Barbara Stanwyck photographed in 1936
Barbara Stanwyck collaborated with some of the finest directors of her time: from Frank Capra, William Wellman, William Dieterle, George Stevens, John Ford, King Vidor, and Mitchell Liesen in the thirties; to Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, André de Toth, and Robert Siodmak in the forties; to Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, and Samuel Fuller in the fifties; to Jacques Tourneur and Joseph H. Lewis on TV in the sixties.
Barbara Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas" (1937) directed by Kind Vidor“While women identified with Stella Dallas and suffered for her and with her, I like to feel that she was a woman who cheated failure. One who eagerly paid for the full measure of what she wanted from life.” —Barbara Stanwyck on her role in Stella Dallas
Dan Callahan considers both Stanwyck's life and her art, exploring her seminal collaborations with Capra in such great films as Ladies of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, and The Bitter Tea of General Yen; her Pre-Code movies Night Nurse and Baby Face; and her classic roles in Stella Dallas, Remember the Night, The Lady Eve, and Double Indemnity. After making more than eighty films in Hollywood, she revived her career by turning to television, where her role in the 1960s series The Big Valley renewed her immense popularity.
In his biography "Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman", Dan Callahan examines Stanwyck's career in relation to the directors she worked with and the genres she worked in, leading up to her late-career triumphs in two films directed by Douglas Sirk, All I Desire and There's Always Tomorrow, and two outrageous westerns, The Furies and Forty Guns. The book positions Stanwyck where she belongs-at the very top of her profession-and offers a close, sympathetic reading of her performances in all their range and complexity. A four-time Academy Award nominee, winner of three Emmys and a Golden Globe, she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy.
Callahan believes that this refusal to collapse into self-pity, or worse, “allowed her to become perhaps the most consistently fine actress of her time in American movies.” By 15, Ruby Stevens was a Ziegfeld Follies girl. She never attended high school. In 1926, Stevens became Barbara Stanwyck for her first acting job in a movie, and in 1928 signed a contract with Warner Bros. Here, Stanwyck developed her film acting style during the pre-Production Code early 1930s.
Barbara Stanwyck, circa 1930
Director Frank Capra used close-ups and multiple cameras to force Stanwyck to be genuine and spontaneous, and when he found that the first take was her best—Stanwyck was apparently capable of emptying her immense emotional reservoir into a scene only one time—he didn’t rehearse her with the rest of the actors. The results were the impressive pre-Code movies Ladies of Leisure (1930), which Callahan calls an Oscar-worthy performance;
Miracle Woman (1931); and 1933’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Stanwyck would use and refine this method for the rest of her career.
Callahan explains the famous opening “foreplay” scene in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), with Stanwyck and Fred McMurray, in terms of his subject’s past. He notes the similarity between the rapid-fire dialogue (written by Raymond Chandler) and “vaudeville patter routine,” and surmises that Stanwyck might have drawn on the “specter” of first husband to bring an emotional realism to her role as a woman who despises her husband. Source: www.wsws.org
Promotional still of Barbara Stanwyck for Ball of Fire (1941)
Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea in "The Great Man’s Lady" (1942) directed by William A. Wellman
Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor (they married 14 May 1939 - divorced 25 February 1952)In Callahan’s readings, then, her two failed marriages and the rift between her and her adopted son matter not for their scandal quotient but because of how she used them professionally. Of her performance as the self-sacrificing mother in “Stella Dallas” (1937), he writes that the hard-working Stanwyck “didn’t like reality and neither does Stella, but Stanwyck had an outlet and Stella does not.”
Stanwyck never signed a long-term contract with a studio. This non-exclusivity goes far to explain why she kept coming home from Oscar night empty-handed (until, that is, the Academy awarded her an honorary Oscar in 1982). Whichever studio she happened to be working for had little incentive to mount a vote-for-Stanwyck campaign. But freelancing gave her a measure of control over the roles she played. She made some excellent choices, and her natural style of acting has aged well. The result is that, unlike the movies of her rival Bette Davis, which ooze campiness, many Stanwyck vehicles — especially “The Lady Eve,” “Double Indemnity,” “Stella Dallas,” “Remember the Night” and “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” — are as watchable today as they were on first release.
Callahan’s enthusiasm informs every page, and he makes a good case for what Billy Wilder, who directed Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity,” said about Stanwyck when she received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement award in 1987. “In this business, you aren’t supposed to say anyone was the best.” Pause. “She was the best.” Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Mr. Callahan gives a fine summation of the actress's greatest work: "Stanwyck loved the movies, even at their most extreme and artificial, yet she was the actress who most often reminded the movies of reality. Crying alone in your room. Making love with someone you're scared of. Lashing out and hurting other people. Reminding other people of their responsibilities."
Stanwyck had the unusual ability to suggest several things simultaneously, and without the specificity of dialogue. Look at the way she watches Henry Fonda's unworldly herpetologist in "The Lady Eve." On the one hand, as a con artist with a professional's pride in her craft, she can't believe her luck in snaring such a dope; on the other hand... he's kind of cute. At one point, discussing her performance in Fritz Lang's "Clash by Night," he refers to Stanwyck's "daring, her need for flesh." Beneath the physicality, there was honesty, and beneath that, there was an avidity, a hunger—a combination that explains why Stanwyck's reputation has only grown in the years since her death. Source: online.wsj.com
Barbara Stanwyck at the pool with adopted son Dion.
Sam Fuller who directed her in Forty Guns (1957) said: "To work with Stanwyck is to work with the happy pertinence of professionalism and emotion. She's superb as a queen, slut, matriarch, con girl or on a horse... her form or class or appeal or whatever you want to call it stems from tremendous sensitivity and thousands of closeted thoughts she can select at will, at the right moment, for the exact impact."
Scott Eyman explains that there's no way his review is going to be objective: "That's because I love Barbara Stanwyck. I love her because she was never beautiful, but she was always sexy, never more so than when she let her hair go white in middle age. I love her because of the way she called Fred MacMurray's character 'Waltuh' in Double Indemnity — that little touch of the Brooklyn gutter that gave her an authenticity other actresses lacked. And I love her for a guided ferocity that enlivened and occasionally transcended the actual movie at hand. It didn't matter if the material was great — Double Indemnity (1944), The Lady Eve (1941) — or just good: The Furies (1950), Clash by Night (1952), There's Always Tomorrow (1956). And it didn't matter if her acting opportunities diminished as she aged: Whether it was the Elvis-vehicle Roustabout (1964) or an episode of The Big Valley (1965-69), she didn't wink, she didn't slum, she didn't ham. She played every scene for all it was worth and no more." Source: mubi.com
Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck in “The Lady Eve” (1941) directed by Preston SturgesCallahan on The Lady Eve: "For Sturges, Stanwyck keeps hitting gongs of verbal recognition so that they resonate so deeply they can hardly be explained, finally, with specific thoughts or words, just as The Lady Eve itself is slippery and resists the sort of “deep dish” analysis that Sturges always mocked in his work while still offering as complex a sensory experience as any in the cinema. This movie was a hit, a honey and a riot, and it’s been loved ever since it was released, right when America needed to take its mind off the upcoming war, a war that barely impinged on Stanwyck’s life on film (at one point, William Demarest does a vaudeville-like imitation of Hitler, a reminder of the hell happening off screen).
“They say a moonlit deck is a woman’s business office,” says Stanwyck’s Jean, when Henry Fonda’s Charles goes all mushy on her describing his love. Claudette Colbert would have said a line like that with all her earthy, racy common sense. Jean Arthur would have said it anxiously, as if she wasn’t sure if she didn’t sound silly. Irene Dunne might have said it with a tiny twinkle in her eyes, pressing the tip of her tongue to her palette, while Katharine Hepburn would have said it resentfully (or hopefully, if she was in her “femme” mode). Joan Crawford would have made it sound pushy and needy. Bette Davis would have said it ironically. Only Stanwyck could have said this line like she does in The Lady Eve, casting an eye on all of these possibilities while never quite settling on one of them; it’s clear that the idea amuses her, lightly, but Jean doesn’t take it too seriously. Or does she? Stanwyck makes it clear that Jean loves falling for her own act for once. All through this movie, Jean is at her most sincere when she’s being most blatantly insincere with Charles, and surely this is a paradox of human behavior that a world-class actress like Stanwyck would intimately understand.
For all its fun, The Lady Eve also quite seriously describes a process of disillusionment in youthful nonsense romance and the sort of constantly renewing attraction that is necessary, by hook or by crook, for any long-term sexual relationship after the first flush fades and is replaced by deeper knowledge. There’s no such thing as too much information for real, devoted lovers (even if there are certain things that are definitely better left unsaid, a point that Charles makes in the last scene).
-How did your understanding of Stanwyck’s work and understanding of Stanwyck’s biography end up deepening and informing each other over the course of writing?
Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "There's Always Tomorrow" (1956) directed by Douglas Sirk-As I watched all of her films for the book, in rough chronological order, and researched her life, which at a certain point really did narrow to making those movies and giving her all to them, I was struck by how hard it must have been to sustain her all-out sensitivity on screen over the 60 or so years of her career. Her private life was in many ways disappointing, or unsatisfying, but she never closed up for the camera. She had the discipline to keep herself open without ever being destroyed by the hard knocks that kept coming at her in life. That’s why, to me, what she achieved really is a kind of miracle.
-For each major decade of Stanwyck’s Hollywood career—the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s—what’s the one movie role you wish she had played instead of whoever did?
-I would love to see what Stanwyck might have done with Jean Arthur’s part in Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939). That’s a masterpiece as it stands, and I love Arthur, but she’s clearly uncomfortable in the role some of the time (which sometimes works in the film’s favor and sometimes doesn’t) and with Stanwyck it would be much more coherent, and much, much tougher. Let’s take ever-competent Loretta Young out of The Stranger (1946) and see how Stanwyck would function acting with and being directed by Orson Welles. She covered practically all of the auteur bases, but she never worked for Hitchcock, so let’s remove breathy Anne Baxter and install Stanwyck into I Confess (1953), where she can confess to a love affair and recreate it with Montgomery Clift.
Wearing blonde hair always brings out Stanwyck’s most ruthless side on screen, so I’d love to see how that would work up against Hitchcock’s
blond obsession. Source: www.thelmagazine.com
"Of course, I've always had a burning desire to be the best of all, and though I know most of things you dream of pass you by, I'll go on working with that same desire till the last role I play". -Barbara Stanwyck
“I am very, very proud… I love our profession very much. I love our people in it. I always have and I always will. And whatever little contribution I can make to the profession, or to anything, for that matter, I am very proud to do so. It is a long road. There are a lot of bumps and rocks in it, but it kind of all evens out, when an event like this happens in your life. From a very proud and grateful heart, thank you very much.” -Barbara Stanwyck, accepting the Screen Actors Guild Award, 1966
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