husband David (Robert Preston) tries to keep her out of jail by telling her story to an indifferent doctor.

  Flashback to Las Vegas, where Joan enters a casino looking all fresh and dewy-eyed, her clothes neat and housewife-cute. Stanwyck pitches her voice slightly higher than usual to portray this gullible, open woman, almost stretching her wide range to the breaking point in these first scenes. But Stanwyck really starts to cook when Joan first catches gambling fever, embracing the illicit, clearly sexual thrill she gets from rolling those dice. When she asks a big-time club manager (Stephen McNally) for more money, Joan looks spent, out of breath and scared, like she’s just been through a disaster. When she gets upset about his initial refusal, Stanwyck is desperate in the shamed way of a repressed, bourgeois woman. This is knife-edge, exacting work, always specific to the person she is playing.

  The miracle actress who needed Capra’s protection in order to give her all on the first take had developed a formidable technique over the years. In a scene where Joan tries to get money from a pawnbroker, Stanwyck went even further with her character’s outraged gentility and sense of shame, and she did so under trying conditions. Gordon said, “Houseley Stevenson, who played the pawnbroker, was getting along in years and had difficulty remembering his lines. Because the scene was so emotionally draining for Barbara—there were no fake tears in her performance—after several takes I reconciled myself to settling for a less than satisfactory performance on the old man’s part rather than ask her to keep repeating the scene. But Barbara insisted on my staying with it until she knew I felt we’d gotten it right. The wear and tear on her nervous system that day was considerable—but that’s the way Barbara worked.” If you’re going to shoot for being “the best of all,” you must have flexibility and discipline. Stanwyck dug ever deeper into the reservoir of her emotions until it seemed, at times, that the rage and pleasure and agony she needed had no limit.

  How did she learn to do this? In a bind like this pawnshop scene, when she had to keep repeating herself, Stanwyck may have used her own version of sense memories. When actors are dry and need a boost, they often have go-to images, thoughts, and visions from the past that can instantly call
up what they need. Some of these spurs and triggers have a short shelf life, but the deepest of them can last for an entire career. What, I wonder, was Stanwyck using to come up with the scenes of Joan at the gambling tables, where she sweats and pants like an animal, her tongue sometimes sliding out of her mouth, followed by the “morning after” bliss when she wakes up in the afternoon? Stanwyck makes it crystal clear, and then some, that gambling is sexually stimulating for passionate Joan, so that there’s no doubt that she isn’t being satisfied by her husband (and Robert Taylor definitely wasn’t satisfying Stanwyck at the time, if he ever had). Eying McNally’s Corrigan, who exploits her needs, Joan says that gambling is “noisy and confusing and … just a little dirty”—and she doesn’t mean the dirt that can be wiped away with a homemaker’s dishrag.

  Yet The Lady Gambles cannot bring itself to put the blame on Joan’s good-hearted, dull husband and insists on introducing a red herring, Joan’s older sister Ruth (Edith Barrett), a possessive sort who, like Stanwyck’s sister Millie Stevens, raised Joan as her own child after their mother died. Bemoaning her spinsterhood, Ruth cries, “I should have put you in a home!” Stanwyck looks alarmed at this exclamation; her own sister did indeed put her in a home, several homes, in fact—most of them bad. Maybe this is part of the reason Stanwyck hesitated about taking this role, for these first scenes with her on-screen sister hit so close to home that they carry a nagging, unresolved tension.

  Joan tries to reform, but she’s soon gambling again. At this point, Stanwyck comes back from the tables looking like she’s drunk, but in the best possible way, hyper-aware and liberated. It’s scenes like this that make me wish we could liberate Stanwyck from this well-meaning but somewhat sterile movie and install her into something like Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels (1963), where platinum blond Jeanne Moreau makes a religion of roulette and offers it to us like a vision of paradise.