Authors: Dan Callahan
Cliff's son sees his father with Norma and immediately jumps to conclusions. He's rude to Norma when Cliff invites her over for dinner. Afterwards, when Cliff tries to get through to Marion to tell her about his discontent, she reveals the full extent of her passive-aggressive bitchery. He wants a little adventure in their life, like when they were young! “If life were always an adventure, it would be very exhausting,” Marion says, with a smug little smile. She's right, of course, in a way, but Marion uses this “sensible” attitude to keep her husband's feelings totally in check.
And Marion is murderous about Norma, saying that she pities the poor childless career woman. Cliff counters that Norma has had excitement and success, but Marion insists that those things “don't mean so much to a woman.” When Marion goes to get a dress at Norma's new LA flagship store, Norma looks slightly disappointed when Marion manages to insult her in that infuriating “oblivious” way we've seen so much of in her marriage to Cliff. The people here are so stuck in the roles that they're supposed to be playing that they can't react in any natural way.
By this point, any sensible audience would like nothing better than to see Marion's queenly humbleness punctured, but the conventions of society (reflected, of course, by the conventions of the movies), won't stand for that, and so Sirk is left furiously signaling the hypocrisy of middle-class life with his images, while the script takes several sharp right turns in order to make everything come out the way it needs to. In
one triumphant, shocking moment, Cliff sits down to read the newspaper and notices a framed family photo looming up in front of him from a table. Fed up, he blocks the photo with his paper (MacMurray makes this movement in just the right measured, “fuck you” way).
We see Norma hopefully putting on some perfume in front of a mirror before Cliff's children confront her. Instead of being ashamed, she tells them off, as if she's been watching Sirk's movie herself (she certainly couldn't have found out all the bad things she mentions about this family from one dinner, unless she has the discernment of a great novelist). Rain from a windowpane is reflected on her face, so that Sirk makes visual the tears that Norma cannot afford to cry. Meeting with Cliff, she says that they couldn't be happy together, even though we've seen quite enough to know how miserable they'll both be without one another. He'll have a wonderful life with Marion and the kids, she saysâand, most tellingly, she falls back on what she thinks people will say, how they'll gossip about Cliff deserting his family. This is the sort of soapy, “the status quo must be maintained” writing that the movies of this time made us accustomed to.
Sirk, though, manages to make us realize that Norma's familiar argument against change is based on a pack of stiff 1950s bourgeois lies that the upheavals of the 1960s would try to sweep away. “Be happy, Cliff ⦠you
will
be happy,” Norma insists, before running away from him. But of course he won't be happy, and neither will she. Given boilerplate soap to work with, Sirk fashions a genuine tragedy and an early Capra-esque call to arms, a call to self-actualization. It is a call to the 1960s, a decade when Stanwyck found herself relegated to TV as a western mother who, in stray glimpses, bears a certain resemblance to Bennett's Marion, the domestic tyrant par excellence.
Annie Oakley, Union Pacific, California, The Furies,
The Moonlighter, Blowing Wild, Cattle Queen of Montana,
The Violent Men, Escape to Burma, The Maverick Queen,
Trooper Hook, Forty Guns
W
hen asked about the western, which was probably her favorite genre, Stanwyck sighed happily, “Oh, I love to do them. I just love to do them.” She owned ranches for most of her life and also raced horses. Wide-open spaces agreed with her. “Well, I'm particularly fond of reading about the early West,” she said. “I think it was a very romantic era in our country.” In the heyday of her initial years of stardom, the 1930s, westerns were usually relegated to B and Z picture programmers and were rarely major features, but that started to change in the mid-to-late forties. By the fifties, the western in America was one of the most challenging and complex of film forms. In the hands of directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, Budd Boetticher, Allan Dwan, André de Toth, and many others, it was characterized by any number of fresh ideas and attitudes, politically, morally, and aesthetically.
George Stevens's version of the early life of
Annie Oakley
(1935) is about as sophisticated politically as you can expect from a film of its era. This is a movie that often hints at a more developed content but usually retreats into period charm and the kind of comedy routines that Stevens learned at the Hal Roach studios while photographing the best short subjects of Laurel and Hardy. “No fiction is stranger than the actual life of Annie Oakley who came out of a backwoods village half a century ago to astonish the world,” reads a title after the credits. But the film does indeed fictionalize parts of her story to suit the conventions of the time.
Stanwyck actually does look a lot like photos of the real Annie, who stood barely five feet tall; Stevens makes sure to film her in such a way that she looks small, even dainty, in his over-packed frames.
We first see Stanwyck's Annie riding in a carriage with her mother. “Gosh, ain't he pretty,” she says softly, looking at a picture of Toby Walker (Preston Foster), a renowned sharpshooter (in real life, Stanwyck had a helpless respect for male beauty). “That's not for ladies,” says a barkeep to vaudevillian Vera Delmar (Pert Kelton), trying to keep her out of his barroom, but she cracks, “I'm no lady” and barges right in. Stevens does some fast cuts to nonplussed male faces. “Next thing you know, they'll be smoking cigarettes!” says one man, while another wonders if there's nothing sacred anymore. There's no heat in their objections. Stevens situates his audience so that they can see what relative progress has been made for women since the nineteenth century.
Throughout, Stanwyck is wearing far too much lipstick to play a country girl, and her Brooklyn smarts sometimes don't match Annie's more simple common sense, but she has some fine moments early on. Jeff Hogarth (Melvyn Douglas), a scout for Buffalo Bill, offers her his arm, and when she hesitates, her mother nods her approval of his alien, chivalrous gesture. Stanwyck's Annie takes Jeff's arm, finally, but her face definitely registers that she thinks such exaggerated deference to her sex is silly.
The real Annie competed with marksman Francis Butler and beat him. Butler retired and soon proposed to her, and they lived out their lives together happily. In this film, Annie goes up against the fictional Toby, and when she and her mother see that she's going to ruin his career if she beats him, Annie throws the match. Before Stanwyck does this, she looks down for a moment, as if she's thinking, “Well, life is unfair, we knew that going in.” She didn't have the heart to beat Toby, she tells her friends: “He was just too pretty,” she repeats, matter-of-factly.
After Jeff brings Annie to the attention of Buffalo Bill (Moroni Olsen), they go out into the waning sunlight so that Bill can introduce her to his mostly male troupe, which responds with confusion and disdain. This sequence is done with a truly evocative series of magic hour shots that highlight Stevens's eye for pictorial effects. The best parts of
Annie Oakley
seem to be about a moment in American history when the demarcation line between the sexes was blurry. In the world of this movie, men are too pretty and famous gunfighters like Buffalo Bill have Stanwyck's 1940s-style hair, while the women are as hard and saucy as Pert Kelton and as capable as Stanwyck herself.
Yet the script and direction ask Stanwyck to be too sweet in too many scenes. There's not enough of the down-home grit that made Annie a legend in her own time and ours, a precious alternative to Barbies and beauty queens for the tomboys of the world. Foster does well in the most fleshed-out role here, but Douglas is just a dim point in the eternal triangle. “Aim at a high mark, and you will hit it,” said the real Annie, and that's the spirit that Stanwyck embodied as an actress, desiring and often achieving the crown of “the best of all” in her chosen profession. Both Annie and Stanwyck deserve better than this contrived version of Oakley's story. For all its ingratiating qualities, this ensemble movie loses all urgency in its final third (for a more daring version of this material, look no further than Robert Altman's still underrated
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
[1976]).
The little girl who dreamed of being Pearl White relished acting the tomboy heroine in Cecil B. DeMille's
Union Pacific
, a railroad epic that begins with
Star Wars
-style unrolling credits and a rousing score that segues from workin' on the railroad to my darlin' Clementine without missing a beat. This is the kind of action movie that kids could see and then act out afterward; in all of its scenes, it only matters what's happening in the moment and not why it's happening, particularly.
DeMille, much derided by his fellow directors but an unstoppable force in his industry, was a showman who never quite lost the simplicity of the silent films from the teens; he himself was a contemporary of Pearl White and an important rival to D. W. Griffith. His movies almost always made money (one wag called a picture of his “a movie for De Millions”), and that's because his hard-driving, circus-like sensibility was close to the confused emotions and instincts of the American public, especially on the issue of sex, where he proved a master at arousing prurient interest, having his cheesecake and eating it too by condemning licentiousness with biblical but slightly winking fervor.
Stanwyck appeared often on DeMille's radio show, and he was impressed with her lack of temperament on
Union Pacific
, calling her “a good workman,” his sincerest compliment. As Mollie Monahan, a postmistress and all-around spitfire, Stanwyck is introduced atop a train, shouting happily for her pa and crinkling her nose at him. She delivers her lines in a heavy Irish brogue that announces, “Yes, get used to it! I'm going to try an accent!” This Irish accent, unlike her more effective light one in
The Plough and the Stars
, “comes and goes,” as people like to say. But Stanwyck is obviously having so much fun physicalizing her role, hitching up her skirts, and throwing up her arms, that she fashions a wholly
new, animated style to suit DeMille's specific needs. For the first half of the film, Stanwyck's acting is akin to action painting; she throws her colors around vigorously, but if we step back, there's an order to what she's doing. In repose, Stanwyck gives Mollie her own watchful urchin look, and she makes a smooth transition to sentiment when asked to lament, to the strains of “Danny Boy” on the soundtrack, the needless death of a man in a saloon.
With her frequent partner Joel McCrea, a man who moves with tough, contained manly grace, Stanwyck has a sisterly chemistry. Rather unexpectedly, she plays out a most revealing scene with him in
Union Pacific
. “You think I'm an outrageous flirt,” says Mollie to McCrea's Jeff, as they rest for a moment on the tracks. “Did you never know that flirtin' gets into a woman's blood like fightin' gets into a man's?” she asks, her face taking on a lyrically high-energy yet contemplative look. “Now, a girl begins coquettin', to discover if she has the power. Then she goes lookin', like a fighter after a bully, for the hardest man to conquer. But tis never the man she wants, tis the pleasure of bringing him to her feet!” Mollie concludes cheerfully, less for Jeff than for herself, as if she's worked something out.
This is a classic explanation of Stanwyck's relation to men on screen.
Union Pacific
had many writers, so we can't be certain who wrote this speech, but it really rings a bell for her. The man she dreams of, Mollie/ Stanwyck continues (aided by McCrea's horny prompting), will give her the spanking she deserves. This isn't just sexism, but something else, something having to do with the tender roughness that Stanwyck wanted on screen from men and perhaps, to an extent, in her personal life. She got only roughness with Fay, and a bit of tenderness, but little else, from Taylor, so she never really found the combination she cravedâexcept with Capra, mainly in movies.
California
(1946), a Paramount western directed by John Farrow (Mia's father), was the first film Stanwyck made in color (she only made six in total and remains for most of us, in memory, a creature of lustrous black and white). The film begins with shots of California's natural scenic wonders, narrated by a bewildering variety of voices (this opening is so goofy that it suggests a parody of one of the “sight-seeing” shorts of the time). We see some wagons circling on a town's main street, and Farrow's camera moves to the left until we catch a group of women throwing Stanwyck's shady cardsharp into the street. It's quite an entrance (and it looks like she takes the fall herself, frustrated stuntwoman that she was). When Farrow cuts to a closer shot, Stanwyck raises herself up
out of the dust and says, “Thank you,” to the women, “thank you very much,” her mouth wide open and her teeth bared in a sneer.
She tries to vamp Ray Milland to get him to take her to California, the state that Stanwyck so loved that she practically never left it from 1929 on. But Milland isn't buying. Instead, saintly Irish winemaker Barry Fitzgerald lets her tag along with him. The pioneers ostracize her, and Fitzgerald tells her not to take their cruelty to heart. She stares off into space and begins to recite a litany of places she's been to with pretty names: Natchez, Memphis, Savannah, Biloxi. And all of these cities hurt her, it seems. Stanwyck's anger in these first scenes is too harsh for the movie to handle; she provides this candy-colored western with a strong belt of bitterness, and suggests that her character, Lily, is a hopeless case. “A woman gets tired knowing too much,” she says. It's an archetypal Stanwyck line, but when she doesn't react after Milland slaps her, only to touch her face with pleasure after he leaves, it seems like the screenwriters are just trotting out a familiar routine for her without adding anything new.