Barbara Stanwyck

by Dan Callahan

  Joan looks like a startled little girl when David catches her gambling again, then sinks down into a chair like a ruined middle-aged woman (it’s often extreme age transitions like this that separate the great actors from the merely good ones). She goes back to pimp-daddy Corrigan with childlike misgiving on her face—this is a movie that suggests a lot, but never follows through on its promises. Joan winds up in a low dive, with blond hair, dancing and rolling customers for money. When a low-life forces her to blow on his dice, Stanwyck makes this moment look deeply humiliating, as if Joan is being forced to give head.

  In the last scenes, set in the hospital, Ruth is set up as the villain, but Stanwyck and Barrett (who’s quite good) play against the script, so that when Ruth tells Joan that she killed their mother, it seems like there’s a deeper trauma at play. In a few moments here, as David tries to comfort Joan, Stanwyck transcends her material and hits a deep well of fear and remorse that feels bruisingly personal. This performance is the opposite of her Megan Davis in General Yen: too Method, too Lee Strasberg, too much. The doctor uses laughable reverse psychology to talk Joan out of jumping off a ledge, and the film ends with Joan and David looking out at a new day and a new beginning. But Stanwyck has shown us too much hurt and nervy excitement to make us believe that this woman will ever go back to being a housewife.

  When the American Film Institute gave Stanwyck its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987, Walter Matthau remembered her in The File on Thelma Jordan (1950, also known as Thelma Jordan), particularly the way she sighed, “Maybe I am just a dame and didn’t know it.” Matthau then went on to knock her co-star, Wendell Corey, an unprepossessing actor who was good when he was doing a menacing type in Budd Boetticher’s The Killer is Loose (1956), but who was hard-pressed to hold his own as a leading man opposite Stanwyck. Thelma Jordan has a fine director in Robert Siodmak, a past master of film noirs like The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1948), and he brings a solemn, German expressionist look to the first scenes of Jordan, where Corey’s assistant DA Cleve Marshall staggers into his office, drunk, trying to avoid a dinner with his wife and hated father-in-law. “Fed up,” he says to his co-worker. “You ever heard that phrase? No, you wouldn’t, you’re not married.”

  Siodmak frames a long hallway behind Cleve, and he does the same thing in Cleve’s house, where Cleve’s slightly whiny wife nags at him over the phone. The director is trying to set up the same sense of gentle disillusionment he found in Charles Laughton in The Suspect (1945) and in George Sanders in Uncle Harry (1945). But Siodmak is defeated by Corey’s limitations and also by the extremely wordy script by Ketti Frings, which always goes out of its way to dissipate any momentum with tangents and unnecessary exposition.

  Still, Siodmak works up to a fine entrance for Stanwyck’s Thelma, who is revealed in a slight shock cut near the office door, breaking into Cleve’s dreamy inebriation with her direct look, her white Edith Head dress and gleaming gold necklace, and her somewhat ritzy manner (lots of British “a’s” in these first scenes). Cleve and Thelma get to know each other at length, and as their scenes plod along, it’s hard not to wish someone like Dana Andrews were playing Corey’s role, someone with some charisma and presence. Andrews could have kept Thelma Jordan from descending into the doldrums, as it often does during its first half hour or so.

  We get lots of chatty dates between Thelma and Cleve, yet the screenplay barely establishes Thelma’s rich aunt (Gertrude Hoffman) before having her shot off-screen. The narrative is more interested in “whodunit” than character, and Stanwyck puts the brakes on, merely walking us through Thelma’s back-story, which involved being a hostess at a gambling house and dreams of becoming an actress, both of which sound promising but get little follow-through. When Thelma and Cleve run around the scene of the crime, things start to get unintentionally comic because they keep panicking. “Touch the safe!” he tells her. “Wait, what about the window?” she asks. “I left a note!” she remembers. They wipe fingerprints off things, put new fingerprints on other things, turn the corpse over, and so on. Stanwyck’s “fear” feels lazy, or at least unconvincing—which might be the point, but couldn’t Thelma show some acting talent?

  Siodmak told an unsettling story about working with Stanwyck on this film. “Barbara always had the character completely worked out,” he said. “Before we started shooting, she would be sitting in her chair, her eyes closed and her concentration on the scene she was to play.” This sounds like her, but then he added: “One day, before a very difficult scene, I tried to give her some last minute advice. That was the only time she showed any temper. She brushed me impatiently aside. I didn’t mind, for I was sure she knew what she wanted to do.” Judging from her rote work in Thelma Jordan, it’s a shame that Stanwyck gave Siodmak the brush-off. He was often an exceptional director of actors, and he could have helped her deepen parts of this character that needed deepening, especially the sense that Thelma is a frustrated actress, which never really comes through in Stanwyck’s performance. You’d think it would be catnip to her as a performer who, at her best, was always aware of the levels of role-playing everyone engages in.

  Things improve slightly when we get to court, where Thelma is tried for murder, even if there are unwelcome echoes of Remember the Night, a far superior film, as Cleve deliberately throws the case out of love for his mistress. When Cleve shows Thelma a photo from her gambling girl past, we see Stanwyck in a blond wig, usually a scary sight, but here it looks so fake that this photo reveal gets another unwanted laugh. There’s a good scene with Thelma’s crooked lawyer (Stanley Ridges), where he details his crookedness from the shadows; this is the only point where Stanwyck seems genuinely engaged in the film. The climax gives her a nasty bit of business with a cigarette lighter in a car, and then a tearful bedside confession where she talks about her good/bad nature and wonders, “You don’t suppose they could just let half of me die?” before expiring. We are left to wonder what Stanwyck might have accomplished with Siodmak if she had been more open to him and if Frings’s script had been more concise.

  As it is, Thelma Jordan is the kind of movie that can be viewed several times without any memory of past viewings. Perhaps Stanwyck was suffering from noir fatigue: “My God, isn’t there a good comedy around?” she asked at the time. “I’m tired of suffering in films. And I’ve killed so many co-stars lately, I’m getting a power complex!” Screwball comedy with feelings, for Preston Sturges, had been much more agreeable to her than noir and its restrictions, but she never did get another comedy role (it’s a shame she didn’t work for Hawks again in the early fifties, or for Blake Edwards in the early sixties).

  Stanwyck had much more enthusiasm for No Man of Her Own (1950), which reunited her with Mitchell Leisen. Director Leisen, who got such exceptional work from her in Remember the Night, gave her a book he was interested in called I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich (written under the pseudonym William Irish). She was so taken with its morbid plot that she insisted to Paramount that it be her next picture for them. Woolrich stories have been made into many fine films, most notably Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). This Hitchcock-type material is sometimes not in Leisen’s comfort zone, yet he manages to personalize a lot of it (Woolrich was gay, as Leisen was, and there’s a sensibility at work here that makes their outsider status plain).

  The opening scenes, which were written by Catherine Turney, are inventively done: Leisen begins with an image of an idyllic suburban street, as Stanwyck starts to talk to us on the soundtrack: “The summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield. They smell of heliotrope and jasmine, honeysuckle and clover.” She pitches her voice higher here, which suits the woman she’s playing, Helen Ferguson (the same name as that of Stanwyck’s longtime publicist and special friend, a former actress who sometimes lived with Stanwyck and protected her from the press).

  Helen urgently describes the hush of the evenings, the stillness in a place like this. “The summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield,” she says, “But not f
or us. Not for us.” She will repeat this “not for us” mantra again. It refers specifically to her and her boyfriend Bill (John Lund) as they ponder what to do about an inconvenient murder. But in Stanwyck’s reading the line also speaks to the outcasts of this world, the people who aren’t welcome in homes like this, the Lee Leanders, the Mitchell Leisens, the Cornell Woolrichs—and the Barbara Stanwycks, of course. She was as secure as she’d ever be in Hollywood in 1950, and as socially accepted. She was politically conservative, so she had no fear of the blacklist of that time. But some worldly people can only go so far in their pursuit of a happiness that stems from a feeling of unthinking security, and her Helen Ferguson discovers as much—just as Lee did, and just as Stanwyck did.

  Leisen takes you inside a large, comfy house, and Helen talks about the cleanness inside (“the smell of wax,” Stanwyck emphasizes, so forcefully that you begin to smell it). We see Helen sitting across from Bill with a blond-headed baby boy in her lap. The couple seems to be at the end of an argument, locked in stalemate. “This is a thing apart,” says Helen, “this is murder.” She goes upstairs to put the baby to bed, and Leisen darkens his frame so that we can only see Stanwyck’s eyes glowing from the shadows. Helen’s voice continues on the track, leading us into a flashback. She says she was desperate, and we see her in a phone booth, down to just a few pieces of change, pregnant and stranded in New York.

  In this flashback, Stanwyck makes her face into a stony mask with a shining forehead; she wears little or no make-up. We see Helen dragging her pregnant bulk up some stairs, and then she begins to cry desperately at a closed door. We see her betrayer, Stephen (Lyle Bettger), and his new woman, a blond (Carole Mathews). Helen has begged there before, for she has nowhere else to go, and Stephen slips some money into an envelope and slides it under the door to her. Helen opens the envelope and pulls out a train ticket to San Francisco. She thinks for a moment and finally accepts the situation with Stanwyck’s familiar stoicism, grown a bit grim with time. Leisen shows us Helen lumbering back down the stairs of the rooming house, then pulls back so that we see the money left on the landing. She still has some pride, it seems.

  Leisen and Stanwyck create an intense mood of static despair in this first flashback sequence, and they keep to this mood when Helen gets on her train. She’s seated in an uncomfortable position and looks old and tired until Hugh Harkness (Richard Denning) offers her his more spacious seat. Responding to his offer, her face seems to grow years younger, so that she seems like a grateful little girl: Ruby Stevens at twelve or thirteen, surprised by some bit of random kindness. When Hugh’s wife Patrice (Phyllis Thaxter), who is also pregnant, asks about Helen’s husband and finds out that there is no husband, she’s embarrassed. “Funny, you never think, do you?” Patrice asks, so polite, so cheerful, so unmarked by life. “No, you never do,” Helen murmurs, in a way that takes in her own foolishness and Patrice’s radically different ignorance, seeming to measure the enormous distance between the two and then melding the women together so that they can somehow share the same small space. It’s as all encompassing a line reading as her, “That’s it, we’re smart,” from Leisen’s Remember the Night, only much more beaten down and resigned. Lee Leander is still young enough to wonder at life, but Helen Ferguson is old enough that she has to do the hard work of continuing to exist, even though her existence has been given over to sordid repetitions that she can no longer truly learn from.

  In the ladies’ room, Patrice comes out with hearty American bromides like, “Don’t let anybody tell you that Europe is cheap,” and she insists that Helen try on her wedding ring. There’s a real ambivalence in these scenes: Leisen is alert enough to how grating Patrice can be, but he also sees how her basic kindness is something that everyone longs for, the kind of kindness that leads a man to not only give up his more comfortable seat to a pregnant woman, but also try to be friendly with her because she so obviously needs a friend. It’s a more complex attitude, finally, than the Leisen/Sturges representation of the perfect family in Remember the Night, even though it doesn’t last for long. We can intuit Leisen’s ultimate feeling about this all-American couple, these non-outcasts, by the gleeful, abrupt way with which he dispatches them. Trying on Patrice’s wedding ring, Helen looks into a mirror, and no sooner has Patrice insisted, “I couldn’t have bad luck,” than the mirror shatters (upsettingly, given the consistent relationship on screen between Stanwyck and her mirrors), and the train flips all the way over.

  The restroom set where Stanwyck played this scene with Thaxter was built inside a steel wheel. Leisen suspended a camera from a catwalk, and when the train was supposed to be hit, he rotated the wheel all the way around with both actresses inside doing their own stunts. The effect is unnervingly realistic in its violence. Helen is taken from the wreck on a stretcher, which leads to a shot from her perspective looking at a ceiling as doctors cut off her coat and save her baby through caesarian section. When she wakes up, Helen is suffering from a concussion, which Stanwyck suggests by making the emotions behind her eyes seem liquid, unmoored to her mind. Leisen gives nearly Capra-esque attention to Stanwyck’s plain, intensely girlish face in the hospital bed. After Helen realizes they’ve mistaken her for the dead Patrice, she tries to tell them the truth, but she’s too ill and upset to do so. Stanwyck allows herself to be extremely vulnerable in these scenes, and Leisen is sensitive to every small shift in her expression.

  Going to meet Hugh’s well-off parents, Helen says, “It isn’t too late, I can still back out!” several times in voiceover to the rhythm of the train’s wheels on the track. Just as she spoke to us so tantalizingly after the opening credits, Helen’s voice reappears every so often to tell us her thoughts. This is an interior sort of cinema, and it’s saved from gimmickry because its experimental nature isn’t stressed. Stanwyck’s voice isn’t exactly in sync with the train wheels—as it would be, say, in a Rouben Mamoulian movie from the early 1930s. It’s enough here to suggest a correlation between things like outside sounds and inside worries.

  Helen is met at the station by Hugh’s mother, played by the stage star Jane Cowl (whose popularity in the twenties meant that Ruby Stevens became Barbara Stanwyck instead of Jane Stanwyck, according to the former Miss Stevens herself). Given that this is a Leisen movie, Helen’s baby boy is soon placed on a plush satin pillow. It must be said that when the plot starts to get more contrived and improbable, the director seems to retreat into his own distinctive set design and lighting, which—because this is a melodrama with a noir patina—is much darker than usual.

  Helen keeps making mistakes, of course; she’s never sensible enough just to say as little as possible to Hugh’s family (but maybe her concussion hasn’t worn off yet). Helen is “passing” in these scenes, as Leisen and Woolrich had to, as Stella Dallas tried to. Helen Ferguson, living a lie! (Whatever the truth of the lesbian rumors about Stanwyck and her publicist, Helen Ferguson, who could be very motherly and controlling with her best client, Leisen may have had a private laugh over this character name). Everything up to the train wreck and hospital stay is effectively dreamy, but in this perfect house where Helen is passing, and where family members sit around the piano just as they do in Remember the Night, things start to get sleepy rather than dreamy. A part of the problem here is Lund, one of those movie actors from this period who seems to have been employed precisely because of his stolidity and lack of charisma. He’s playing a man whose motivations throughout are a mystery, and Lund can do nothing to enlighten you.

  Helen gets a threatening telegram. Of course, Stanwyck has to read it to us again on the soundtrack after we’ve read it ourselves, but it’s more dramatic when she reads it, so we can forgive the reiteration. The unsavory Stephen turns up to blackmail Helen, and Stanwyck has little to do but look worried. (Leisen shot a scene where Stephen slaps her around, and Stanwyck insisted on Bettger actually hitting her, naturally. But this scene was cut, probably because it was too rough, and so we’re missing perhaps a key example of
Stanwyck’s masochistic “hurt me when I tell you to” streak). Stephen forces Helen to marry him (she’s set to inherit money). Stanwyck gets a bright idea as she hears the section about “til death do us part” in the marriage vows; you can almost see a thought balloon that says, “I know, I’ll kill him!” at this moment. Stanwyck milks the moment as if she’s decided to play this one scene comedically—if they weren’t going to give her comedies anymore, she’d just have to make her own opportunities. This wild choice punctuates the overly languorous mood of the film quite nicely.

  Helen goes to kill Stephen. He’s already dead, it seems, but she fires the gun anyway and then gets the weirdly loyal Bill to dump Stephen’s body off a bridge. This is another shot, like the train crash, where Leisen surprises us by not cutting away when we expect him to; he lets us see the corpse as it flops over in the air on its way down. “God forgive me,” Helen whispers, finally, and Leisen lets her off the hook with an ending in line with the blonds equal danger theme running through Stanwyck’s career. Like many of her movies of this period, No Man of Her Own is uneven, but it deserves a lot more exposure and comment than it has received.

  Actor Joe DeSantis remembered that there was much tension and “personal unhappiness” on the set of The Man with a Cloak (1951), an atmospheric period thriller shot right after the ordeal and humiliation of Stanwyck’s divorce from Taylor. It begins promisingly, with David Raksin’s ominous score under the credits and some tense low angle shots of 1848 New York, where the saturnine Dupin (Joseph Cotton) observes the arrival of gamine Madeline (Leslie Caron), a French girl who has come to win some money for her fiancée from his reprobate grandfather Thevenet (Louis Calhern). Stanwyck makes her star entrance walking down some stairs in the Thevenet household, her face a mask with little glimmers of contempt burning away underneath, her voice precise and false. She plays Lorna Bounty, a once-celebrated stage actress reduced to keeping house. Lorna is a schemer, almost a Mrs. Danvers type, a stone butch eying young Madeline’s Paris lingerie with Sapphic bemusement. Stanwyck parcels out some of her behavioral modes here like individually wrapped gifts, then pulls back into a steady, watchful look.