Barbara Stanwyck

by Dan Callahan

  Naomi narrates for us again, talking about her hometown, Riverdale, Wisconsin, and about “the lawns the husbands were so proud of.” River-dale is a place you leave, and Riverdale is a place to come back to when you’re close to the end of your rope. Her older daughter, Joyce (Marcia Henderson), is a prim, hypocritical type who is always scolding Lily, who takes after her mother. Naomi’s husband, Henry (Richard Carlson), is a school principal; when we first see Henry, he’s being told by a school supervisor not to go teaching any “progressive ideas.” Henry doesn’t flinch one bit at this. The way he keeps O’Sullivan’s spinster schoolteacher character on tenterhooks about their relationship feels mean; he practices the type of well-intentioned meanness that can’t be called out for what it is. This is a town where all anybody ever really cares about is how things look. “A woman comes back with all her dreams, with her love,” Sirk said, “and she finds nothing but this rotten, decrepit middle-class American family.” (This is a far better and more integrated movie than Lang’s Clash by Night, which had a similar theme.)

  As Naomi approaches her old house, Sirk shows us her shadow on the pavement; there are some discreet violins playing on the soundtrack. When he cuts to a close-up of Naomi moving forward and looking all around the outside of the house, Stanwyck is so deeply involved in this woman’s nostalgia and regret that the scene almost feels pornographic, as in her best Capra work. This is acting at so high a level that it doesn’t even seem like acting; it seems like we are watching a real woman on a real street. Stanwyck is able to achieve this level of exposure partly because Sirk is so stylized and chilly and distant.

  Never before or after does Stanwyck’s face look so much like an open wound, an open battlefield. Her mask is dropped in this close-up, and we seem to be seeing the engine room of her talent, the bottom of her being. What she was always able to do with her voice to get an orchestral effect she is now skilled and daring enough to do with her face. And the Sirkian irony is particularly brutal here, for Naomi is looking with such longing at a house that all but broadcasts a sense of complacent, prison-like security. Sirk uses low angles inside the house to give us a sense of entrapment as this prodigal mother enters. After she’s greeted her children and they’ve gone upstairs, Sirk cuts to an overhead shot and divides the frame between Henry and Naomi with an ornate banister.

  When the German housekeeper asks Naomi if she can still do a high kick onto a box that holds cigarette butts, Naomi cheerfully does her chorus girl kick and the butts explode all over her disapproving daughter Joyce as she enters from the landing (this image says more about their relationship—and even Naomi’s relationship to this small town—than any dialogue could have). The usually gentle Carlson is surprisingly forceful when he gets into an old argument with Naomi, which spurs Stanwyck to turn on a dime into resentment. “That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Appearances and what other people will think?” she asks, spitting out the words as fast and contemptuously as possible.

  She says that she won’t laugh too loud anymore and embarrass him or “speak to the riff-raff I knew before I married you,” which lets us know that Naomi used to be a bit of a Stella Dallas. She had been too loud, uneducated, from the wrong side of the tracks, but anxious to improve herself with this beautiful young man, this schoolteacher who taught her the classics that didn’t go over so well when she escaped to the commercial theater. It’s an open question whether Naomi’s lack of talent is at the root of her problem. She can be seen, however, as a stand-in for Sirk, an artist, a director of the classics of German theater, forced to flee the Nazis and give up his cultural heritage and to struggle to express his creativity through the medium of Hollywood melodrama.

  In the early scenes of All I Desire, Stanwyck is so sensitive that she almost vibrates with barely controlled feelings. She’s especially touching when she watches Lily in the school play, a bit of trash called The Baroness Barclay’s Secret. Naomi’s voice comes on the soundtrack again as she describes her delight in seeing how promising her daughter is; it’s as if she’s being confronted with her own youthful self, before bad luck and the realities of the theatrical marketplace tore apart her dreams.

  Gradually, Naomi begins to get control of herself, and Stanwyck lowers the carapace of her own “tough/smart” performing style onto Naomi’s festering disappointments and tiny hopes. “Don’t wait too long, Henry,” she says, knowingly, about his delayed relations with O’Sullivan’s teacher. But Naomi can’t help returning to all the mixed emotions this confrontation with her hometown and her youth keep digging up in her. The love between mother and daughter here (created partially by the distance afforded by a theatrical setting) is finally more real and convincing—more mature, more coherent, more deeply felt and imagined—than the entirety of Stella Dallas.

  At the after-party for the play, Naomi dances the bunny-hug with Joyce’s fiancée. It looks grotesque at first, but then Sirk cuts to an overhead shot and Stanwyck starts to transform the novelty steps by doing variations on them until the dance begins to look beautiful. Naomi is out of breath when she finishes (the film always reminds us of her age and of time running out), but she catches it long enough to read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the guests. “And if God chooses, I shall but love thee better after death,” Naomi recites, staring straight at Henry. Stanwyck opens her mouth and lets her tongue flutter near her teeth on the “th” sound in “death,” so that it sounds almost lascivious, a hint that a big part of Naomi’s problem is her sexual drive, which couldn’t be satisfied by Henry and had to be condemned by small town mores.

  Sirk has his actors constantly move in and out of confined spaces that keep them from really reaching each other. The Murdoch house is a trap, and so is the small town of Riverdale, but Sirk has shown us that what lies outside of middle-class strictures is no better. In fact, the rootlessness of city life might even be worse for a single person. Naomi needs to find her happiness where she can, and it rests, finally, in this jail of a home. “You don’t know how unimportant success is until you’ve had it,” Naomi says. Stanwyck doesn’t shrink from this line, even if it’s the one line here that might have caused her some personal pain. Disillusioning Lily, Naomi says that there has been no glory and no glamour in her life. She then recites a litany of soul-destroying show business work and winds up with, “And I know a pawnshop in every town on the circuit.” Stanwyck makes Naomi sound almost proud as she goes over this laundry list of failure. It’s the pride of sheer survival.

  Sirk sometimes loses the thread of his argument in some of the later scenes. He’s stymied by journeyman players and errant script choices, and he’s forced to tack on a Hunter “happy ending,” so that Naomi stays in town (she leaves in Brink’s novel). Still, it isn’t really a happy end for anyone; Henry will never satisfy her, and the town gossips are obviously out for blood after Naomi accidentally shoots her old lover Dutch (Lyle Bettger). But there is one thing that Naomi has found that might sustain her, a love for her children. Stanwyck never played a more poignant scene than the one she enacts here with her young son Ted (Billy Gray), trying to explain to him how people aren’t perfect and warning him, in an archetypally maternal way, about the pain he’s about to experience in adolescence and all the rest of his life. Stanwyck arrived at this purely motherly place for this scene in a major Sirk film, but she couldn’t get there for her own son. There are some people who can only express their feelings through the work they do. I would hope that if Dion ever saw this movie, he could feel the “imitation of life” truth in his mother’s words.

  Stanwyck was top billed in her second movie for Sirk, There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), but this incandescently angry film belongs to Fred Mac-Murray and to Joan Bennett, who excels in her role of housewife as monster. MacMurray plays Cliff, a successful toy manufacturer in California, and we first see him in his large workroom filled with toys in various stages of development. Sirk foregrounds various toys in his frames so that they look a bit menacing, as if they’re rebuking thei
r maker. Cliff’s new product is Rex, the walkie-talkie robot, a small talking toy that sits on a long table waiting to be animated. When Cliff goes home, Sirk creates an even more stark-looking prison, a house filled with pools of dark shadows, puritan-style wooden furnishings, and three bratty, selfish children Cliff’s wife Marion (Bennett) dotes on. It’s Marion’s birthday tonight, and Cliff has planned a date with her, but she’s not having it. At her age, she says, birthdays are a time to turn the mirrors to the wall. Marion is the “I want to see nothing” opposite of nearly every Stanwyck character.

  Completely rejected, even by his own cook (Jane Darwell), Cliff sulks in the kitchen until he hears the doorbell ring. He opens the door and there in the dark is Norma (Stanwyck), an old flame, walking toward him into the light. Gratefully, he asks Norma if she’d like to accompany him to the theater, and she seems delighted to go. Stanwyck makes it look as if Norma doesn’t have anything definite in mind when she goes to see Cliff and is just following her instincts blindly. She and Cliff used to work together, but she went away and started her own dress business in New York. “Blue Moon” was their song; she’s so glad that he remembers that. Back at his workroom, Cliff shows her how he’s incorporated their old song into one of his toys. Norma tells Cliff that she married once, out of loneliness, but then shrugs it off as having happened a long time ago. Time is now Stanwyck’s ally against pain, for she can say about anything, “that doesn’t matter now.”

  One of Cliff’s daughters hurts her foot (she cries like a much younger child), so Marion refuses to accompany Cliff on a little vacation he’s planned for them. The novel (and perilous) theme here is that of a father who dislikes his own children. Cliff seems right to dislike them, but he never quite sees just how complacent and destructive his wife Marion is, and she’s the real problem here, not the kids, who just need some discipline. Cliff goes by himself on the vacation, and what do you know? Norma is there, too. Did she plan it, or did they really just bump into each other accidentally? Most likely, Norma planned on running into Cliff in such a way that she didn’t even know herself what she was doing. All the people in this movie tell lies to themselves and refuse to see what’s in front of them. Appearance is all in this rotten society that Sirk dissects like a surgeon. “I’ve never been one for casual acquaintances,” says Norma at dinner, and that was true of Stanwyck, too; she had only a few close friends and didn’t let anybody else get near her. Love? Cliff asks. Norma replies, “I guess I just kept myself too busy.” And that, too, could be something Stanwyck might have said about herself.

  Cliff’s son sees his father with Norma and immediately jumps to conclusions. He’s rude to Norma when Cliff invites her over for dinner. Afterwards, when Cliff tries to get through to Marion to tell her about his discontent, she reveals the full extent of her passive-aggressive bitchery. He wants a little adventure in their life, like when they were young! “If life were always an adventure, it would be very exhausting,” Marion says, with a smug little smile. She’s right, of course, in a way, but Marion uses this “sensible” attitude to keep her husband’s feelings totally in check.

  And Marion is murderous about Norma, saying that she pities the poor childless career woman. Cliff counters that Norma has had excitement and success, but Marion insists that those things “don’t mean so much to a woman.” When Marion goes to get a dress at Norma’s new LA flagship store, Norma looks slightly disappointed when Marion manages to insult her in that infuriating “oblivious” way we’ve seen so much of in her marriage to Cliff. The people here are so stuck in the roles that they’re supposed to be playing that they can’t react in any natural way.

  By this point, any sensible audience would like nothing better than to see Marion’s queenly humbleness punctured, but the conventions of society (reflected, of course, by the conventions of the movies), won’t stand for that, and so Sirk is left furiously signaling the hypocrisy of middle-class life with his images, while the script takes several sharp right turns in order to make everything come out the way it needs to. In one triumphant, shocking moment, Cliff sits down to read the newspaper and notices a framed family photo looming up in front of him from a table. Fed up, he blocks the photo with his paper (MacMurray makes this movement in just the right measured, “fuck you” way).

  We see Norma hopefully putting on some perfume in front of a mirror before Cliff’s children confront her. Instead of being ashamed, she tells them off, as if she’s been watching Sirk’s movie herself (she certainly couldn’t have found out all the bad things she mentions about this family from one dinner, unless she has the discernment of a great novelist). Rain from a windowpane is reflected on her face, so that Sirk makes visual the tears that Norma cannot afford to cry. Meeting with Cliff, she says that they couldn’t be happy together, even though we’ve seen quite enough to know how miserable they’ll both be without one another. He’ll have a wonderful life with Marion and the kids, she says—and, most tellingly, she falls back on what she thinks people will say, how they’ll gossip about Cliff deserting his family. This is the sort of soapy, “the status quo must be maintained” writing that the movies of this time made us accustomed to.

  Sirk, though, manages to make us realize that Norma’s familiar argument against change is based on a pack of stiff 1950s bourgeois lies that the upheavals of the 1960s would try to sweep away. “Be happy, Cliff … you will be happy,” Norma insists, before running away from him. But of course he won’t be happy, and neither will she. Given boilerplate soap to work with, Sirk fashions a genuine tragedy and an early Capra-esque call to arms, a call to self-actualization. It is a call to the 1960s, a decade when Stanwyck found herself relegated to TV as a western mother who, in stray glimpses, bears a certain resemblance to Bennett’s Marion, the domestic tyrant par excellence.

  Wild West Stanwyck

  Annie Oakley, Union Pacific, California, The Furies,

  The Moonlighter, Blowing Wild, Cattle Queen of Montana,

  The Violent Men, Escape to Burma, The Maverick Queen,

  Trooper Hook, Forty Guns

  When asked about the western, which was probably her favorite genre, Stanwyck sighed happily, “Oh, I love to do them. I just love to do them.” She owned ranches for most of her life and also raced horses. Wide-open spaces agreed with her. “Well, I’m particularly fond of reading about the early West,” she said. “I think it was a very romantic era in our country.” In the heyday of her initial years of stardom, the 1930s, westerns were usually relegated to B and Z picture programmers and were rarely major features, but that started to change in the mid-to-late forties. By the fifties, the western in America was one of the most challenging and complex of film forms. In the hands of directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, Budd Boetticher, Allan Dwan, André de Toth, and many others, it was characterized by any number of fresh ideas and attitudes, politically, morally, and aesthetically.

  George Stevens’s version of the early life of Annie Oakley (1935) is about as sophisticated politically as you can expect from a film of its era. This is a movie that often hints at a more developed content but usually retreats into period charm and the kind of comedy routines that Stevens learned at the Hal Roach studios while photographing the best short subjects of Laurel and Hardy. “No fiction is stranger than the actual life of Annie Oakley who came out of a backwoods village half a century ago to astonish the world,” reads a title after the credits. But the film does indeed fictionalize parts of her story to suit the conventions of the time. Stanwyck actually does look a lot like photos of the real Annie, who stood barely five feet tall; Stevens makes sure to film her in such a way that she looks small, even dainty, in his over-packed frames.

  We first see Stanwyck’s Annie riding in a carriage with her mother. “Gosh, ain’t he pretty,” she says softly, looking at a picture of Toby Walker (Preston Foster), a renowned sharpshooter (in real life, Stanwyck had a helpless respect for male beauty). “That’s not for ladies,” says a barkeep to vaudevil
lian Vera Delmar (Pert Kelton), trying to keep her out of his barroom, but she cracks, “I’m no lady” and barges right in. Stevens does some fast cuts to nonplussed male faces. “Next thing you know, they’ll be smoking cigarettes!” says one man, while another wonders if there’s nothing sacred anymore. There’s no heat in their objections. Stevens situates his audience so that they can see what relative progress has been made for women since the nineteenth century.

  Throughout, Stanwyck is wearing far too much lipstick to play a country girl, and her Brooklyn smarts sometimes don’t match Annie’s more simple common sense, but she has some fine moments early on. Jeff Hogarth (Melvyn Douglas), a scout for Buffalo Bill, offers her his arm, and when she hesitates, her mother nods her approval of his alien, chivalrous gesture. Stanwyck’s Annie takes Jeff’s arm, finally, but her face definitely registers that she thinks such exaggerated deference to her sex is silly.

  The real Annie competed with marksman Francis Butler and beat him. Butler retired and soon proposed to her, and they lived out their lives together happily. In this film, Annie goes up against the fictional Toby, and when she and her mother see that she’s going to ruin his career if she beats him, Annie throws the match. Before Stanwyck does this, she looks down for a moment, as if she’s thinking, “Well, life is unfair, we knew that going in.” She didn’t have the heart to beat Toby, she tells her friends: “He was just too pretty,” she repeats, matter-of-factly.