Barbara Stanwyck

by Dan Callahan

  After Jeff brings Annie to the attention of Buffalo Bill (Moroni Olsen), they go out into the waning sunlight so that Bill can introduce her to his mostly male troupe, which responds with confusion and disdain. This sequence is done with a truly evocative series of magic hour shots that highlight Stevens’s eye for pictorial effects. The best parts of Annie Oakley seem to be about a moment in American history when the demarcation line between the sexes was blurry. In the world of this movie, men are too pretty and famous gunfighters like Buffalo Bill have Stanwyck’s 1940s-style hair, while the women are as hard and saucy as Pert Kelton and as capable as Stanwyck herself.

  Yet the script and direction ask Stanwyck to be too sweet in too many scenes. There’s not enough of the down-home grit that made Annie a legend in her own time and ours, a precious alternative to Barbies and beauty queens for the tomboys of the world. Foster does well in the most fleshed-out role here, but Douglas is just a dim point in the eternal triangle. “Aim at a high mark, and you will hit it,” said the real Annie, and that’s the spirit that Stanwyck embodied as an actress, desiring and often achieving the crown of “the best of all” in her chosen profession. Both Annie and Stanwyck deserve better than this contrived version of Oakley’s story. For all its ingratiating qualities, this ensemble movie loses all urgency in its final third (for a more daring version of this material, look no further than Robert Altman’s still underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians [1976]).

  The little girl who dreamed of being Pearl White relished acting the tomboy heroine in Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific, a railroad epic that begins with Star Wars-style unrolling credits and a rousing score that segues from workin’ on the railroad to my darlin’ Clementine without missing a beat. This is the kind of action movie that kids could see and then act out afterward; in all of its scenes, it only matters what’s happening in the moment and not why it’s happening, particularly.

  DeMille, much derided by his fellow directors but an unstoppable force in his industry, was a showman who never quite lost the simplicity of the silent films from the teens; he himself was a contemporary of Pearl White and an important rival to D. W. Griffith. His movies almost always made money (one wag called a picture of his “a movie for De Millions”), and that’s because his hard-driving, circus-like sensibility was close to the confused emotions and instincts of the American public, especially on the issue of sex, where he proved a master at arousing prurient interest, having his cheesecake and eating it too by condemning licentiousness with biblical but slightly winking fervor.

  Stanwyck appeared often on DeMille’s radio show, and he was impressed with her lack of temperament on Union Pacific, calling her “a good workman,” his sincerest compliment. As Mollie Monahan, a postmistress and all-around spitfire, Stanwyck is introduced atop a train, shouting happily for her pa and crinkling her nose at him. She delivers her lines in a heavy Irish brogue that announces, “Yes, get used to it! I’m going to try an accent!” This Irish accent, unlike her more effective light one in The Plough and the Stars, “comes and goes,” as people like to say. But Stanwyck is obviously having so much fun physicalizing her role, hitching up her skirts, and throwing up her arms, that she fashions a wholly new, animated style to suit DeMille’s specific needs. For the first half of the film, Stanwyck’s acting is akin to action painting; she throws her colors around vigorously, but if we step back, there’s an order to what she’s doing. In repose, Stanwyck gives Mollie her own watchful urchin look, and she makes a smooth transition to sentiment when asked to lament, to the strains of “Danny Boy” on the soundtrack, the needless death of a man in a saloon.

  With her frequent partner Joel McCrea, a man who moves with tough, contained manly grace, Stanwyck has a sisterly chemistry. Rather unexpectedly, she plays out a most revealing scene with him in Union Pacific. “You think I’m an outrageous flirt,” says Mollie to McCrea’s Jeff, as they rest for a moment on the tracks. “Did you never know that flirtin’ gets into a woman’s blood like fightin’ gets into a man’s?” she asks, her face taking on a lyrically high-energy yet contemplative look. “Now, a girl begins coquettin’, to discover if she has the power. Then she goes lookin’, like a fighter after a bully, for the hardest man to conquer. But tis never the man she wants, tis the pleasure of bringing him to her feet!” Mollie concludes cheerfully, less for Jeff than for herself, as if she’s worked something out.

  This is a classic explanation of Stanwyck’s relation to men on screen. Union Pacific had many writers, so we can’t be certain who wrote this speech, but it really rings a bell for her. The man she dreams of, Mollie/ Stanwyck continues (aided by McCrea’s horny prompting), will give her the spanking she deserves. This isn’t just sexism, but something else, something having to do with the tender roughness that Stanwyck wanted on screen from men and perhaps, to an extent, in her personal life. She got only roughness with Fay, and a bit of tenderness, but little else, from Taylor, so she never really found the combination she craved—except with Capra, mainly in movies.

  California (1946), a Paramount western directed by John Farrow (Mia’s father), was the first film Stanwyck made in color (she only made six in total and remains for most of us, in memory, a creature of lustrous black and white). The film begins with shots of California’s natural scenic wonders, narrated by a bewildering variety of voices (this opening is so goofy that it suggests a parody of one of the “sight-seeing” shorts of the time). We see some wagons circling on a town’s main street, and Farrow’s camera moves to the left until we catch a group of women throwing Stanwyck’s shady cardsharp into the street. It’s quite an entrance (and it looks like she takes the fall herself, frustrated stuntwoman that she was). When Farrow cuts to a closer shot, Stanwyck raises herself up out of the dust and says, “Thank you,” to the women, “thank you very much,” her mouth wide open and her teeth bared in a sneer.

  She tries to vamp Ray Milland to get him to take her to California, the state that Stanwyck so loved that she practically never left it from 1929 on. But Milland isn’t buying. Instead, saintly Irish winemaker Barry Fitzgerald lets her tag along with him. The pioneers ostracize her, and Fitzgerald tells her not to take their cruelty to heart. She stares off into space and begins to recite a litany of places she’s been to with pretty names: Natchez, Memphis, Savannah, Biloxi. And all of these cities hurt her, it seems. Stanwyck’s anger in these first scenes is too harsh for the movie to handle; she provides this candy-colored western with a strong belt of bitterness, and suggests that her character, Lily, is a hopeless case. “A woman gets tired knowing too much,” she says. It’s an archetypal Stanwyck line, but when she doesn’t react after Milland slaps her, only to touch her face with pleasure after he leaves, it seems like the screenwriters are just trotting out a familiar routine for her without adding anything new.

  Lily gets lost in the shuffle when the narrative settles down and introduces the villain, Pharoah Coffin, played by George Coulouris. Coffin is a lunatic slave trader (the role needs a George Sanders or a Claude Rains to really put it over), and Lily’s motivations for taking up with him aren’t clear. Stanwyck stops sneering and gives the rest of her performance with her red lipstick, which glistens obscenely in some of Farrow’s extreme close-ups. Though Farrow’s camera movements can be extremely elaborate (he favored takes that often lasted close to five minutes or more), they can’t disguise or enhance the perfunctory quality of most of the acting and writing. Toward the end, Fitzgerald has been shot, and we see Stanwyck hurry over to him from the left. The camera glides away to the right and picks up Milland, then glides left again so they can stand over his body, then follows Stanwyck as she exits left. It’s quite a complicated single take, and it must have taken all kinds of time for preparation, but it’s like a long, beautifully written sentence that finally doesn’t say all that much.

  Robin Wood, in his admiring but ambivalent essay about The Furies (1950), called it a “hybrid” picture that brought together the western and the woman’s melodrama. But th
is rich brew of a movie also partakes of daring elements of screwball comedy in its treatment of the blatantly incestuous, tough-funny battle of wits in 1870s New Mexico between T.C Jeffords (Walter Huston, in his last role), a rip-snorting, jocular cattle baron with a shock of thick white hair, and his blond, lovingly competitive daughter Vance, played by Stanwyck.

  When he directed The Furies, Anthony Mann was coming off a string of talent-displaying noirs like Railroaded (1947) and Raw Deal (1948), and he had just made his first western with James Stewart, Winchester 73 (1950). Always drawn to the most upsetting implications of violence and revenge, Mann in his best work could sometimes be a bit heavy-handed, which is why the light, almost Sturges-like opening scenes of The Furies come as such a surprise. Maybe Huston and Stanwyck managed these interactions themselves, for she clearly felt some of the same admiration for Huston as an actor that Vance feels for her father.

  Like many of Mann’s westerns, this is a Shakespearian sort of film, with T. C. as King Lear and Vance as a Regan or Goneril with a wide streak of Cordelia love. Vance is introduced trying on earrings in her dead mother’s room. Her face is sly yet secretive, her feelings deeply hidden, though we can see that Vance has some private source of amusement that keeps her continually tickled (an unusual mode for Stanwyck). As she chats with her handsome, stooge-like brother, Clay (John Bromfield), Vance idly plays with a pair of scissors that have been lying on a dressing table.

  T. C. has kept his dead wife’s room exactly as it was, and Vance is staking her claim to her father by invading it and wearing one of her mother’s old dresses. When she hears T. C. riding up to the house, the knowing Vance, with her hard, adult laugh, suddenly becomes an excited little girl, eager to see and please her daddy. T. C. eyes her from the stairs: “You were in her room,” he says. “That’s right,” Vance replies, testing him. “Her gown befits you,” says T. C. This is a highly-charged moment, and there are a lot of things working to create a queasy mood: the razor-sharp tightness of the framing and editing, the usage of the odd word “befits,” and of course the actors, who are set on their own often bizarre course together.

  If this film had been made later on, in the late 1960s or 1970s, it probably would have been more open about the incest theme, and may even have suggested sexual abuse as its basis (this line of attack turns up frequently when modern writers delve into the myth of Lear and his daughters). Under the strict censorship laws of 1950, Mann and his gifted collaborators can only hint at what goes on between T. C. and Vance, and these hints make the film sometimes impenetrably ambiguous. The original slant here is that Mann seems to be positing the relationship that T. C. has with his daughter as a lively and even natural thing, at least in these early scenes.

  Vance kisses T. C. happily and unashamedly on the mouth, and there’s no suggestion that she wants to actually go to bed with him, even when he asks her to “scratch my sixth lumbar vertebrae” and she cheerfully obliges. “Pretty good, huh?” asks T. C. in his barroom manner, standing in front of his own portrait; he’s a rampaging egomaniac who dares us not to like him. The Furies is a great movie because it doesn’t demonize this power-mad, instinctual man. It understands that his charm is like a hurricane and that his energy is essential if you want to get anything done. He’s a life force, and the film respects him. Maybe this represents another strand of Stanwyck’s innate right-wing leanings, this mixed admiration for such a crazed capitalist.

  Vance thinks and feels so much from moment to moment, in her subterranean way, that it’s often hard to keep up with her, and Stanwyck never makes it easy to understand this character, one of the most multi-faceted she ever attempted. She banters with T. C. in their nearly newspaper comedy style, but then we see her vulnerability with her childhood friend Juan (Gilbert Roland), a man she loves—but not in the romantic way he loves her. Juan and his people have been reduced to being regarded as squatters on their own land, an empire T. C calls The Furies, and Vance is always having to bargain with T. C. to keep him from burning them off the land permanently.

  T. C. has his own currency printed as IOUs, and he thinks his money is better than the government kind because his has some cheesecake value (there’s an image of a girl riding a bull on his illegal tender). T. C. is a man of huge appetites, performing his own life and legend for us. It’s clear that he’s sleeping with his Mexican maid, Chiquita, which Vance approves of, even if she doesn’t take the same pleasure in Juan (in the source material, Niven Busch’s novel, Vance is more involved with Juan, but their platonic love in the film is in many ways more interesting).

  “You won’t have it easy, finding a man,” taunts T. C., eying his daughter. “I’ve spoiled most of ’em for you.” Vance puts her boots up on T. C.’s desk, and he asks her to scratch his itchy vertebrae again. But there’s a chasteness in Mann that thankfully stops him from going too far with their father-daughter attraction (nor will he conjure the evil that Huston’s son John found in the incestuous Noah Cross of Chinatown [1974]). A lot of different elements make The Furies what it is, not least Charles Schnee’s tangy script and Victor Milner’s low-light, sunset-time black and white cinematography, with its evocative use of grey silhouettes, but it’s Mann that keeps all these potentially explosive elements in line. You can see his acuity at work in the way he chooses his outdoor landscapes so that every bare, runty tree and towering cactus seems to express the inner lives of his characters.

  The framing is just as precise indoors, too. When Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey) invades Clay’s wedding party, Mann has Darrow and T. C. stare each other down across his composition, framing Vance coming down the stairs in a tiny sliver screen right, so that she looks like she’s sliding down Darrow’s shoulder. In this one expertly composed shot, the whole narrative of the film shifts, even if Corey is not at all up to his manly-guy role, unfortunately. When Vance dances with Darrow, she asks him if he thinks he’s top man of God’s green earth, the exact same question that she asked T. C. earlier in his office. Vance and T. C. both use other people as chess pieces in their game with each other, and woe betide anyone who gets between them. Observing the budding romance between Vance and Darrow, T. C. rings them out of the room with a large bell (Huston is always game to introduce broad comic touches like this, which Mann observes just dryly enough for maximum tension).

  T. C. offers Darrow money to break off his relations with Vance; he had earlier offered her a dowry of fifty thousand dollars if she married a man he approved of. When Darrow accepts the money, Vance stiffens with affronted pride, and Mann cuts to a close-up of T. C. looking lovably boyish and triumphant, as if he’s won back the girl he loves. In this shot, Mann starts to get at the deep-dyed sickness in the repressed, or at least misdirected sexuality in T. C. and Vance. After Darrow leaves with his money, T. C. takes up his old bantering tone with Vance, who has her back to us. When she turns, we see that she’s in tears. T. C. goes in to hug her to him, and a tear shoots out of her right eye onto his shoulder—at this point, their relationship doesn’t seem vital and amusing anymore, just pitiably unhealthy. The Furies works a twisted new template for Stanwyck, who weakens for love as she’s done in the past and then has to strengthen for vengeance, as if this were some Freudian Lady Eve on the range mixed with Electra.

  The movie then introduces an alarming new element: Judith Anderson as Florence Burnett, “Flo” to T. C., a widow with connections who makes no bones about her designs on both The Furies and the man who rules over them. Sipping her favorite drink, a cognac with orange juice, Flo brags to Vance about how she got T. C. a meeting with the president, and at one point condescendingly taps Vance’s chin with her black fan. The film takes on a fresh level of excitement now, because Anderson is as formidable an actress as Huston is an actor, and their stage training is of an entirely different order than the one Stanwyck received from Willard Mack. Anderson and Huston aren’t on the same modern, internalized wave length as Stanwyck, but they both have such authority that Stanwyck begins to seem hemmed-in and e
ven routed in her scenes with them. This corralling is something that has never happened before and will never happen again to Stanwyck on screen. Luckily, this upstaging exactly suits what’s happening to her character.

  When T. C. asks Flo to scratch his itchy lumbar, Vance absorbs this request as the ultimate insult. Mann gives Stanwyck a pause as she goes upstairs, where we can see Vance experience a moment of recognition about her true feelings for her father. Vance wants to be T. C.’s wife, which is why she put on that dress in the first scene. In her own mind, her relationship with her father doesn’t need to involve sex; we learn later that T. C.’s dead wife was “a lady,” who found it distasteful to fornicate except to conceive children.

  Flo is nothing if not bold; she even dares to look at the books on T. C.’s empire Vance has been keeping. Her every “My dear,” when spoken to Vance, fairly drips with aggression, and when she taunts Vance about her failure with Darrow, telling her that she needs to leave The Furies and take the grand tour of Europe, you can practically see Vance on the boat already. Flo Burnett is as steely an enemy and rival as anyone could imagine, and Vance sees no way around her. Sex is one thing that she can’t offer her father, and sex is what Flo is giving him—while also being an unimpeachable “lady” with useful friends in high places. And so The Furies works up to its primal scene, the scene that everyone remembers after they’ve seen it.

  In Vance’s dead mother’s room, armed with hot tea, Flo tells Vance that she’s going to marry T. C. Retreating to her mother’s vanity table, Vance asks, “Why? Why do you marry him?” Her voice sounds drained of energy, almost zombie-like, and this isn’t the “I’m not going to expend energy on you” tone that Vance takes when she’s insulting someone. She’s genuinely at her wits’ end. Flo is straightforward and honest, even calling herself “an adventuress” and admitting that the marriage is “perhaps for love of the man, or perhaps for love of The Furies!” (Anderson uses her full Shakespearean iambic pentameter rhythm for this thrilling line reading.)