Barbara Stanwyck (11 page)

Willa Cather was outraged when she saw what Warner Bros. made of her book
A Lost Lady
in 1934, and anyone who has read Cather's evocative, perfectly structured novel can only share her feelings. Marian Forrester, Cather's lead character, is a naturally bewitching woman, flighty, life loving, unstable. She makes a strong impression on a boy named Niel, who falls in love with her as a youth, becomes disillusioned with her when he discovers her sexual infidelity to her much older husband, and finally comes to terms with her profound impact on his life. Cather writes: “Where Mrs. Forrester was, dullness was impossible, Niel believed. The charm of her conversation was not so much in what she said, though she was often witty, but in the quick recognition of her eyes, in the living quality of her voice itself. One could talk to her about the most
trivial things, and go away with a high sense of elation.” (p. 70). This isn't a natural part for Stanwyck. It's closer to the Julie Christie of Joseph Losey's
The Go-Between
(1971), based on L.P. Hartley's novel, which contains a more dangerous version of Cather's basic theme (Hartley even calls his enchantress Marian).

It's possible to imagine Stanwyck doing a decent Marian at the more expansive Warner Bros. of the 1940s, with King Vidor or Frank Borzage directing. But this Cather book really needs the Orson Welles of
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942), and what it gets is “let's finish this fast” hack Alfred E. Green, who was more suited to his job on the sordid
Baby Face
. The first sign of trouble is when the credits inform us—with that Warner Bros. “living headshot” style of this time—that Niel is to be played by sweaty, gangster-ish Lyle Talbot, but nothing can prepare us for what this movie does to the book. It uses Cather's basic story outline in the cheapest possible way, opening on Stanwyck's Marian kissing her fiancée at a swank party, then watching him get shot (she puts her hands in the front of her hair, a mechanical gesture to mime the distress she refuses to feel).

On a sabbatical in the Canadian Rockies, Stanwyck starts to emote a little for her maid (Rafaela Ottiano), but she's sitting on a truly hideous striped chair next to a hideous matching striped couch, and this juxtaposition serves to dampen anything she might want to try. This is a movie that reduces an audience to carping over unfortunate set design, or the succession of ugly, unflattering Orry-Kelly gowns that Stanwyck is made to model (the film was originally intended for clotheshorse Kay Francis, and it shows). Her Marian takes what looks like a pratfall and is saved by nice fuddy-duddy lawyer Dan Forrester (Frank Morgan). Schmaltzy music comes on when he asks her to be his wife, saying that they'll live on “honesty” instead of love, and she half-heartedly accepts his hand. No attempt is made to capture the rural atmosphere of Cather's book; instead, the most specious kind of 1930s glamour is endorsed. This Marian takes up with an unappealing lover (Ricardo Cortez) fast and unconvincingly, and when she tells her husband, he retreats to his room and sulks for a long time.

Talbot's Neil finds Marian drinking. Cather's character is a sherry tippler, but Stanwyck's Marian looks like she's belting back straight whiskey. In her tired, desultory drunk scene she is hilariously far from the sensual, hedonistic woman we find in the novel, more a complaining Flatbush housewife than a special vixen grabbing everything she can get hold of. At sixty-one minutes, the film ends with reconciliation between man and wife, though it's hard not to wonder just what has changed
between them. Are they going to attempt a regular sex life now, or will Stanwyck's Marian just have to go without for the rest of her years? The film is a travesty of Cather, and it doesn't even work on its own limited terms.

Stanwyck's post-Code slump continued with
The Secret Bride
(1934), an exposition-loaded mystery for Warners that nonetheless features excellent direction from the underrated William Dieterle and a few challenges for its star. Dieterle liked to employ a restless, probing camera, and he opens the film with a picture of Lincoln and the American flag, then pans to the governor's daughter, Ruth (Stanwyck), who looks amused at the prospect of marrying the ever-seedy Warren William. In these first scenes, Ruth is well dressed, in a pampered kind of way, and Stanwyck makes her face look childlike and undisturbed. She uses her most regal, mid-Atlantic-style voice, because she's playing a rich, cloistered girl who sometimes verges on being outright inane. When Ruth finds out that her father is mixed up in a scandal, Stanwyck finds a credulous mask; this most wised up of actresses is playing a bit of a fool, and doing it well. “It's ridiculous of us to worry,” she says to William, managing to sound quite vague and Main Line snooty.

Ruth is a girl who grew up in a gilded cage. When she has a confrontation with her father, Dieterle uses some striking low angles, and there's some fast editing to convey the confusion between them. Then we cut to a full close-up of Stanwyck, as she stares at her father and starts to doubt him. Only here does she falter. The sadness in her eyes is too heavy and deep to belong to this girl, but it's probably too much to ask of the former Ruby Stevens to be able to access the first sadness of a happy, oblivious society type. Ruth is convinced of her father's innocence, and Stanwyck quite impressively keeps the upper-crust voice she's been using, even when she's making her intense pitch to William to keep on fighting to clear her dad's name. Glenda Farrell is given the typical pre-Code Stanwyck part as a working girl caught up in the case, while Stanwyck labors to stay interested in the last half of the film. Understandably, she looks bored in some of her last scenes. “She was not happy at Warners and wanted to get out of her contract as quickly as possible,” said Dieterle.

Her unhappiness is visible throughout her last Warners contract dud,
The Woman in Red
(1934), a horsey, mechanical drama that has Stanwyck in jodhpurs and then a red coat, which figures in the film's badly cross-cut courtroom climax. Robert Florey, a Frenchman who began his career with some experimental shorts, tries to enliven the film with a few odd camera angles and visual compositions here and there, but he doesn't
have Dieterle's touch. “Mush,” says a bored Stanwyck at one point, tossing a book aside (is it the script?). Then she walks through a totally unconvincing romance with Gene Raymond.

It's as if she's saying, “You have my body, but you won't get my soul or my talent, Jack Warner.” Asked to explode at wicked society woman Genevieve Tobin and her stuffy set in one of the last scenes, Stanwyck shoots the works, but she doesn't trouble to control her emotion, so that it spills out all over the place and makes a silly mess. (Off the set, Fay was at his drunken, abusive worst, which must have contributed to her cold misery here.) In court, Stanwyck's character has another “eruption,” as another character puts it, and this instance is expert, but to little end. Clad in the red coat of the title, Stanwyck's character participates in “a notorious yachting party”—but not aboard the omnipresent “boat of vice” of her early films, alas.

After portraying this dull woman in red, a no-doubt demoralized Stanwyck spent six idle months at home before moving into
Red Salute
(1935), an often jaw-dropping, independently made anti-Communist gewgaw. Though she must have been desperate to get out of the house, it's worth stressing that she chose this controversial movie for herself in the middle of the radical thirties, when it was fashionable and even de rigueur in most artistic circles to be pro-union, pro-proletariat, anti-capitalist, and even a shade or two pink. When the film opened at the Rivoli theater in New York, it was picketed by the National Student's League, a leftist student group, and eighteen people were arrested when fights broke out in the theater.

Stanwyck picked up her right-wing politics from Fay, and she held onto them throughout her life. As late as the seventies, she was complaining about Jimmy Carter and his family to artist Don Bachardy, and she fit right into the Nancy Reagan red eighties. During Vanessa Redgrave's acceptance speech at the 1978 Academy Awards, a canny TV editor cut to a resplendent, glittering Stanwyck just before Redgrave pronounced the offensive words “Zionist hoodlums.” It was as if she could serve as a kind of conservative counterpoint to radical Vanessa.

Describing a fake sore throat in
Ball of Fire
(1941), Stanwyck's Sugar-puss O'Shea cracks wise on the left: “It's as red as
The Daily Worker
and just as sore!” Off-screen, in the forties, Stanwyck and second husband Robert Taylor helped to found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization that aligned itself a few years later with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Taylor himself was the only major movie star to name names. Stanwyck wasn't called,
but gung-ho Taylor said that if she were called, “[S]he would be tickled to death to come down and she would come a-running.”

Taylor's jingoism sounds close to that of the odious Jeff (Robert Young) in
Red Salute
, a restless, cruel soldier determined to uneducate Stanwyck's Drue Van Allen, a general's daughter who has fallen in love with Arner (Hardie Albright), a radical Communist propagandist. The film begins with a shot of an American flag flying in the breeze. We then see one of Arner's Communist harangues. “What's a proletariat?” asks an onlooker, and a man standing next to him snaps, “I'll take vanilla.” Arner is described as a brainy graduate student who might be in the country illegally. A beaming Drue tells the “sez you!” dissenters that Arner's ideas are the way of the future. All the sloganeering in this first sequence goes by in a blur.

“He's a radical!” cries Drue's father. “He's a darling,” she rejoins, lovingly, her head in the clouds. This is another oblivious rich girl, like the girl in
The Secret Bride
, but this time the character's credulity is leading her right into the hands of the commies. General Van Allen bundles Drue off to Mexico; south of the border, Drue tries to win some money at a gambling house and runs into Young's Jeff, an enlisted man who says that he's dying to “heave bombs” at people, like an army recruiting poster promised. It takes a while to sink in that he is supposed to be our hero.

Jeff calls Drue “Red,” and she calls him “Uncle Sam,” and their antagonism is uneasy and unpleasant. The film uses an
It Happened One Night
(1934) template, but it's not romantic or funny. Stanwyck plays the whole stinking courtship with Jeff on one single, heavy note of crabby resentment, and the midsection of the film, where she's stuck in a trailer with her enlisted man, only demonstrates that she still can't handle sophisticated banter. Similarly, an early scene at a bar proves that she's oddly resistant and inexact with drunk scenes.

Jeff's argument in favor of strict divorce laws is as ugly as his longing for a fight of any kind. “I wish somebody'd start another war,” sighs Rooney (Cliff Edwards), who serves as a driver to the pair. “We're working on it,” says Jeff, in a breathtaking moment of vague, aggressive mean-spiritedness. When Jeff threatens to punch Drue in the nose, Stanwyck gets all S & M excited, just like the Ayn Rand heroine that she so wanted to play. They dance, and when she breaks away, the film moves back towards absurdity. “You're not such a heavy thinker,” Jeff tells her. “You know how I know? Because a thinker's a dodo on the dance floor.”

It's a laughable line, but it remains ominous that the fringe right wing of today likes to endorse ignorance, outright stupidity, and love of brute
force for its own sake in the same manner as the hardline American right wing did in 1935. Jeff tells Drue she needs a cop or a soldier like him—some authority figure to follow. Up in her bedroom, she stares into a mirror in what looks like private shame and arousal, then puts on some more lipstick (in her best films for Capra and Wellman, Stanwyck is always taking off her make-up and coming clean). What did Capra make of
Red Salute
? If he saw it, he might have secretly liked it, I'm afraid, but he'd have been canny enough to keep his feelings to himself.

There's one sensible scene here, thank goodness. When the General talks to an official, this government figure reasonably insists that Arner has a right to his free speech under our Constitution and we have to tolerate him until he does something criminal. But it all ends in a repulsive climax where Arner condemns militarism in front of a crowd of supporters, only to have Jeff get up and manipulate the crowd into endorsing his own war-mongering point of view. At first the crowd boos him (and this is clearly one soldier who should be booed), but then Jeff talks about Americanism and patriotism, and how he's always been nuts about “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and how the American flag makes him tingle (at least it doesn't give him a lump in his throat). Unforgivably, the camera then pans over the radicals on stage; they're all foreign-looking and bespectacled, playing to the worst kind of stereotyping and rightwing prejudice.

The yahoos in the audience fell for the leftist junk, and now they fall for the rightist junk, all too quickly. The turnaround comes when Jeff shows them the American flag he has tattooed on his arm (I wish I were making this up). When a fistfight breaks out, Rooney sighs, “Oh, this is wonderful,” amid the senseless violence. This leads to a (happy?) marriage for Drue and Jeff.

Red Salute
is not excusable on any level. It's as if Bette Davis had starred in
Salt of the Earth
(1954). The following year, fittingly enough, Humphrey Pearson, who wrote the offensive story and screenplay for
Red Salute
, was accidentally killed by his wife. It seems he was in a drunken rage and waving a gun around when she tried and failed to disarm him.
Red Salute
is hard to watch. It has to be Stanwyck's worst movie, and I can only wish that she hadn't made it.