Barbara Stanwyck (12 page)

Several questions attach themselves to
A Message to Garcia
(1936). The first concerns why Stanwyck was even considered for the part of a Cuban revolutionary. The second is why she accepted the role. The third is why director George Marshall chose to film this adventure story at such a glacial pace. Thankfully, Stanwyck doesn't attempt any accent, though
she is introduced crying, “Padre!” and then “Padre mio!” when she discovers her dead father. She wisely tries to blend into the background as the movie goes on, though Marshall (or Darryl Zanuck, the Fox studio head who always had a thing for Stanwyck) manages to isolate her in plenty of glamorous extreme close-ups, where she always seems to be reclining in the foliage of the jungle, her lipstick heavy, her hair freshly tended-to, her clothes spotless.

Stanwyck, John Boles, and Wallace Beery are stranded for the majority of the film, and they have lots of quiet conversations in that studio jungle, all filmed in a static way without any scoring. These scenes seem designed to lull an audience to sleep. At the end, when Stanwyck shouts, “No, no, no!” and then, “Stop!” she finally breaks the spell of this weirdly mesmeric dud. Her all-too-appropriate words are soon followed by some gunfire, a hammy Beery death scene, and the delivery of the titular message to General Garcia, which apparently signals the liberation of Cuba. Young Rita Cansino, later Rita Hayworth, shot some scenes as Stanwyck's sister, but Zanuck had them cut, perhaps because of Cansino's inexperience, or perhaps because her Latin beauty made Stanwyck look even more miscast.

Director John Cromwell favored florid female performances (see Laura Hope Crews in
The Silver Cord
[1933], Bette Davis in
Of Human Bondage
[1934], Eleanor Parker in
Caged
[1950], and Kim Stanley in
The Goddess
[1958]). In the movie he made with Stanwyck, the folksy, slight
Banjo on My Knee
(1936), Cromwell brings out a kind of neediness in her. When she tells a rival that she can “cook better, love better and fight better,” her words carry none of the toughness Stanwyck displays in other roles. Here, she seems defensive and uncertain. Her character, Pearl, is clingy and desperate as she waits out the whole movie to consummate her marriage to Ernie (Joel McCrea), and their union is delayed by so many complications that it all gets a little tiresome after a while.

Cromwell engineers several outbursts of emotion from Stanwyck, and he even has her sing and do a dance with Buddy Ebsen (she stares down at her feet a bit, but looks to be enjoying herself). After washing dishes for eleven days and eight hours to pay back a debt, an exhausted Pearl stops and watches a full-scale production number of “St. Louis Woman,” headlined by Theresa Harris, who played Lily Powers's best friend, Chico, in
Baby Face
. Harris was almost always relegated to playing servants, and Lily eventually is made to reject Chico to “redeem” herself. But as Stanwyck watches Harris sing here, it's as if their connection has been re-established, and part of the sadness we feel in this sequence is that they've
been separated, post-Code. They don't even get to be in the same frame together.

Dave Kehr has called Stanwyck's next movie,
Internes Can't Take Money
(1937), “Ophulsian.” It's odd to think that the first entry in what would become the long-running Dr. Kildare series could seem like a Max Ophuls film, until you see what director Alfred Santell is able to do with this medical drama/crime drama script. He begins
Internes
with a few elaborate tracking shots, which is not reason enough to invoke Ophuls, but as the film goes on, it develops an abstract feeling that allows for maximum involvement in the plot. Santell called his work here “a deliberate blending of silent and talking techniques held together by mood, intensity and sincerity.” Stanwyck's character, Janet, is desperately trying to rescue her daughter from a bunch of crooks, and the main villain, Innes (a chronic popcorn eater played with insinuating, soft-spoken nastiness by Stanley Ridges), has put our heroine in a bind: If she doesn't sleep with him, he won't tell her where her daughter is.

When Janet decides to go away with Innes, Santell frames a long shot of her buying a bag of popcorn. This little scene might seem silly in other hands, but Santell has built up such a hushed atmosphere that we only feel Janet's deep resignation. At one point, after Janet tries to steal money she needs, Joel McCrea's Kildare says, “Next time you pick a man's pocket, don't do it in front of a mirror.” After he leaves, Santell moves his camera to Janet's kitchen mirror, and we see her image reflected there, crouched over a table in defeat—one more instance where a mirror exposes Stanwyck on screen. The upright Kildare eventually saves this bad-luck damsel in distress, and though the story is trivial, the careful direction and the acting by all the principals are exemplary.

Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox wanted Stanwyck to do another
Stella Dallas
-type picture with mother love as a theme. He enticed her into
Always Goodbye
(1938), a little-seen movie with a nicely melancholy title that doesn't fit its jerky shifts in tone. It's a weepie that sometimes acts like a romantic comedy, or a romantic comedy with mother love issues. The score under the credits certainly makes it sound like it's going to be a comedy, and the first shots show Stanwyck's rather high-voiced Margot Weston all aglow with happiness because she's about to be married. There's some poor rear projection shots of city streets behind her as her fiancée gets killed in a car crash, and then noble surgeon Jim (Herbert Marshall) stops Margot from jumping into the drink and convinces her, in no time flat, to go on living.

She has her fatherless baby, and Jim helps her place the boy with a couple he knows. Giving him up, Stanwyck's eyes slowly fill with tears, and the purity of her emotion is at its most impressive here. I can imagine a later Actors Studio guru like Lee Strasberg genuflecting before her talent. This is the sort of close-up that makes you wonder how one person could carry around so much pain and still be able to use it strategically for often claustrophobically small, contained motion picture scenes.

Margot becomes a famous fashion designer in one of those montages that leave an audience gasping for breath. As our heroine embarks on a trip to Paris, it's hard not to wonder if the screenwriters couldn't resist kidding us with this script, which lurches into shipboard hijinks with Cesar Romero (Stanwyck looks amused to find herself dancing with him, insisting, “I'm a working girl!” as he gives her his full continental lover act).

Back with Jim, Margot charmingly remembers being the youngest of six children and only getting to eat the neck of the family's chicken dinner. But if this sounds self-pitying, she quickly insists, “I like it”—and makes you believe that she does. She tries to get her child back, necessitating a fine confrontation scene with a female rival (slinky Lynn Bari). When she vanquishes this woman, Stanwyck leans in slightly, intoxicated with the thrill of battle, her mouth partly open and her eyes shining. Though
Always Goodbye
has to count as one of the worst scripts Stanwyck ever played, it has a kind of lunatic confidence in itself that makes it a minor pleasure.

The Bride Walks Out, Breakfast for Two, The Mad Miss Manton,
You Belong to Me, Christmas in Connecticut, The Bride Wore Boots

C
omedy is not something that came easily to Stanwyck, but she stuck to it and eventually mastered the genre. Early on, she professed that she found light material “a vacation—I was playing, not working.” But later, being interviewed by John Kobal, she confessed, “I am not really a comedienne, per se. I'm not very good. But when they are written as well as
The Lady Eve
or
You Belong to Me
(1941) … both of those films are with Henry Fonda, who
is
a wonderful comedian … or if it is a situation comedy, I'm alright. But—just for me to be funny—I'm not a funny person.”

In the mid-thirties, screwball comedy was in vogue, and practically every actress of note tried it, sometimes with spectacular results (Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn) and sometimes not (Loretta Young). We can take Stanwyck at her word that she wasn't a naturally funny person, and certainly good humor is not the first thing we think of when we think of her. But unlike, say, the always-serious Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, she successfully extended her technique in some small comedies before finally grasping the brass ring with Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks.

Her director on the RKO film
The Bride Walks Out
(1936), Leigh Jason, admired the fact that Stanwyck “was the only one I ever worked with who would dig to the bitter end for what you really wanted—and then give it to you.” The main thrust of the plot (engineer Gene Raymond won't let bride Stanwyck work, even though he brings in only thirty-five dollars a week) is consistently irritating. “Women have always worked,” says Stanwyck's Carolyn, when she wants to continue modeling clothes for fifty dollars a week. “Why shouldn't they do it in a shop instead of in a kitchen?” Raymond's unlikable Michael never has a good answer
whenever she asks about this, and that's because there is no good answer (it might be worse if he tried to define his sexist feelings, of course).

During the film's leisurely eighty-one minutes, there are four separate, would-be humorous references to wife beating. The most disturbing one comes from Stanwyck's mouth: “Hit me, that would be the manly thing to do,” Carolyn says to Michael (suddenly it becomes clearer that some of the attitudes of this era were to blame for Stanwyck getting smacked in the face by Frank Fay). In many ways, this movie prefigures a sort of fifties conservatism. The married couple sleeps in separate beds, and in this time of the working girl—the high noon of Jean Arthur and so many other career women of the thirties—it feels absurd, even cruel, to put the mighty Stanwyck in an apron in a tiny kitchen in a small apartment and expect her to pinch pennies on milk, when what she really wants is the trunk full of cash and gems belonging to Baby Face Lily Powers. She can't cook, of course, and why should she have to? Because that's what a “real, bona-fide wife” does, according to Michael.

This lunkhead Michael is another Fay figure, and he isn't remotely worthy of Stanwyck, as usual, but
The Bride Walks Out
has time for all kinds of diversions around its main plot. Hattie McDaniel has one of her better roles. In her first scene, she talks about the many men in her life, then cracks that “one or two of them I jilted!” In a later, even more telling scene, McDaniel wonders why white men don't want their women to work (it's interesting, from a modern perspective, that the black servant McDaniel plays is obviously more liberated and happier than the stymied white woman she works for). Stanwyck has a ball in a short dance scene with Raymond, jumping up on his thighs and thrusting her legs straight out into the air. And she finally pulls off a drunk scene with the help of pro-farceurs Billy Gilbert and Helen Broderick.

Broderick's crack timing is notable. Creditor Gilbert takes away the couple's furniture and finally comes to Broderick, who is sitting in the last chair. “What you're sitting on does not belong to you,” he says, whereupon Broderick thinks this over for a second or two (a priceless take), and then slowly rises. Jason said that Stanwyck blew a few takes because she was laughing so hard at Gilbert. That's a treasurable image: the self-denying pro finding that her profession could be fun and not all tears and slaps and gunshots. After she marries Michael, Carolyn starts to cry. Stanwyck makes sure to pull back just enough so that they're clearly comic tears, a small adjustment that I would think brought her a certain amount of relief and maybe a feeling of power—or at least expanding horizons.

In her next comedy,
Breakfast for Two
(1937), Stanwyck is completely out of her mid-thirties transitional period and almost fully developed into her streamlined, titanic 1940s self, an actress of near total flexibility and strength. She had just made
Stella Dallas
and saw this rather rough screwball comedy as a relaxation. She was thirty now, and if something was lost in the passage of time—a certain vulnerability, a certain type of raw exposure—this loss was more than compensated for by gains in confidence and control.

In
Breakfast for Two
, Stanwyck plays a Texas heiress named Valentine, and she's decked out in a white fringe dress and white fur coat in the first scene, recovering after a night on the town with irresponsible playboy Jonathan (Herbert Marshall). Stanwyck has made a huge leap forward in her handling of fast, sophisticated comic dialogue, throwing her mammoth fur over her shoulder as she tosses out repartee as if it came naturally to her. Over breakfast, Jonathan asks if he proposed to her the night before; apparently he does so whenever he picks up women. “Ah, I don't remember,” Valentine murmurs, and Stanwyck makes this brief moment of genuine disappointment the linchpin of her fierce performance.

This is another RKO film. It has distinctive art deco set design by Van Nest Polglase, and the direction by Alfred Santell is somewhat static, so that the settings are made to feel oppressive (which might have been the intent). Valentine plots revenge against Jonathan and snaps up his ailing company with the idea of making a real man out of this idle-rich parasite. She compares her plan to training a horse: “Slip a bit in his mouth and make him like it,” she purrs. It becomes clear that the victimized chorus girl has it in her now to dish out some full-fledged, dominatrix-style abuse. Valentine puts this guy in his place verbally, and thus brings out the caveman in Jonathan, who sneers, “You're the type of woman who wants to wear the pants—alright, Mister, wear them, trip over them and break your neck!” The male/female hostility between these two breaks into all-out brawling. When Jonathan's effeminate butler (Eric Blore) tries to stop them from putting on boxing gloves to fight, Valentine cries, “Keep out of this, I was raised with six brothers!” She socks Jonathan in the jaw, and there doesn't appear to be any fakery here; Stanwyck really seems to give Marshall a whack.