Barbara Stanwyck

by Dan Callahan

  Vance turns, and her eyes cloud over as Flo tells her that she’s to be relieved of managing The Furies (for her own good, of course). Juan and his people, Flo continues, will finally be thrown off their land. This last bit is what really enrages Vance past all endurance. We see her reach behind her back for the scissors on the vanity table, and after a short, remorseless buildup, aided by Franz Waxman’s steadily boiling music, Mann cuts to a close-up of Vance’s contorted face as she leaps forward with the scissors in her hand. We hear a shrieking, bird-like cry off-screen, and Mann cuts to the scissors falling to the floor, dripping blood, then cuts to Flo’s face, which sports two splotches of gore. Then, in the most gruesome shot, we see Flo covering the left side of her face, blood gushing out between her fingers.

  Vance has been backed into a corner, utterly vanquished. And so she does the only thing she can think to do, lashing out with childlike fury and destroying this woman’s face so that T. C. will no longer want to bed her. Stanwyck makes us understand, beat by beat, how a person could be driven to such a vile act, and when she actually strikes out with the scissors, her face says, “Yes, I will dare this.” After that, we’ve crossed a line with Stanwyck artistically that can never be uncrossed. Vance is not a sociopath like Phyllis Dietrichson; this is a mixed-up but industrious woman, and to see her descend to such savagery is more truly disturbing than viewing the remorseless actions of an aberration like Phyllis.

  This act of violence presages all-out war between father and daughter. T. C. hangs Juan and then confronts Vance on horseback, provoking one of Stanwyck’s most vivid tantrums. Vance practically spits at T. C. as she vows to take his world away from him, but the film relaxes a bit after this stand-off (it couldn’t possibly continue at such a pitch of intensity). Vance goes around the country buying up T. C.’s IOUs. She has a memorably bitchy exchange with a good-time girl named Dallas (Myrna Dell), who acts friendly and says, “I’m new in town, honey,” only to be met with Vance’s scalding reply: “Honey, you wouldn’t be new anyplace.” Stanwyck gets a laugh by rattling off the line as fast as possible and, crucially, not bothering to even look up from the ground as she says it, a perfect example of her strategically “lazy” way with an insult. Stung, Dallas looks at Darrow when he enters the room, then looks at Vance and says, “I never could see what they see in the thin ones.” Vance quickly says, “It’s not what they see,” a radical statement about the superiority of inner quality over outward charms. Fun as this scene is, it doesn’t fit with what’s gone before; it’s as if the film can no longer deal with the Pandora’s Box it has opened up and is blindly striking out in random directions.

  There’s some fetching S & M sex comedy when Vance tells Darrow that he’d like to hit her (he does, and she keeps on smiling at him), and then tells him that he’d like to kiss her. He answers yes. “What’s in it for me?” she asks, exiting the scene by biting lustily yet with feigned disinterest into a chicken leg. This comic scene suggests that Vance has begun to transfer her “bad girl” tendencies from her father to Darrow (Lord knows she’ll probably be a handful in the bedroom). But where does that development leave poor dead Juan, or Flo, both casualties of this father-daughter drama? The film doesn’t forget about Flo; when we last see her, she is covering her disfigured face with a handkerchief and drinking cognac and orange juice to excess. A bankrupt T. C. asks her for money, and she politely refuses. “Money is the only thing that makes loneliness bearable to some slight degree,” Flo says. Anderson gives this line its full weight, especially in the way she lingers on the “some slight degree” and then chokes the words off.

  Anderson was the definitive Medea of her time on stage, and in The Furies, she offers as fine a performance as could be wished for in this important role. Her last scene, especially, haunts the movie, putting the lie to its attempt to simply celebrate T. C. and what he has wrought in the final reels. Cast as Juan’s mother, another famous stage actress, Blanche Yurka, shoots T. C. down in the street after father and daughter have reconciled in their own way (Vance has total control now of The Furies, and T. C. admires her dedication, so like his own). What The Furies seems to be saying about American expansionism and the diseased hothouse of the American family romance gets lost toward the end, but that’s because these issues can’t really ever be resolved. This is a movie that presents a large, active, deadly world of its own, and Stanwyck is at her fully committed best in it, stimulated to reach for her highest heights by her fellow actors and by Mann’s scrupulously tactful direction.

  Stanwyck made three of her very best films opposite Fred MacMurray: Remember the Night, Double Indemnity, and There’s Always Tomorrow. Her fourth film with MacMurray, a 3-D western called The Moonlighter (1953), has a poor reputation, but it boasts a smart script by Niven Busch, who provided the source material for The Furies, and an effectively dramatic opening. A lynch mob, looking for MacMurray’s moonlight cattle thief, hangs the wrong man (a black prisoner sings and weeps, upsettingly, in his cell as this drama plays out). At first, Stanwyck’s role as MacMurray’s loyal girlfriend seems thankless, but she gets in on some serious action later on, shooting it out with Ward Bond and then doing some rough stunt work when her character falls over a waterfall, and her chemistry with MacMurray gives depth to the script’s sketch of their troubled relationship.

  Stanwyck then went south of the border for Argentine director Hugo Fregonese, who has a minor reputation in some auteurist circles. David Thomson has written of the small pleasures of Fregonese’s Blowing Wild (1953), a film shot in Mexico but set in some unspecified country in South America where oil wells keep pumping and bandits are ever lurking. This movie seems to have been made in a hurry, and it leans on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1949) in its opening, with Gary Cooper and Ward Bond as down-and-out male friends who meet up with a third friend (Anthony Quinn), a successful oil-driller who has captured the hand of Stanwyck’s lusty Marina (her part was originally intended for either Katy Jurado or Dolores del Río). They make an odd couple in their first scene, Quinn and Stanwyck, and she treats him dismissively, complaining of his stench, until he forces her into a scorching kiss. Though at first she resists him, she finally responds with gusher-like physical passion (it’s like a cartoon version of the grappling over the sink she does with Robert Ryan in Clash by Night, and it shows that Stanwyck’s sexuality, once awakened, is as incendiary as ever).

  Stanwyck trots out her sexy/mercurial mode when she kisses Cooper and then lets her mouth open on his arm for a sensual moment or two. Riding roughshod over hubby Quinn, who has a cowardly streak and has his first oil derrick pumping right outside his house for reassurance, Stanwyck explodes, “Those pumps are driving me nuts!” She soon gets her revenge. Kissing Quinn, she stares up at the derrick and then shoves him right underneath it, first with a sort of “Hah!” expression, and then a blank, “What did I do?” face—junk food acting for a junk food movie. “I committed murder to get you, mur-dah!” she howls at Coop, in a singed voice that sounds slightly Ida Lupino-like. He strangles her for a bit, then leaves her alone, and she covers her ears and pulls back her face with her hands until it looks like a distorted, grotesque mask. It’s a totally ridiculous gesture, and totally right for this tasty pulp fiction.

  Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) finds its star at loose ends. As Sierra Nevada Jones, a would-be settler in Montana, Stanwyck wears a red wig that makes her look, at times, like a grown-up Little Orphan Annie—yet several characters remark on this unfortunate hair as if it cinches Sierra’s attractiveness. Bathing in a mountain stream, she’s spied on by Ronald Reagan; the TV-wise charisma he exerted to get him through his eight-year role as commander and chief is in short supply here. There isn’t one interesting scene in this movie, and even the cinematography by the estimable John Alton isn’t up to par; some day-for-night work is so egregious that it looks like its flaws might be deliberate, as if Alton was trying to get a blue sky/black tree Magritte-type effect that doesn’t gel. As Stanwyck herself said of
such efforts: “[Y]ou do the best you can—and you privately hope that nobody goes to see it.” The Blackfeet Indian tribe in the cast made her an honorary member after admiring her hard work performing stunts. She didn’t use a double for the skinny-dipping scene (the water was cold, in the mid-forties), and she did most of her own shooting and riding. The name the tribe gave her was Princess Many Victories III. Even in this film, I’d amend that to Queen Many Victories, Second to None.

  As a girl, Ruby Stevens went to the zoo to study the way the animals walked, especially the cats in cages, the panthers and tigers, and she adopted their coiled slinking as a way of protecting herself. Of course, “animal exercises” have long been a staple of acting classes; students are entreated to do just what Ruby did to pick up interesting physical behavior that may enliven or reveal the characters they will one day play. In The Violent Men, a well-made Western loaded with sex and violence, Stanwyck plays Martha, a woman who plays at being “the loyal wife” and “the gracious lady” to Lew (Edward G. Robinson), the owner of a vast cattle empire. If her blond hair isn’t a tip-off to her real character, Stanwyck’s stealthy, panther-like movement through a room lets us know this is another of her duplicitous women, anti-heroines who play at false roles in order to get what they want. Once again, Stanwyck is the actress as villain and sociopath.

  In Martha’s case, she’s pretended to love her crippled husband for twelve years, but has secretly carried on an affair with his own brother, Cole (Brian Keith). Lew speaks of being only “half a man,” and it’s clear that his crutches are meant to symbolize impotence, but Martha isn’t particularly interested in being sexually satisfied. Instead, she wants Cole around for back-up in the range wars that always seem to be heating up. When she tries to keep Cole away from his Mexican sweetheart, Martha’s eyes get hungry, but she isn’t hungry for this man. Like Lily Powers, she’s a Nietzschean superwoman who lives for power.

  Lew’s grand house is set on fire, and this fire leads to the film’s most memorable moment. Lew and Martha appear at the top of some stairs as fire balloons up around them. He loses his crutches and looks to his wife: “Martha, my crutches,” he cries, a once-dominant man reduced to the level of helplessness. Martha grabs the crutches, and Stanwyck freezes in a masterful hesitation as she considers her options. Will I? she thinks. Do I dare? Yes! She chucks the crutches into the fire with fiendish energy, her mouth opening wide, as if her own daring excites her sexually. But Lew somehow survives his wife’s colorful vengeance, and Martha gets her just deserts when Cole’s girlfriend shoots her. Stanwyck does a marvelous fall to the ground when she dies, stiff, straight down, THWACK! It must have killed her bad back, but it was worth it, visually.

  In 1945, cinematographer John Alton wrote a book on his craft called Painting With Light, and that’s just what he does in Allan Dwan’s Escape to Burma (1955), presenting a constant series of delights for the eye, especially when experimenting with shadows. There are exciting visual effects achieved throughout with smoke and firelight and an attention to the gradations of color. When Stanwyck’s matriarch, Gwen, moves through a darkened room to turn on a light at one point, the red of the red lampshade practically pops out at us three-dimensionally. Alton shows similar attention to the actors; amid various thrills and spills, Stanwyck is romanced by an unusually relaxed Robert Ryan, and when he first kisses her, Alton has her move in and out of shadows as she wonders if she likes it.

  On a script level, Escape to Burma is nonsense, which is why it has a reputation as one of Stanwyck’s worst movies (“Why would a woman like you want to spend her time in a teak forest?” is one of Ryan’s more laughable lines). But Dwan puts this small adventure over with gusto; it’s certainly miles ahead of the same team’s misbegotten Cattle Queen of Montana. Alton goes too far sometimes with the filters on Stanwyck’s close-ups, and the ending resolution is particularly silly, yet on a purely stylistic level there’s a lot to enjoy here. There’s an amusing photo of Stanwyck on the set where’s she’s holding a leopard in her lap; if anything, it’s the leopard who looks intimidated. “She could have been a great animal trainer had she wished,” said Dwan.

  A singer named Joni James (she sounds like her name) warbles an insipid theme song under the credits of The Maverick Queen (1956), which is based on a Zane Grey book that might have been finished by Grey’s son. For fifteen minutes or so, we take in some poor acting and some poor editing and some poor framing as the Wild Bunch makes a robbery. Included in this bunch are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Scott Brady). The latter makes a lunge for the film’s ingénue (Mary Murphy), then comes back to his main woman, Stanwyck’s maverick queen, a saloon gal who’s butcher than Butch and Sundance put together.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, take a bath first!” she snipes at Sundance, still dealing with smelly men and their smellier advances. She looks good with light reddish hair, but in her early scenes here, Stanwyck treads perilously close to late Crawford dreadnought camp, putting men down in her low, cigarette-deepened voice. The film has echoes of Crawford’s Johnny Guitar (1954), with none of its quality. Hack director Joe Kane keeps the camera running until people have finished their dialogue, then leaves it on out of sheer inertia once they’ve left the frame. There’s action stuff to keep us awake, including Stanwyck’s climb up a hill after a fall off a horse, but her death by shooting is so indifferently staged that it’s hard to tell if she’s been shot before she quietly expires and the film ends, with more Joni on the track.

  “A Chronicle of the West,” reads a card that appears on the screen before the credits come up for Trooper Hook (1957), Stanwyck’s sixth and last movie with Joel McCrea. Given its charged subject matter (Stanwyck plays a white woman who has been held captive by Native Americans and has a child by a native chief), it’s a surprisingly blah film. Stanwyck herself doesn’t seem invested in her role; when, in close-up, her face is first pulled up by the hair by a soldier, she does “stoic” and “inward,” but she just isn’t feeling it. The movie has a cramped, dusty look and suffers from very awkward editing; when Stanwyck is finally reunited with her husband (John Dehner) toward the end, director Charles Marquis Warren dissolves away from him right in the middle of a sentence. The script is vaguely racist—at one point, McCrea tells Chief Nanchez (Rudolfo Acosta) that maybe “you’re more white than you know,” when the chief shows that he cares about whether his son by Stanwyck lives or dies. Trooper Hook has lots of possibilities, and Stanwyck has a good moment or two—shyly responding to a friendly stranger who waves at her, or staring into one of her eternal mirrors and saying her name out loud—but the film needs more dynamic direction and thoughtful writing.

  That same year, Stanwyck’s period of western doldrums suddenly ended as she entered into the wild world of total auteur Sam Fuller, a tough-talking former newspaperman who wrote, produced, and directed her in Forty Guns, her last major movie. Forty Guns is a source of dizzying stylistic excitement, and a kind of farewell and tribute to Stanwyck’s film career. “To work with Stanwyck is to work with the happy pertinence of professionalism and emotion,” said Fuller later. “She’s superb as a queen, slut, matriarch, con girl or on a horse …. Her form or class or appeal or whatever you want to call it stems from tremendous sensitivity and thousands of closeted thoughts she can select at will, at the right moment, for the exact impact.”

  Fuller knew what he had in his star and he tailored his film to her measure. He dared her into her most dangerous stunt, where her character, Jessica Drummond—a Catherine the Great of the West who makes her own law with her forty hired guns—catches her foot in the stirrup of her horse and is dragged across a landscape during a twister. The stunt men wanted Fuller to let them control the drag so that they could undo their own feet if the horses’ hooves came too close to their heads. Fuller refused them, so Stanwyck offered to do the stunt herself, Fuller’s way (she did it three times, demonstrating her Lillian Gish-like dedication to the movies). It’s quite an image, seeing her dragged across th
e plains in steady, unbroken takes—she’s become so elemental by this point that she seems fully the equal of both horse and cyclone.

  Forty Guns is a Cinemascope marvel, Stanwyck’s only real widescreen movie, if we don’t count Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow. It begins with a view of the sheer immensity of the western landscape; in another shot, we see the hugeness of the sky, reflecting Fuller’s lust for size and hinting at all the happy jokes to come at the expense of male pride. We hear the thunder of hooves; the editing has a kind of musical rhythm as Jessica and her army of men rumble down a hillside to intimidate the Bonnell brothers, whose leader, Griff (Barry Sullivan), has come to clean up Jessica’s empire. Fuller uses every inch of the Cinemascope frame to grab and hold not just our attention but all of our senses (this film really needs to be seen on as large a screen as can be found).

  The brothers ride into town, and Griff talks to a man who’s being menaced by Jessica’s bad seed brother, Brockie (John Ericson). The man is nearly blind, and Fuller shows us several frames from his blurred perspective, providing an alienation effect that contrasts with the clarity of those opening shots out on the prairie. Fuller soon switches moods again; we hear a man’s voice singing the theme song, “Woman with a Whip,” crooning about how Jessica is “a woman that all men desire,” but no man can tame. Songs were standard on the soundtracks of movies in this period, especially westerns, but Fuller confounds our expectations when Barney Cashman (Jack “Jidge” Carroll) walks into the frame, and we see that he’s singing the song for us—or lip-synching it, at least—as the camera follows him in one of the film’s first punishingly long tracking shots. The tone here is blunt and outrageous, close to that of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974), yet it’s married to the most sophisticated visual technique imaginable. Fuller possessed exactly the sort of dichotomous sensibility to make a grand filmic swan song for Stanwyck, who made so much of her career by verbally bridging yawning gaps between disparate ways of living and looking at the world.