Barbara Stanwyck (18 page)

Then there's the last scene, so corny that your first, correct impulse is to laugh. Mrs. Morrison makes sure that the curtains are drawn for Laurel's wedding to her society man. Stella is outside, of course, and any laugh dies in your throat when you see her Depression-ravaged, wiped-out face, her coat with its ratty fur on the shoulders, her man's hat. As she watches her daughter's wedding from behind a fence in the rain, Stella's face is serene, like it was when she watched that movie on her first date with Stephen. It's her fate to be a fan, to be literally outside looking in, and she has accepted it. A policeman tells her to move along, I'm afraid, but she convinces him to wait until the groom has lifted Laurel's veil and kissed her. We see that and then cut back to Stella, who's chewing on a handkerchief. A tear slides gently down her face and right into her open mouth, a sensual detail that lets us see her instinct for pleasure is still alive.

The show over, Stella turns and dips slightly to the side, like a happy child, then starts to stride toward the camera as the music swells. Stanwyck leaves us on a high of goose-pimply exaltation. In the book, Stella has married the now-helpless Ed, her one friend, and she works in a shirtwaist factory, sewing clothes. She was never good with clothes, God knows, but they can't hurt her anymore, and she doesn't need them to protect her, either. (Poetically enough, a cop at the premiere of
Stella Dallas
briefly and violently detained Stanwyck because she was so plainly dressed that he didn't recognize her). Stanwyck felt that Stella had managed to “cheat failure,” at least for her daughter. For such a mixed-up person, a small victory like that counts as a large achievement.

The Plough and the Stars, Golden Boy, Clash by Night

K
enneth Tynan wrote that Greta Garbo couldn't be considered a great actress, finally, because she had never put herself to the test in major theater roles; she had never given us her Hedda Gabler, her Masha in
Three Sisters
, her Mrs. Alving in
Ghosts
. This idea that an actor can only truly prove her talent by scaling the heights of classical theater roles is perhaps an old-fashioned one, tied more to British than American tradition, but stage success is certainly helpful, if not infallible, as a gauge of acting ability. Bette Davis is every bit the equal of Katharine Hepburn as a screen actress, yet Davis never played any Shakespeare leads, as Hepburn did on stage. In late middle age, Hepburn offered a definitive Mary Tyrone in a film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's
Long Day's Journey Into Night
(1962), and she went on to tackle Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and even Greek tragedy in
The Trojan Women
(1970)—albeit with uneven results. The closest Davis came to a testing theater part like this was her Regina Giddens in
The Little Foxes
(1941), and that's a sterling credit. But it's hard not to wish that Davis had attempted a few more of these “prove your mettle” roles, and that Hepburn had been a bit more discriminating about what parts suited her (i.e., no Amanda Wingfield in Williams's
The Glass Menagerie
[1973]).

“I'd drop dead if I had to recite a single line of Shakespeare,” Stanwyck joked to a reporter in the 1940s. Classical drama was out for her, but she had three notable tries at parts written originally for the theater. The first of these was the difficult role of Nora Clitheroe in John Ford's abbreviated RKO adaptation of Sean O'Casey's
The Plough and the Stars
(1936), a disenchanted account of the Irish Easter rebellion of 1916.
When the play premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1926, there was a riot during the fourth performance, led mainly by some of the women associated with the fallen men of 1916. These women objected to the play's satire on the kind of nationalism that destroys Nora Clitheroe's middle-class family and dreams (Barry Fitzgerald had to punch a male protestor on stage to defend the actors). In O'Casey's play, Nora is pregnant, and she eventually loses her mind. She is the heroine of the piece, which employs a large company to play people on the margins of a dramatic event. Though she is often sympathetic, Nora is also a nag and a hysteric, so that the actress playing her has to commit fully to all of her flaws and take the risk of not being liked, at times, in order to be true to the life of this three-dimensional, righteous, sometimes exasperating woman.

For his film of the play, Ford uses the dark, expressionist look he favored in this period, and his introduction of his star is striking. We see a woman's head turn toward the camera, wearing a Virgin Mary–like head-cloak: Stanwyck's face is creased in doubt, almost folded in half, in fact.
The Plough and the Stars
can be most fruitfully seen as one artist, Ford, looking at another, Stanwyck, in purely visual terms, observing her in different moods and at different angles. In many ways, he films Stanwyck here in a similar fashion to the self-denying, rapt, intense way that he shot Katharine Hepburn's shadowed close-ups in
Mary of Scotland
, made that same year, but with a key difference. Whereas with Hepburn, Ford's photographic attention is discreetly romantic, with Stanwyck he elevates her as a kind of maternal figure.

Away from the city, in a contrasting luminescent sequence at a park where Nora wanders with her husband, Jack (Preston Foster), Ford has Stanwyck wear a stiff white lace hat that he lights like it's a halo. Though Ford takes care with the illuminated and then darkened frames he puts around Stanwyck's face, there is no attempt to glamorize or idealize her face itself. Throughout this film, she looks like a real, extremely worried person. Her features are doughy here, as if they were made of lumpy clay, and her swollen Nora looks like a person who sweats and who breathes heavily.

Stanwyck uses only a hint of an Irish accent, allowing her to focus on Nora's feelings without worrying about overly correct phrasings. When she tells her husband Jack that she burned his notification from the Irish Citizen Army, Stanwyck puts her full orchestral force behind the word “burned,” so that it seems to explode outward like a shower of sparks. But this is only a preview of her big moment, when she shouts for her husband outside and is told to hush up by the women of the army.
“They're all cowards!” her Nora cries. “Fools, do you think they want to die!” she howls, in a decidedly ferocious, deeply disgusted manner.

It's a risk. When she tried this deeper, more full-blooded hysteria in
The Woman in Red
, Stanwyck just looked silly, because the flimsy film couldn't handle it. Here, she has the material and the director to make such forceful expression land and resonate. Aside from
Ever in My Heart
, she never made another movie that dealt directly with war, for Stanwyck is an urban American creature; she made her own battlegrounds. In this scene in
The Plough and the Stars
, Stanwyck is able to address one of the greatest of outrages, just as she addressed the outrage of suffering, defenseless children in
Night Nurse
, and she has the epic size for the role, so that you wonder if she couldn't have played Hecuba, or Clytemnestra, or a modern Medea slaughtering her children on Flatbush Avenue to avenge herself on a faithless husband. The full arc of her role, however, is sidestepped; Stanwyck's Nora doesn't lose her mind, as she does in the play (she never portrayed outright mental illness on screen, preferring less clinical disturbances of the mind and heart).

The Abbey Theatre players in Ford's
Plough
“project” their roles to the camera. Arthur Shields, brother of Barry Fitzgerald, has a credit as an assistant to the director and seems to have been in charge of these actors. Ford generally preferred more natural performers, but he indulges Fitzgerald and the impish Una O'Connor without really harming the texture of his movie. Ford is the ideal interpreter of O'Casey's ambiguous material, and this little-seen film is admirable on several levels. He does not shy away from the looting that goes on during the Easter uprising, or from arguments about the merits of socialism, which get batted around by some of the characters. In one especially vivid scene, an Irish boy is trapped on a slatted roof, trying to get into a window for shelter. British soldiers shoot him, and his body sticks to the roof for a moment and then slides down—a sickening image, held for just the right amount of time.

RKO tampered with the film when Ford left for Honolulu on vacation. Pandro Berman, who had taken over as production head from Samuel J. Briskin, thought that the movie would be more commercial if Nora and Jack were lovers instead of spouses, and he insisted that Stanwyck and Foster come back and re-shoot some scenes, to Stanwyck's dismay. “I've always felt that John should not have left the sinking ship,” she told
Film Comment
in 1981. “God knows I had no power at that time, nor did Preston. Only John could have saved it, and he should have.” This re-cut and re-shot version was supposed to be released in America, while Ford's version was shown in England and Ireland (the non-Ford
version has all but disappeared at this point, and most of the reviewers in America saw the Ford version). Tag Gallagher, one of the pre-eminent scholars of Ford's work, told me that there is also a second US version of this film that is much longer, with “substantial newsreels in between some sequences—not by Ford.” Presumably such a cut was put together in order to pad the film out to reach the length of a prestige picture.

Introducing his heroine, Lorna Moon, in his play
Golden Boy
, Clifford Odets writes: “There is a certain quiet glitter about this girl, and if she's sometimes hard, it is more from necessity than choice.” He also writes that her eyes “often hold a soft, sad glance.” When
Golden Boy
was first produced for the stage in 1937, Lorna was played by Frances Farmer, a promising young actress who was romantically involved with Odets at that time. Afterwards, he dropped her, and she fell into mental instability. It was the part of a lifetime for Farmer, a serious role in a serious play where she was surrounded by Group Theatre stalwarts like Morris Carnofsky, Luther Adler, Robert Lewis, a young John Garfield, and, as the obsessed gay gangster Fuseli, Elia Kazan.
Golden Boy
was one of the Group Theatre's major productions, but it isn't revived much. In Paul Mazursky's
Next Stop, Greenwich Village
(1976), two young actors complain about Odets's stilted language, but their teacher tells them that the playwright was writing poetically, that he “heightened the thing,” and that it takes a special kind of belief—and the right delivery—to make
Golden Boy
work.

Lorna Moon is one of the best and most apposite roles Stanwyck was ever given, and the film of
Golden Boy
(1939) should have been one of her biggies, but it doesn't really work on any level. There are several probable reasons for this failure. Lorna is a self-described “tramp from Newark,” but for this post-Code movie, she's a “dame from Newark,” and the four credited screenwriters have subtly removed a lot of the guts from the part. In this film, Lorna doesn't talk about how her father beat her mother, or how her mother killed herself, and she doesn't get to say, “If I let myself go, I'd be a drunkard in a year.”

As Odets wrote her, this is a self-destructive woman, and all of her interactions with Joe Bonaparte, a self-loathing young violinist turned boxer, should reflect their tense longing for each other, as well as their need for oblivion. Odets sets up his dichotomy of boxing (selling out to Hollywood) versus music (the theater) as a personal indictment of himself, but also of the commercialism of the modern world, and his play still shoots the sort of bullets he intended—even if some are blanks owing to some overly gaudy writing in the last scenes.

Lorna is involved with Tom Moody, a broken-down, married fight promoter who once pulled her out of the gutter. She feels loyalty to him for having saving her and sticks by him because he's a little boy at heart and needs her help. In the film, Adolphe Menjou is cast as Moody, and he's hopeless from the first moments of the first scene, too suave and too hollow to make Lorna's feeling for him make sense. When he mentions the money he made back in 1928, Lorna says that her mother died that year, and it's clear from the outset that Stanwyck just isn't feeling this role. She's disconnected from the fussy Menjou and totally divorced from the emotions of an embittered girl who should be right up her alley.

Rouben Mamoulian directs uncertainly; his camera is always jerkily moving to the right or left to catch up with the characters, and this makes everything feel like a rehearsal rather than a take. He had a habit of telling his actors that the camera was running when it wasn't, for some reason, and when he tried this on Stanwyck, she told him off in no uncertain terms. It's hard to imagine a directorial technique that could have alienated her more, and her inspiration dried up for the actual scenes. Probably some of the best of her Lorna Moon was performed when Mamoulian's camera wasn't running.

Aside from this, Stanwyck was also concerned about her inexperienced young leading man, William Holden, who had been cast as Bonaparte over a large field of likely contenders. He too had trouble with Mamoulian's methods, and Columbia head Harry Cohn was going to have Holden fired until Stanwyck interceded on his behalf, promising to work with him off the set. “I told him much of what Willard Mack had taught me,” she said. Holden comes off just fine in the film, but it's likely that Stanwyck's own performance suffered because she was busy making sure his work was as good as it needed to be.

To top all this off, she married Robert Taylor midway through shooting, on May 13th, 1939, and this was another distraction that must have caused her mind to be anywhere but on the job at hand. When he heard the news, Holden sent her a sweet telegram that read, “GOSH, What a Blow!—The Golden Boy.” It's been intimated that Stanwyck and Holden might have been more than friends during this trial by fire, but it's more likely that he had a lifetime crush on her owing to the help she gave him. For the rest of his life, every April 1st, the date they started shooting, Holden would send Stanwyck two dozen roses and a white gardenia. Surely Holden was one of the few people that Stanwyck really loved, perhaps a bit romantically, perhaps not. She always enjoyed helping younger, pretty boy actors like Taylor, Holden, and later Robert Wagner.
“See you in 1960, maybe you'll be somebody by then!” Lorna tells Joe. It's a line that isn't in the play, and of course Holden would be one of the biggest movie stars in the world in 1960. By then, Stanwyck's film career was largely over.