Barbara Stanwyck

by Dan Callahan

  Moorehead is more than a little hammy, but this part doesn’t call for restraint; the role of Leona requires an actress to go as all-out as Moore-head does, with her symphony of gasps and rasps and arpeggios of hysteria up and down the vocal scale. It’s a tribute to her work that it’s hard to imagine seeing this Leona; she exists as a voice, and Fletcher taps into the fear associated with this disembodiment. On the telephone, we’re all verbal consciousness and no body, just as radio voices are Beckett-like instruments talking to themselves, just as Leona does.

  It’s just you and her in the dark, as Leona finally descends to desperate whispering, sure that a man is in the house and about to come up and stab her to death. The people on the other end of her line get less and less helpful, until she’s finally disposed of, her almost sexual scream blending into the shriek of a train whistle.

  Moorehead’s career was rather unfulfilling after her Welles films, but how do you follow those two seminal movies? She’s probably most known now as Endora on the 1960s TV show Bewitched, but she’s really the archetypal radio actress, a performer who could do pretty much anything with her voice, best restricted to extremes of short duration.

  Leona Stevenson, then, is a part for an actress who can get full mileage out of playing a neurotic. This type of role goes against Stanwyck’s grain, her aspect and image of total, widespread knowledge. For her screenplay, Fletcher opens up her radio script with flashbacks, and sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks, and this strategy weakens her original conception to the point of almost total incoherence.

  Under the credits for Sorry, Wrong Number, we see a phone and its shadow, and Franz Waxman’s stormy music gives way, momentarily, to an ominous telephone busy signal. So far, so good, but when a title card comes up under the image of girls working a switchboard, it’s easy to predict trouble ahead. “In the tangled networks of a great city,” reads the card, “the telephone is the unseen link between a million lives … It is the servant of our common needs—the confidante of our inmost secrets … life and happiness wait upon its ring … and horror … and loneliness … and … death!!!” Those three exclamation marks after “death” set the unfortunate, “Step right up!” carnival barker tone of this picture, and this crudeness remains consistent from first to last. Anatole Litvak directs Sorry, Wrong Number as if his audience is both stupid and greedy for lurid detail, and the effect is one of thoughtless confusion.

  The camera takes in a nighttime interior and a phone off the hook; we then see Stanwyck’s Leona, crying, “Opera-tuh, opera-tuh!” from her bed, her diamonds glinting on her fussy lace nightgown. Stanwyck pats her hair and dabs at her face with a lace handkerchief to get across how pampered and cloistered this woman is in the heat of summer (so much of the performance that follows will be predicated on surface indications such as these). After Stanwyck hears the murder plan, she furrows her brow and actually shakes the phone in frustration—a weak choice, borne more of a performer’s desperation than a character’s frustration.

  It becomes instantly clear just how wrong it is to see Leona in this first scene when we should really only be hearing her on the phone, on the radio, in the dark; Stanwyck has to make impossible physical transitions as a real woman in a real bed. What to do? She falls back on invalid clichés (panting, obsequious looks), and decisive body movements, but there’s no emotional throughline to what she’s doing. Litvak keeps moving the camera away from Stanwyck to look around the apartment so that she can just be a voice like Moorehead was, but he always has to come back to her, and nothing can hide the sketchiness of this character and this situation as visualized.

  Stanwyck’s version of this woman’s high-handed foolishness is painful to watch because it’s all on one note, all done in a monochromatic style that doesn’t have the jittery fun of Davis’s emoting or Crawford’s heartfelt reaching for effects. Stanwyck can’t make herself over into that kind of showboating actress at this late date, so she just heedlessly blasts her way through, putting lipstick on while staring at her grotesquely preening face in a mirror (it’s enough to make you imagine Capra shouting, “Barbara, stop this hamming! You can have one of my Oscars!”).

  Glamour shots of a 1930s Stanwyck peer out from behind furniture belonging to Leona’s father (Ed Begley), who tells his daughter that maybe what she heard was just a gag on the radio (an in-joke from Fletcher). Leona talks next to Miss Jennings, secretary to her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster), and this woman is an Agnes Moorehead type, a skinny old maid played by Dorothy Neumann as if she were doing a dreary comedy sketch. Things get worse with the introduction of Sally Hunt, Henry’s old girlfriend, played by Ann Richards as a dippy blond who seems to be trapped in a Carol Burnett-style parody of phony 1940s acting.

  Lancaster is ill at ease in his role—great to look at but still green as an actor. He lets Stanwyck push him around in their scenes together until we get the feeling that she doesn’t like her rich girl hypochondriac one bit. Bette Davis could seem to despise some of her characters, and yet still be exciting to watch because of all the effort it took to put them together. But Stanwyck can’t get by on this kind of technique; it feels too shallow for her. In her scenes with Begley, always a crude actor, Stanwyck does fast-sell work without grace or thought—this from an actress who even in some of her worst movies always seems to be thinking, weighing her options, considering.

  “But that’s what acting is, it’s re-acting,” she told John Kobal in the 1960s. “When youngsters ask me how to act, I say, ‘Don’t. Re-act! Don’t act!’” World class advice, and yet in Sorry, Wrong Number, one of her best-known movies and the occasion for her last Oscar nomination, Stanwyck does nothing but “act” in Litvak’s half-assed vacuum, where everybody shouts for no reason and strides around. It’s as if the base of her talent had been dynamited away.

  A honeymoon montage featuring wealthy Leona and poor, ambitious Henry only serves as an occasion for Stanwyck to cement the “she was too bossy and that’s why she lost Robert Taylor” publicity narrative that would cling to her for the rest of her life. The interminable flashbacks keep coming. Genteel-voiced Sally calls Leona and tells her about a trek she made to Staten Island because of some suspicions she had about Henry. “I waited there for about an hour,” she says. “Nothing happened.” No kidding! (Non-fans of Richards might be interested to know that she retired from acting shortly after this, thankfully, and devoted herself to poetry, publishing a collection in 1971 called The Grieving Senses. I kid you not.)

  Sally keeps talking and talking at pay phones and crying, “Wait, I know I have another nickel!” while we pray that she doesn’t, and finally she’s all out of money to gab on the phone with. Hearing a doorbell downstairs, Stanwyck’s Leona gets up from her sickbed and cries, “I can’t come down, I’m on the top floor and I’m sick!” with her voice breaking on “sick,” in that pure emotion way of hers. This role doesn’t need that emotion, though, which is why we see so little of it.

  Litvak cuts next to a floor show with a female dancer being twirled and twirled upside down by her partner (it seems like he’ll bring on some jugglers next to pad the running time a little more). Dr. Alexander (Wendell Corey) breaks the news to Henry that Leona is “what we call a cardiac-neurotic,” and when he hears this, Henry winds a phone cord around his wrist until the phone falls to the floor (broad foreshadowing of the end, of course). After hearing this diagnosis, Leona screams, “Liars!” about ten times, as she collapses on her bed.

  Following this fresh blast of hysterics, Litvak unwinds an even duller flashback involving Waldo Evans (Harold Vermilyea), a tediously mousy type who went in with Henry on a scheme to embezzle money. The film goes right to sleep for a long time owing to Vermilyea’s measured, Edmund Gwenn-like voice. And Fletcher does Lancaster a real disservice; we are told in dialogue everything his character is supposed to be feeling, when it would be so much better to just show a few short scenes of him becoming discontented with his marriage and his own lapdog status. The actor rushes thro
ugh this movie with scarcely veiled impatience.

  Stanwyck bypasses the few occasions when she might have made this cardboard woman more complex—even moments when she could have made Leona at least a quasi-recognizable human being, such as the scene where she has her first psychosomatic attack in front of Henry after wondering if he’s only married her for her money. We get no sense of Leona’s insecurity or her relation to her father, only the same “shoot the works,” hard-edged emoting; there’s no vulnerability, no humanity, just bulldozer acting. We learn that Henry has set Leona up to be killed for her insurance, as if this whole project was penance for Double Indemnity. This time, the actress who played the murderer is on the receiving end; this movie is a steep price for Stanwyck to pay for Phyllis Dietrichson.

  So, finally, we come to the main event, Leona’s final act fight for life. For twelve days, Stanwyck played her scenes in bed in order, and she took them seriously. Litvak had her do take after take, and she trusted him, even when the crew started to get angry and told her that she had done enough. I wonder if better, more nuanced takes might not have been left on the cutting room floor; nothing in Litvak’s career suggests that he was a good judge of performances. In fact, he had a knack for making a hash of promising projects (see particularly his enervating collaboration with Vivien Leigh in The Deep Blue Sea [1955]). I’m willing to make Litvak the villain here because nothing in Stanwyck’s work before or after this movie suggests the dumbed-out flattening that occurs in this picture.

  Taken purely as an exercise, and detached from the preceding hour or so, the last reel of Sorry, Wrong Number contains some colorful work from its star—not serious or first-rate Stanwyck, but definitely colorful. We see Leona’s shaky fingers on her white phone, and when she finds out that she’s calling the morgue, she throws herself all the way down out of frame while Waxman’s music goes nuts. His scoring really helps, and it deserves a lot of credit for making these last moments what they are (Fletcher herself was married to the Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann, so she knew the importance of a musical score). Leona thinks to call the police, then quickly calls the hospital to get a nurse. This kind of stupidity will be exhibited in many a horror film to come, where the audience yells at the screen and gets to feel superior to the dopey victim.

  Her husband calls: “Did you say Mr. Steven … Mr. Stevenson from New Haven?” Leona asks, and Stanwyck’s hesitation between “Steven” and “Stevenson” displays the naturalistic talent that’s been missing in action all through this movie. Stanwyck makes Leona look like a little girl now, even with her messed-up, gray-streaked hair. “Evans said that you wanted me to … to-die,” she says, strategically using that wooden “to” of hers to get across the stuttering simplicity Leona has reached. She apologizes for being so “awful” to her husband, but we should have felt this ambivalence earlier. Now it’s too late, for us and for Leona.

  Waxman’s music steadily builds as Henry tells her to get out of the house (the insurance money is unnecessary now, a too-cute twist by Fletcher). “I can’t move, Henry, I … I’m too frightened,” she cries, believably paralyzed. Then she looks up, and her face freezes. “Henry,” she says, quietly. “Henry,” she repeats. “Henry, there’s somebody coming up the stairs!” she screams, building up to that third “Henry” until her voice crescendos and breaks into terrified little pieces flying around the room (this magnificent vocal flourish, with Waxman’s music, has never failed to raise gooseflesh on my arms whenever I’ve watched this). Finally Leona is pleading with an unseen assassin, promising to give him anything, then screaming hoarsely as he goes in for the kill (I assume he strangles her). The curtain line is just a terse, “Sorry, wrong number,” and this is the one improvement on Fletcher’s original play, where the killer was wordier after the murder.

  Stanwyck did this part for Lux Radio Theatre in 1950, but she didn’t do the Moorehead version, unfortunately. The Lux broadcast runs about an hour, and it does play better than the film, but it still doesn’t have the concentrated sting of the Moorehead original. After caterwauling her way through the finale, Stanwyck has to come back on and sputter about how she just loves Lux soap, I’m afraid. It isn’t acting, what she does in Sorry, Wrong Number, but it is classic awards-baiting, and it is, like that Lux plug, pure, unadulterated show business.

  Two for Sirk

  All I Desire, There’s Always Tomorrow

  There is no cinema reputation that has made a more dramatic turnaround in recent years than the work of Danish-German émigré Douglas Sirk. In his most productive period, the 1950s, his Universal soap operas and melodramas were looked down on as tearjerker money makers marked with the opulent vulgarity of their producer, Ross Hunter. But in the seventies and ever since, audiences and writers have looked closer at Sirk’s supposed lowbrow “weepies” and discovered their irony, their levels of social criticism, their flamboyant consciousness of sex and neurosis, and their magisterial, often downright icy visual style that traps people in architectural cages (a later German auteur, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was profoundly influenced by both Sirk’s technique and his radical pessimism). A highly intellectual, cultured European of the Thomas Mann school, Sirk favored broken, “in-between” type characters who move helplessly in a kind of circle, never able to break free of the wheelhouse of American society. He was most interested in portraying failure in all its permutations. In the two films he made with Stanwyck, he came as close as he ever would to analyzing his obsession with failure, aided in both cases by his star’s willingness to imagine and experience a theme that she herself was not invested in.

  “The mirror is the imitation of life,” Sirk told an interviewer, Jon Halliday. “What is interesting about a mirror is that it does not show you yourself as you are, it shows you your opposite.” And so, in his two films with Stanwyck, he holds up that mirror that she was always looking into in her movies and shows her her opposite, and the result is her deepest and most unusually inflected work since Capra’s General Yen. Sirk understood her almost as well as Capra did: “She gets every point, every nuance without hitting on anything too heavily,” he related to James Harvey. “And there is such an amazing tragic stillness about her at the same time. She never steps out of it and she never puts it on, but it is always there, this deep melancholy in her presence.”

  “And the way she acted between takes was very different,” Sirk remembered. “Most people, as soon as the camera stops, you know, go straight to the mirror to check. But every time, she would go to a corner of the set, hardly talking to anyone—until we were ready to shoot again, and she was always ready and always perfect.” (Maureen O’Sullivan, a supporting player in Sirk’s first film with Stanwyck, All I Desire [1953], found her “a cold person,” because of the way she isolated herself on set. Stanwyck needed to do this to get into character, for Sirk had stimulated her most creative impulses). “She impressed me all the time as someone who—what can I say?—someone who had really been touched deeply by life in some way,” Sirk concluded. “Because she had depth as a person ….”

  Sirk favored the title of Carol Brink’s source novel Stopover, and considered it far stronger than the final title of his initial collaboration with Stanwyck, All I Desire. Concession to popular taste was something he always had to work against; even so, these concessions to Ross Hunter stimulated Sirk’s creativity. After the credits, we see a placard with, “Naomi Murdoch, Direct From Broadway,” billed fourth on a theater bill. “Naomi Murdoch, that’s me,” Stanwyck says, in voiceover, “Not quite at the bottom of the bill yet and not quite at the end of my rope.”

  Her voice sounds beyond exhausted, like an empty cornhusk, as she tells us about the stale air in theaters during the summer months and how she’s never really impressed an audience. She has dyed blond hair and is dressed like a showgirl. We later learn that Naomi used to do Shakespeare and the classics, but, like Sirk, she’s been boxed into giving the public what it supposedly wants. She was probably not a very good actress, Naomi says,
but maybe she just tells herself that because she’s tired of feeling badly about the downward trajectory of her career. “Brother, there’s not much to look forward to,” she says, continuing the voiceover in her pleasantly weary voice. “Well, I guess some people might say maybe I asked for it.” Stanwyck stresses the “I guess” and the “might” and the “maybe.” She’s drawn to such escape-hatch words in all of her interviews, and they add to that “in-between” feeling that Sirk is focused on.

  In an overhead shot, Sirk frames a large wooden beam running across Naomi’s head as she enters her shared dressing room, the first of the prison bar shots he so favors in his interiors. Her dressing room crony tells Naomi that she should “go back to legit,” where you don’t have to worry so much about getting old. Sirk frames Naomi in a mirror as she opens a letter and reads it, then moves to her actual body and then back to her image in the mirror when she gives the letter to her fellow vaudevillian (a mirror shot in a film, an image of an image).

  “It’s a laugh, that’s all,” Naomi says, in an agitated, slightly panicked voice. “Dearest mother,” the vaudevillian reads, and Naomi says, “I told you it was a laugh,” in Stanwyck’s fastest, most scaldingly self-loathing delivery. She’s in a mirror again, narrating her character’s life for a director who will leave her with no illusions whatever. Naomi thinks about visiting the husband and three children she left behind years ago in a small town; her daughter Lily (Lori Nelson) is in a school play and is asking to see her. When the vaudevillian encourages her, Naomi murmurs, “I’ve done it on the stage,” as if she thinks she can just act the part of the glamorous absentee mother.