Stanwyck
Page 52
A remake of 1934 Frank Morgan-Binnie Barnes starrer. MacMurray is married to Bennett but wonders what it would be like with old flame Stanwyck.
The Maverick Queen. Director: Joseph Kane. Screenplay: Kenneth Gamet and DeVallon Scott, from the novel by Zane Grey. Camera: Jack Marta. Costumes: Adele Palmer. Editor: Richard L. Van Enger. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck (Kit Banion), Barry Sullivan, Scott Brady, Mary Murphy, Wallace Ford, Howard Petrie. Republic, 1955.
Fast-paced Zane Grey western by Republic Studio’s prolific western director has bandit woman Stanwyck fall for Pinkerton detective sent out to arrest her. Remade as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fourteen years later.
These Wilder Years. Director: Roy Rowland. Screenplay: Frank Fenton, from a story by Ralph Wheelwright. Camera: George Folsey. Music: Jeff Alexander. Costumes: Helen Rose. Editor: Ben Lewis. Cast: James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck (Ann Dempster), Walter Pidgeon, Betty Lou Keim, Don Dubbins, Edward Andrews, Basil Ruysdael, Grandon Rhodes. MGM, 1956.
Stanwyck as principled director of an adoption agency who opposes self-made millionaire James Cagney’s attempt at tracking down the illegitimate son he fathered and repudiated twenty years earlier. Reviewers said only veteran cast saved modest drama.
Crime of Passion. Director: Gerd Oswald. Screenplay: Jo Eisinger. Camera: Joseph La Shelle. Costumes: Grace Houston. Music: Paul Dunlap. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck (Kathy), Sterling Hayden, Raymond Burr, Fay Wray, Royal Dano, Virginia Grey, Dennis Cross, Robert Griffin, Jay Adler. UA, 1957.
Executive wife Stanwyck’s ambition for her husband leads to murder. Los Angeles Times’s Phillip Scheuer: “Stanwyck’s characterization is one for the book—and the police blotter: the woman’s character is so completely amoral—as is the tone of the whole picture—that I never found it quite convincing. And this despite an attempt to explain her ‘drive’ in terms of psychological instability. Also, as I say, this is our Barbara. She really shouldn’t do this to us.”
Trooper Hook. Director: Charles Marquis Warren. Screenplay: Warren, David Victor, and Herbert Little, Jr., from a story by Jack Schaefer. Camera:
Ellsworth Fredericks. Women’s costumes: Voulee Giokaris. Music: Gerald Fried. Editor: Fred Berger. Cast: Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck (Cora), Earl Holliman, Edward Andrews, Susan Kohner, Royal Dano, John Dehner, Susan Kohner, Terry Lawrence, Celia Lovsky, Rudolfo Acosta. UA, 1957.
Slow, downbeat western in which the U.S. cavalry razes an Apache village and discovers Barbara among the squaws only to see her become an outcast when returned to her own.
Forty Guns. Director: Samuel Fuller. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller. Camera: Joseph Biroc. Costumes: Charles LeMaire, Leah Rhodes. Music: Harry Suk-man. Editor: Gene Fowler, Jr. Cast: Barbara Stanwyck (Jessica Drummond), Barry Sullivan, Dean Jagger, John Ericson, Gene Barry, Robert Dix, Paul Dubow, Gerald Milton, Ziva Rodann, Hank Worden, Eve Brent. Fox, 1957.
Fuller classic. Powerful ranchwoman and corrupt boss of corrupt Tombstone, Arizona, Stanwyck protects her hoodlum brother.
Walk on the Wild Side. Director: Edward Dmytryk. Screenplay: John Fante and Edmund Morris from the novel by Nelson Algren. Camera: Joe MacDonald. Costumes: Charles LeMaire. Music: Elmer Bernstein. Editor: Harry Gerstad. Cast: Laurence Harvey, Capucine, Jane Fonda, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck (Jo Courtney), Joanna Moore, John Anderson, Ken Lynch, Todd Armstrong, Lillian Bronson, Adrienne Marden, Sherry O’neil, John Bryant, Kathryn Card. Columbia, 1962.
Talkative, self-conscious adaptation of the 1956 Nelson Algren novel. In the 1930s, a penniless farmer finds his childhood love working in Stanwyck’s New Orleans brothel. Newsweek: “The latest nightmare out of Hollywood is Walk on the Wild Side, wrenched from Nelson Algren’s novel.” New York Times’s Bosley Crowther: “It is incredible that anything as foolish would be made in this day and age.” Not to miss: Bernstein’s jazz score and Saul Bass’s title sequence of the alley tomcat on the prowl.
Roustabout. Director: John Rich. Screenplay: Allan Weiss, Anthony Lawrence, from a story by Weiss. Camera: Lucien Ballard. Music: Joseph J. Lilly. Editor: Warren Low. Cast: Elvis Presley, Barbara Stanwyck (Maggie Morgan), Sue Ann Langdon, Pat Buutram, Joan Staley, Dabbs Greer, Steve Brodie, Joan Freeman, Leif Erickson. Paramount, 1964.
An Elvis picture. Barbara runs a carnival, and Presley is a vagabond youth who joins the show.
The Night Walker. Director: William Castle. Screenplay: Robert Bloch. Camera: Harold Stine. Music: Vic Mizzy. Editor: Edwin H. Bryant. Cast:
Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck (Irene Trent), Judith Meredith, Lloyd Bochner, Rochelle Hudson, Judi Meredith, Hayden Rorke, Jess Barker, Tetsu Kumal, Ted Durant, Lloyd Bochner. Universal, 1965.
Stiff suspense drama with Stanwyck terrorized by nightmares, which seem instigated by her husband, who supposedly was killed in a fire. Time called it a lukewarm bloodbath that “does afford Veteran Horrorist Barbara Stanwyck a chance to unleash her hysteria of yore.”
The House that Wouldn’t Die. ABC Movie of the Week. Director: John Llewellyn Moxey. Teleplay: Henry Farrell from the novel Ammie, Come Home, by Barbara Michaels. Stanwyck costumes: Nolan Miller. Editor: Art Seid. Cast: Stanwyck (Ruth Bennett), Richard Egan, Michael Anderson Jr., Katherine Winn, Doreen Lang, Mabel Albertson. Aaron Spelling Productions, 1970.
A Taste of Evil. ABC Movie of the Week. Director: John Llewellyn Moxey. Teleplay: Jimmy Sangster. Stanwyck costumes: Nolan Miller. Editor: Art Seid. Cast: Stanwyck (Miriam Jennings), Barbara Perkins, Roddy McDowall, William Windom, Arthur O’Connell, Ring Russell, Dawn Frame. Aaron Spelling Productions, 1971.
The Letters. ABC Movie of the Week. Director of Stanwyck segment: Gene Nelson. Teleplay: Ellis Marcus, Hal Sitowitz, from a story by Marcus. Stanwyck costumes: Nolan Miller. Editor: Carroll Sax. Cast: Story 1: John Forsyte, Jane Powell, Lesley Warren; Story 2: Stanwyck (Geraldine Parking-ton), Leslie Nielsen, Dina Merrill; Story 3: Ida Lupino, Ben Murphy, Pamela Franklin. Aaron Spelling Productions, 1973.
The Thorn Birds. ABC. Director: Daryl Duke. Teleplay: Carmen Fulver, from the novel by Colleen McCullough. Costumes: Travilla. Editor: Robert F. Shugrue. Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Rachel Ward, Jean Simmons, Ken Howard, Mare Winningham, Piper Laurie, Richard Kiley, Earl Holliman, Bryan Brown, Philip Anglim, Christopher Plummer, Allyn Ann McLerie, Barbara Stanwyck (Mary Carson). David L. Wolper Production, 1982.
ENDNOTES
*A11 figures are given in vintage dollars.
To get a sense of money, the reader should multiply 1920s figures by twelve; $14 a week is the equivalent of about $168 in 1994 dollars. It should be kept in mind that federal and state taxes averaged a mere 3 percent on high incomes and were nonexistent on low incomes (source: Federal Reserve Library of Research).
* A loophole in the law allowed nudity on the stage if the naked woman did not move. Powdered and rouged from head to toe, Kay Laurell, Ziegfeld’s statuesque beauty, was the center of these tableaus.
* See Filmography (page 395) for detailed credits and thumbnail summary of all Barbara Stanwyck movies.
* Swerling’s line was a swipe at Prohibition. The repeal of the Volstead Act was still two years away.
* Schwartz sued Fay for nonpayment of legal fees a year later. The lawyer complained he had represented Fay in five lawsuits and was owed $19,600. In November 1939, Fay won a $611 reduction. In the end the court awarded Schwartz $3,750. It was par for the course. Earlier, Charles Cradick had sued Fay for nearly $50,000 in unpaid legal fees and settled for a fourth of that amount.
* Only two other MGM British films were made before the outbreak of World War II caused Louis B. Mayer to suspend the program: King Vidor directed Robert Donat and Ralph Richardson in an adaptation of the A. J. Cronin novel The Citadel, and Sam Wood directed Donat and newcomer Greer Garson in the world smash hit Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
* In a historical perspective, aficionados of westerns would compare Union Pacific unfavorably with John Ford’s silent The Iron Horse, which treated virtually the same empire-building theme.
* The shipboard cardsh
arp had an afterlife. Mary Our used the name of Stanwyck’s title role in a 1946 Cosmopolitan magazine story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” and created the character Eve Harrington. Four years later, Joseph Mankiewicz adapted “The Wisdom of Eve” to the screen, called it All About Eve, and had Anne Baxter play Eve Harrington, the young ingenue who dethrones the tempestuous aging star Margo Channing.
* Cooper was the highest-paid man in the United States in 1939, earning $483,000 in period dollars.
* Lana Turner, ironically, tried a similar defense ten years later, after she separated from millionaire Bob Topping, her third husband. When her attempted sleeping pill and slashed wrist suicide failed, she would claim she had tried to take a shower while drunk, cutting her arm on the shower door.
* Nearly fifty years later, Arnold Schwarzenegger directed Dyan Cannon and Kris Kristofferson in a TV remake of Christmas in Connecticut.
* The film would be rediscovered by the French New Wave in the 1960s and, together with Cry Wolf, Godfrey’s 1947 thriller with Stanwyck and Errol Flynn, earn praise as a superb policier.
* Enterprise was a new company starting out with a splash. Its first picture was Arch of Triumph, Lewis Milestone’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s current bestseller. Starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, the $4 million film was a commercial disaster and proved to be not so much the promising beginning as the ignominious end. Enterprise had only one success, Body and Soul. After three years it folded.
* Isobel Lennart’s screenplay followed Marcia Davenport’s 1947 bestseller. Making movies from novels was MGM’s continued insurance policy, and East Side, West Side brought the total of novels filmed by MGM in 1949 to ten.
* Both Ray and Crawford had wanted Stanwyck for the McCambridge part, but Republic boss Herbert J. Yates said he couldn’t afford two stars in one picture. Joan was so broke she owed two years’ tuition for her adopted children. She was nipping vodka day and night, and her Johnny Guitar performance provoked new rumors of her lesbian tendencies.
* The winners were Don MacDougall, Ray West, Bob Minlder, and Derek Ball for Star Wars.
Table of Contents
STANWYCK
Contents
Acknowledgement
“I HOPE SHE LIVES”
BROOKLYN
“STARK NAKED, I SWEAR”
REX
FAYSIE
HOLLYWOOD
CAPRA
LOW-BUDGET LIFE
WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?
DEPRESSION BLUES
SINGLE
ARLY
PRIVATE LIVES
STELLA
OFFSCREEN
SCREWBALLS, MR. C.B., AND GOLDEN BOY
MARRIAGE
HE far passions
THE LADY EVE
THE SWEATER GIRL
PATRIOT GAMES
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
RAND AND WARNER
UNEASY PEACE
BEARING WITNESS
PREJUDICE
PRIMAL WOMEN
FALSE FRONTS
HERSELF
B PIX
SHARP REMINDERS
“THE BARBARA STANWYCK SHOW”
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
MATRIARCH
GOLDEN GIRL
CLOSING NUMBER
IT WORKED DIDN’T IT?”
NOTES ON SOURCES
Bibliography
Filmography
ENDNOTES