Barbara Stanwyck (19 page)

In her scenes with Joe, when Lorna is attempting to seduce him into boxing full-time, Stanwyck plays at half-energy, except for a rather too disgusted, enraged reaction after he kisses her. When she's supposed to be charmed by Joe's family, Stanwyck “smiles” a bit, but she isn't a smiler; simple happiness and pleasure are well outside her ken. Lorna is supposed to be torn between Moody and Joe, but Stanwyck is just going through the motions in these later scenes. In the
Meet John Doe–
like happy ending, when she has to sell us another false bill of goods, she can hardly be bothered. Unfortunately, Stanwyck's whole performance is a wash, except for one spine-tinglingly definitive moment that suggests how good she might have been as Lorna Moon. Joseph Calleia's Fuseli looks at her legs (as does the camera) and asks Moody, “This your girl?” Stanwyck is sitting on Moody's desk, impassive, a cigarette smoldering in her right hand. She shoots back, “I'm my mother's girl,” in a no-fuss way that suggests that this isn't a woman who's afraid of gangsters, or of anything much—except for the slow-burning anger that's eventually going to eat away her insides.

Stanwyck had another go at an Odets heroine in
Clash by Night
, directed by Fritz Lang for RKO. With this theater role, she still sometimes seems like she's just going through the motions, especially in some of her early scenes (Manny Farber in his review said that she was given to “impersonating a mentholated icicle”). But she does some of her finest work here, too, in some scenes opposite Robert Ryan—this has to count as one of her most uneven performances. The play was first produced in 1941, with Tallulah Bankhead, Lee J. Cobb, and Joseph Schildkraut in the roles that would be played in the film by Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, and Robert Ryan. Odets set his play on Staten Island, and he resolved the eternal triangle between his characters with murder.

In the Lang movie, the setting has been moved to a California fishing village, and this change allows the director to start things off with waves crashing under the credits, followed by some evocative shots of seagulls and seals. We see Peggy (Marilyn Monroe) waking up to go to work in the fish cannery nearby. This scene is staged very realistically; it's a bit of a shock to see the legendary Monroe as a plain girl in jeans. We watch the factory routine (which suggests Lang's futuristic factory in his
Metropolis
[1926]) and all the little silver fish moving along on an assembly
line. Lang doesn't make this scene particularly symbolic; you're allowed to draw your own conclusions.

Mae Doyle (Stanwyck) gets off a train with a suitcase and goes into a bar to order a coffee with a brandy to go with it. Douglas's Jerry comes in to get his drunken father (Silvio Minciotti) out of the bar. He tells his dad to go home, and the father whines, “Is nothing, home.” We see Mae react, as if to say, “You said it.” She's been away for ten years. “Home is where you come when you run out of places,” Mae croaks, wearily, tossing her cigarette into a coffee cup. Later on, she tells us about a married man she loved, a politician who died and left her money his relatives wouldn't let her have. Stanwyck delivers all this back-story professionally, competently, but in a way that lets us see that she's not all that interested in this woman or where she's been.

Stanwyck shares a warm look of sympathy with Monroe, who blew take after take and was always late to the set. “She couldn't get out of her own way,” Stanwyck later said of Monroe. “She wasn't disciplined … but she didn't do it viciously, and there was a sort of magic about her which we all recognized at once.” This is generous of Stanwyck, paying tribute to a different kind of movie performer after that performer's untimely death. On the set, though, Stanwyck was heard to say, “With a figure like that, you don't have to know how to act,” and she was right. Monroe is stilted in the film, awkward, but in certain moments she does have that movie “magic” that Stanwyck recognized and respected.

Still and all, this is Robert Ryan's movie, and he takes it by force from the moment he first appears as Earl, a savagely disappointed, woman hating romantic (and movie projectionist). Earl excites Monroe's innocent Peggy and Stanwyck's wary Mae, who discreetly looks him up and down while out on a polite date with Douglas's bellowy widower. “Didn't you ever want to cut up a beautiful dame?” asks Earl, talking about film cutting, but meaning something else, a fact that Mae takes in. She can see that he's sexy, but in the worst possible way.

Mae is seduced by Jerry's innocence, which ties her to earlier Stanwyck characters, but Jerry is a tubby, none-too-bright innocent, not Henry Fonda or Gary Cooper, but a last resort for a forty-five-year-old woman who just wants to rest. Mae is burnt-out, and Stanwyck's performance in the early scenes is also regrettably burnt-out, though she sometimes manages to come alive, in isolated moments. When Jerry says that everyone is afraid of getting old and lonely, Stanwyck looks up at him from a ladder she's climbing down, stopping herself, physically and emotionally. She takes in what he's just said as fully as possible and
then replies, “I suppose,” in that shivery way of hers, as if this statement is coming from disparate sources of knowledge meeting and clashing together.

After this moment, however, Stanwyck plays the role with a generic sort of “charged intensity,” which feels a bit forced and all on one level. Lang switches to some cheesecake—Marilyn's Peggy jiggling in a swimsuit on the beach—which gets Earl's attention and then goads his sadism, which is much in evidence. He's cruel to an elderly waiter, calling him “a good boy.” When Jerry asks Earl for his “Chinese imitation,” Mae considers Earl's racist nonsense coolly (Stanwyck does her mouth shrug and even lifts an eyebrow, but this gesture seems like a choice borne out of either uncertainty or boredom). When Earl gets her a whiskey shot, Mae tosses it back and then stares at him challengingly. This doesn't feel like the “Stanwyck is a stoic” routine from some of her lesser films of this time, but a jolt of real anger. There's nothing ambiguous about this emotion, for it all but broadcasts, “I hate men.”

Stanwyck had been the rejected party in her divorce from Taylor, and this status gnawed at her pride. At one point during shooting, she complained to Lang that she couldn't play a scene because it was badly written. “I knew the scene,” Lang remembered, “which I thought was very well-written, and said, ‘Barbara, may I speak frankly and openly with you?' She said, ‘Naturally,' and I continued: ‘I think the scene reminds you of a rather recent event in your private life, and that is why you think it is badly written and you cannot play it.' Barbara looked at me for a second and then said slowly, ‘You son-of-a-bitch,'—went out and played the two-and-a-half-page scene so wonderfully that we had to shoot it only once.”

This is an interesting story, but it's hard to tell just what scene in
Clash by Night
could have reminded Stanwyck of her divorce from Taylor and how she was cuckolded, in the public eye at least, by his flagrant dalliances with
Quo Vadis?
starlets. It's Mae who cuckolds Jerry after she marries him by giving in to Earl and his protestations of loneliness. It sounds like Lang boxed Stanwyck into a corner here; she prided herself on her image as a straight shooter, so she couldn't very well decline when he asked her if he could level with her. I can only imagine her embarrassment when Lang said what he did. She had to take “a second,” before building herself back up and calling him out as a bastard, as if she admired him for it—and maybe she did, but maybe she was offended, too. Her performance is all over the place, indifferent sometimes, and at other times engaged in a remarkably fiery way.

It seems to be Ryan, finally, who wakes her up decisively. “If I ever loved a man again, I'd bear anything,” says Mae, outside a dive with Earl. “He could have my teeth for watch fobs,” she claims. Unmoved by such Odetsian dialogue, Stanwyck satisfies herself with physical business, such as unceremoniously throwing a cigarette away when Ryan's Earl offers her another one. “Don't kid me, baby, I know a bottle by the label,” sneers Earl, moving in for a kiss, and getting met with a vicious slap from Mae that looks very real (it's the beginning of
Baby Face
all over again, but this time with a much older, much tireder woman). “Peace on earth,” Earl cracks, ironically, getting his hate on, which was Ryan's specialty.

Stanwyck seems unwilling, in this scene, to really meet Ryan's hate, but she gradually lets herself go with him, as if she's saying, “Alright, you son-of-a-bitch, you want hate, I'll give you hate.” And she's capable of intermittent inspiration in her scenes with Douglas's Jerry after their baby is born. During a heat wave, Jerry reports that the papers say they're due for some cool weather, and Mae replies, “Well, the papers oughtta know,” in a light, enigmatic voice that signals Stanwyck working at her reverberating best.

A drunken Earl stops by, then stays overnight. The next morning, after a restless sleep, Mae bends over some coffee in the kitchen and is attacked by tears. This attack is the kind of crying-having-its-way-with-you that rarely shows up in movies, where an actor is so often trying to cry instead of trying to fight off tears, as many people do in life. Earl stumbles into the kitchen to wash his neck. Both actors vividly get across both the literal and figurative heat of the environment in this scene. Ryan, wearing an undershirt, with his wide back to the camera, goes into some Irish “I should never have been born” keening, the kind of morbidness that the Irish Stanwyck is also susceptible to.

When Ryan grabs Stanwyck from behind and begs her for love, suddenly both actors seem to leap out of the frame, as if you were watching them in a stage performance right in front of you instead of on a screen. This is the closest we'll come to seeing what Stanwyck might have been like in live theater, and she was never more stimulated by an acting partner. So many actresses crumpled up and slunk away when confronted by Ryan at full throttle on screen. Only Stanwyck has the talent and the sheer nerve to stand up to him and meet him more than halfway. He almost eats her over the sink with a DeNiro-like kiss. She struggles a bit, but then she looks right at him and unleashes her own passion, shoving a hand into the back of his undershirt and rifling around hungrily, as raw a slice of sexual desperation as has ever been shown in movies.

That hand in Ryan's undershirt is an indelible image, one of the things you think about when you think about Stanwyck—that daring, that need for flesh. It is a kind of exposure, even if a lot of her other scenes here look dedicated to keeping her safe from our prying eyes. The ending, where Mae goes back to Jerry and her child, is not convincing, but Stanwyck sums up her performance when she talks to Ryan about their sordid affair and levels with herself about their “love,” which she sees as “love because we're lonely, love because we're frightened,” and then, quieter, “love because we're bored.” This is as full an accounting of her own hit-or-miss work here as any I could offer. Seeing Stanwyck live in a role that suited her surely would have been an event, but most theater actors have only word-of-mouth and faded press clippings to suggest their specialness now, whereas Stanwyck will be reaching into Robert Ryan's undershirt in perpetuity—on screen and in our mind's eye.

Remember the Night, The Lady Eve

A
s we get farther and farther away from the classic Hollywood period of the old studio system, where so many disparate talents flourished, the case of Preston Sturges as writer and director only seems more exotic and unexplained. According to Sturges, he didn't do much up to the age of thirty, though he helped run the cosmetics business belonging to his mother, Mary Desti. The estimable, bohemian Desti (whose real last name was Dempsey) was best friend and confidante to the flamboyant modern dancer, Isadora Duncan. The prototypical culture vulture, Desti merrily led young Preston around to every museum in Europe and was certain he would one day be an important artist. She seems to have realized that she herself had the artist's vocation and temperament, but not the talent. He rebelled against her influence, at first, longing for the business mind and stability of his favorite stepfather, Soloman Sturges, and the unresolved tension he felt between Desti's arty exhortations and Sturges's financial example resulted in the rich, unsettling voice he displayed as a writer of Broadway plays and then screenplays in Hollywood.

The Sturges voice is so distinctive that it comes through in nearly all of his scripts directed by others in the 1930s, and it comes through strongest in two movies directed by the under-valued Mitchell Leisen,
Easy Living
(1937) and
Remember the Night
(1940), which starred Stanwyck (it was originally set for Carole Lombard). On the set of that movie, Sturges told Stanwyck that he would write her “a great comedy”; probably there was a “yeah, sure” twinkle in her little eyes after he said this. “I told him I never get great comedies, and he said, ‘Well, you're going to get one,'” she later remembered. She couldn't have known that this cheerful egoist and closet pessimist would give her
The Lady Eve
, which stands, with Leo
McCarey's
The Awful Truth
(1937) and Howard Hawks's
Bringing Up Baby
(1938), as the very best and most representative of this era's romantic comedies.

Stanwyck was mistrustful of Sturges. He wasn't her type of man, and though she reveled in the two scripts he wrote for her, there was something about him that she found phony. Robert Wagner and others have said that she thought he talked too much. William Wyler's wife, Tami, called Sturges “a terrible listener, he would talk and other people would listen.” But Sturges had a read on Stanwyck; he told the press that she had such inner beauty that she would be “radiant in old age,” and he was right about that. He was right about a lot of things, Stanwyck-wise, and in the two scripts he gave her, he brought her to new maturity as an actress and a sensibility, adding touches of worldliness and optimism until she was able to play the highest of high comedy for him.