The Gay Sisters, Flesh and Fantasy, My Reputation, The Other Love, B. F.’s Daughter, East Side, West Side, To Please a Lady, Titanic, Executive Suite, These Wilder Years
There were times when Stanwyck cast an envious eye over the kind of material Bette Davis was making her own at Warner Bros. She very much wanted to play in Dark Victory (1939), which went to Davis, and she also lusted for Mildred Pierce (1945), but her pal Joan Crawford snagged that one. Stanwyck wasn’t especially suited to the woman’s picture of this era, but, as was the case with many another genre, she got several chances to make this type of movie her own. As she had done in other genres, she tackled—and ultimately conquered—the soap opera on her own terms.
Davis and a few others had turned down The Gay Sisters (1942), a Lenore Coffee adaptation of a lengthy Stephen Longstreet novel, before Stanwyck took it on. The first ten minutes of this movie could make for a knockout drinking game; if you downed a shot every time somebody said the name “Gaylord,” you’d be dead drunk before the first reel was finished. Papa Gaylord (Donald Woods), who is off to World War I, insists on “a Gaylord house, run by Gaylord servants, in the Gaylord manner,” and he’s just getting warmed up. He calls one of his three daughters a “good Gaylord” and then mentions that another is “a Gaylord, through and through.” Of oldest daughter Fiona, a servant intones, “A Gaylord if ever there was one, and a redheaded Gaylord at that!” Just in case we don’t get the picture yet, Father G cries, “You’re not just a Smith or a Jones or a Brown, you’re a Gaylord!” Counseling Fiona, he mentions, “You must always be a Gaylord,” and emphasizes that, “The land is the Gaylord’s religion.” It’s as if some Monty Python sketch had been sandwiched into the opening scenes; counting the readable names of the girls’ dead mother and then the monogrammed hat that falls off of their dead father at the front, there are twenty-one instances of this “Gaylord” repetition mania in the prologue alone.
Jumping forward in time, it seems that the Gaylord girls, or “the Gay dames,” as they’re sometimes called, have been involved in litigation over their father’s will for twenty-three years and counting. Stanwyck’s “fighting Fiona” has some grudge against Charles Barclay (George Brent), a rich man in league with a charity trying to collect 10 percent of the estate, and Barclay has some grudge against her. Fiona has a small boy named Austin (Larry Simms), and we later learn that he is the result of Fiona’s failed marriage to Barclay.
The intriguing thing here is Stanwyck’s relation to her on-screen son. In his first scene, Stanwyck avidly watches this kid get picked on by a group of boys and then relishes the sight of him defending himself: “Fight back, punch him in the nose!” she snarls. Surely this attitude mimics the distant, tough-love way that Stanwyck tried to relate to Dion, who was too sensitive and awkward to be the little firebrand she wanted (Simms even looks a lot like a young Dion Fay). Later on, Fiona worries about where Austin will spend his vacations and briefly gives up custody of him over this issue, a sad on-screen contrast to Stanwyck’s active avoidance of her own son off-screen whenever he had a vacation from military school.
The “Gaylord” madness lets up a bit in the first hour, but it comes creeping back in when you least expect it. “We Gaylords are a queer lot,” says good sister Susanna (Nancy Coleman). Fiona herself gets in on the act: “Susie, Susie, what a Gaylord!” she sighs, and later makes reference to “an old Gaylord custom.” To top off the Gaylord fever, when Fiona has finally given in to Barclay and sold the old homestead, she says, “Let’s go down and drink to the end of the Gaylords,” and Stanwyck is forced into another of her weirdly unconvincing drunk scenes. She’s on much more solid ground when she sarcastically narrates a flashback to when she hoodwinked Barclay; it plays as a rip-off of The Lady Eve, but agreeably so. Stanwyck is fully aware here of the thespian implications of her contemptuous man trapping, referring to “my big acting scene” when Fiona pretends to get the vapors on her wedding night, then swooning ultra-falsely on a staircase. “Katharine Cornell couldn’t have done it better,” Stanwyck cracks, knowing full well that her modern style of performing is sweeping away the “back of the hand to the forehead” custard of Cornell and all her forebears.
Julien Duvivier’s episodic Flesh and Fantasy (1943) was a follow-up to his earlier omnibus picture, Tales of Manhattan (1942). The last of the three tales here pairs Stanwyck with Charles Boyer. He plays a tightrope walker whose act involves pretending to be drunk and then finding himself on the high wire. We see him choke in the middle of this act (Duvivier was always expert at portraying moments of fear and humiliation), and then later, on a ship, he bumps into Stanwyck’s elegantly dressed crook. Boyer’s smooth-talking roué act makes an interesting contrast to her wised-up common sense, and she adjusts herself to him, becoming a bit more mercurial, a bit more continental. This pairing was an event, because Boyer was Stanwyck’s equal as an actor, and it’s a shame that they couldn’t have found a good romantic comedy to do together, something more developed than this stylish but flimsy short story.
“My Reputation [1946] was what we classify as a good woman’s picture,” Stanwyck told John Kobal. “It is a problem throughout the world: the widow who is comparatively young, who does start to go out with eligible men, and then gossip starts.” This movie, with its tacit wartime theme, was made in 1944 but only released in America in 1946. In the meantime, it was shown to serviceman overseas as a kind of dream of what they might be coming home to: a glorified suburbia, in this case Lake Forest, Illinois. Stanwyck plays Jessica Drummond, “a wife type” and widow of thirty-three whose former athlete/businessman husband has just died. It’s a difficult role for Stanwyck, and she’s uneasy in some of the early scenes as she tries to feel her way into this cloistered young matron dominated by a mother (Lucille Watson) who’s been wearing black to mourn her own dead husband for twenty-five years. Jessica refuses to wear black, the first of many small rebellions that grow larger as the film goes on.
Jessica is the type who organizes picnics for her two young boys, driving around in her perfect station wagon with picture perfect silent dogs in the backseat. She’s naïve and sheltered, and when a married friend (Jerome Cowan) makes a pass at her in his car, she’s undone by the sleaziness of the encounter. Running to a female friend (Eve Arden), she breaks down. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she says, choking up, then smashing her arms into a couch. “I seem to be going to pieces!” she cries, and in this release of emotion, Stanwyck gains some control over her characterization.
She’s shaky again when first dealing with a rather leering army major (George Brent). Encased in a tight white sweater, Stanwyck can’t stop her eyes from looking a bit too knowing, but she’s able to use her innate rebelliousness when Jessica begins to assert herself with her gossipy neighbors. Curtis Bernhardt, a minor but effective Warners stylist, gives the film a dark, velvety look, and he’s capable of striking shots. When Jessica breaks away from her major, his shadow looms over her as she cringes against a brick wall.
My Reputation is often too polite for its own good; even Arden gets swallowed up in the chintz and candlelight. Stanwyck just seems miscast when asked to choke back hard liquor or to flinch when she sees the major’s bed, but in the last half hour she comes into her own. The major tells Jessica that he isn’t the marrying kind, and she’s bold enough not to care. In one of the last scenes, staged quite beautifully by Bernhardt, Jessica stands in shadows while she relates to her boys how their father had been ill for two years before he died. She has had to go without sex for a while before meeting her major, and this revelation is an unexpectedly frank detail. Right before going in to talk to her sons, Jessica marches to the door and then hesitates slightly before opening it, an illuminating physical grace note that lets us see how closely Stanwyck has melded with her role after her early missteps.
In the fully charged ending, Jessica sees the major off at a train station and reacts gratefully when some passing sailors whistle at her, proving that she’s still in her prime and more than just a mother and a widow. Stanwyck finishes Jessica’s wave to the major, then just stays in her own feelings of relief and joy for a moment before squaring her shoulders and walking confidently out of the station. This isn’t a major film, and Stanwyck strikes out as often as she hits the ball here, but the ending of My Reputation is certainly a keeper (Todd Haynes’s melodrama pastiche Far from Heaven [2002] has a very similar climax, and this Bernhardt film can be seen as a rough sketch for Douglas Sirk’s far more complex All That Heaven Allows [1955]).
Erich Maria Remarque wrote what would become The Other Love (1947) as a treatment for his inamorata Marlene Dietrich, but what wound up on screen was a lot more simplified than his original scenario, and it shares only certain surface similarities to his other work. The glossiest of soap operas, it’s an anomaly in the career of André de Toth, who thrived on small crime films and westerns that he made as harsh as possible. And it’s also anomalous for Stanwyck, in that she plays in a totally different style to suit this purple material, deploying an expert sort of feyness and quiet lyricism. As Karen, a concert pianist suffering from tuberculosis, she even pitches her voice much higher than usual, so as to sound as breathy and gaspy as possible (reviews of the time, however, noted that she made an absurdly healthy-looking patient).
The heroine looks better and better as she gets sicker and sicker, and Stanwyck shows up in a new (and becoming) Edith Head ensemble in practically every scene. The film has more clothes sense than dramatic sense. “There’s been a lot of men in my life,” chirps Stanwyck’s Karen. “Bach, Brahms and Beethoven!” She plays the piano athletically, like someone digging ditches, and has David Niven as her lovelorn physician and Richard Conte as her rich racecar driver lover. Conte was a replacement for Robert Stack, who shot the film for a month before falling ill and dropping out. Conte acts more like a gangster than a playboy, while Niven is too lightweight for his role.
De Toth seems uninterested for most of the film, so that what should be a grand wallow in glamorous sickbed masochism seems more like a chore (Stanwyck was out sick for a while during shooting, unusual for her, and her illness added to the film’s troubles). “At that time the motion picture industry was still shackled to Hollywood,” de Toth later said. “We who were seeking reality not only in portraying characters but also in presenting real geographical locations had a great deal of difficulty and many obstacles to overcome.”
Apparently Stanwyck shot a death scene. In the sixties, she talked about watching the film at home: “I have no will power. I watch all the old movies on TV, including some of mine …. But it does make me angry that they cut these movies. They cut key scenes. One of mine, The Other Love with David Niven, had a dramatic scene at the end, where I’m dying of consumption. Just before my death, Niven is talking to me. He knows I’m dying and I know it. It was very difficult doing. On TV, right in the middle of the scene, when David is talking and I’m gasping for breath, they end it, cutting out the death. I look like an idiot.” IMDb lists the running time for this film as 95 minutes, but most circulating prints run 89 minutes, and a little-girlish Karen is still alive at the end of this print, cozied up to her doctor as he plays the piano for her.
The following year, Stanwyck cut her long hair short for B. F.’s Daughter (1947), an MGM adaptation of a John P. Marquand novel, and this haircut instantly made her look more severe and matronly. The early scenes are set in 1932, but no attempt is made in sets or costumes to suggest this period. Thus, Stanwyck’s Polly, the devoted daughter of industrialist B. F. Fulton (Charles Coburn), meets her future husband Thomas (Van Heflin) in a staid-looking MGM cocktail lounge that’s supposed to be a downtown speakeasy. Thomas is a Columbia professor with leftist ideas, but the film is generally vague on the subject of politics. At one point, Thomas mentions that he’s written about B. F.’s “interlocking companies,” but this is the only hint that her father might be up to anything crooked. Once married, Polly uses B. F.’s right-wing money and influence secretly to advance the lecture career of her leftist husband, a neat irony that the film is too wishy-washy to do anything with.
As B. F’s Daughter goes on, the hugely wealthy, up-by-his-bootstraps B. F. is painted as a man so sentimental that he has kept several ailing companies going purely out of love. Unlikely, of course, but B. F. really is the swellest old capitalist you’re ever likely to meet. This admission inspires Polly to fight for her dead marriage, which is the film’s ultimate message—one that Stanwyck herself took too much to heart off-screen, I’m afraid. This is another film choice that reveals just how right wing Stanwyck was at heart (Keenan Wynn’s opportunistic left-wing radio broadcaster here is a cartoon character to match the wilder excesses of Red Salute). It was shot quickly by old MGM hand Robert Leonard, and it was a cheerful set where a lot of practical jokes were played. The shrewd Bette Davis once remarked that happy sets rarely make for great or even good films, and B. F.’s Daughter is a case in point. This is a soap opera, one where a woman is finally forced to say, “I need you!” to a weaker-willed husband, and one masquerading at times as a glossy piece of right-wing agit prop.
Bosley Crowther, the film reviewer for the New York Times, could usually be counted on to get everything wrong, but he hit a rare bullseye when he wrote about Stanwyck’s next MGM soap outing, East Side, West Side (1949): “A picture that just about hits the low-water mark of interest, intelligence and urgency.” Like B. F.’s Daughter, it runs 108 minutes on very little story (at least Stanwyck’s mid-thirties stinkers at Warner Bros. only lasted a little over an hour), and there’s no feel at all for Manhattan on the clean studio sets. This is late studio filmmaking at its most barren and machinelike.
The film is filled with fine actors like James Mason and Van Heflin, but they’re stuck in dull roles, and Stanwyck herself is saddled with the worst role as the kind of sniveling, stoic wifey who does nothing but worry about her husband’s infidelities. She’s up against young Amazons like Cyd Charisse and the ultimate big blond, Beverly Michaels, who acts as a deus ex machina in the last third. Sitting beside Charisse in a car at one point, Stanwyck is photographed like a grizzled old frontierswoman. The resplendent Ava Gardner, playing the hellcat trying to break up her marriage, dominates the whole stultifying enterprise through sheer physical splendor.
In her autobiography, Gardner admits to an affair with Robert Taylor when they made The Bribe (1949): “Our love affair lasted three, maybe four months. A magical little interlude. We hurt no one because no one knew.” Stanwyck, who certainly could be counted on to know the score on things like this, was cuckolded in real life and then had to submit to the indignity of being cuckolded on screen by the same young woman that same year. In their one confrontation scene, Stanwyck goes into lockdown mode, so that Gardner even wins their exchange histrionically, and this isn’t the end of the film’s trials. Gale Sondergaard, who plays Stanwyck’s mother here, was a noted victim of the blacklist. And the future Nancy Reagan, here billed as Nancy Davis, makes an uneasy impression in her few scenes as Stanwyck’s loyal friend, as if she’d like to rush over and whisper, “Hey Barbara, let’s name some names!”
More time and thought seems to have been lavished on the women’s sculptural coiffures than on the script or direction. Their hair is twisted all over their heads into the most crazily elaborate shapes (Charisse in particular must have spent hours with the hairdressers in the morning). The only elements that compel attention here, finally, are these hair creations, a number of unaccountably ugly lamps, and the beauty of Gardner’s body (especially her Louise Brooks-like back) in her clothes. Stanwyck is nearly a zombie throughout, looking like she’s on some sort of medication, except in one scene where she displays a grand lady condescension to a short New York “type” that’s as unattractive as it is uninteresting—even if it is theoretically right for the boarding school priss she’s playing.
Close to twenty years after he menaced her in Night Nurse, Clark Gable was teamed with Stanwyck in To Please a Lady (1950), an MGM star vehicle that gets off to a rocky start. It opens with a poster that reads, “Regina Forbes, America’s Leading Woman Columnist, 40 Million Readers, Fearless Exposés.” And then Clarence Brown’s camera prowls around a large office, settling on Stanwyck’s Regina smoking a cigarette and looking cold and vindictive, as a shrunken Adolphe Menjou cowers in the corner of the frame. They’re watching Gable’s maverick racecar driver being interviewed on television, and it feels like the screenwriters have given Gable a character that he could have played in his barnstorming style in 1940, but is hard-pressed to put over as the older, much sadder man he is in 1950. There’s a similar disconnect with Stanwyck’s role in these early scenes, especially when she swaggers around a racetrack and has to listen to the drivers crow, “Take a look at that chassis!” and “Nice looking dish!” She seems embarrassed by this, not because she’s lost her looks in any way (she never really did), but because their catcalls sound like they should be directed at a young bombshell, not a seasoned, attractive middle-aged woman.
The racecar sequence at the beginning and the one that ends the film play out as filler, but Brown often gives this movie a grey-toned, somber kind of melancholy that can’t have been entirely intentional, as if he’s taking his cues from his weathered stars. And stars they are, two of the greats—it’s a pleasure to watch them together in a nighttime scene where her high heels sink into the dirt of the racetrack and he gallantly carries her around. Gable’s driver intrigues Regina by slapping her face; Stanwyck takes the slap without flinching, as if her stoicism was so well known by this point that it’s almost getting to be a joke.
Sometimes the young Gable enthusiasm rises back to the surface of his squinty blue eyes when he bothers to open them wide enough, and Stanwyck obviously enjoys being with a performer with charisma that equals her own, even when the script asks her to do a pixilated, Jean Arthur-type delayed reaction after he kisses her and consigns her to the stands for the last interminable racing sequence. As a team, at this point, Gable and Stanwyck would have been better off with an urban noir or a hard-driving western, but there are times in To Please a Lady when the film seems to know that just looking at the two of them sitting at a table together in a restaurant is enough for any reasonable audience.
Titanic (1953), directed by Jean Negulesco, is a missed opportunity all around, a forgettable film, neither as respected as the later British version of the 1912 maritime disaster, A Night to Remember (1958), nor as wildly popular as the James Cameron blockbuster edition in the 1990s. It has the morbid suspense of all the other Titanic movies, but little else. Charles Brackett produced, and he also had a hand in the script, which actually won an Academy Award for best original story, even though the fictional tale it tells before the boat hits the iceberg is neither original nor overly interesting. In fact, the whole thing is a bit distasteful.
Stanwyck’s Julia is a society woman who wants to save her children from the decadent effects of an upbringing under their effete father, Clifton Webb. Her first close-up is quite striking, a mixture of melancholy in the eyes with a “what the fuck?” set to her mouth, making for a kind of curdled face. When she first sees Robert Wagner, she gives him a hungry look from an elevator, but the script has her gently picking him as a match for her pretentious daughter. Off the set, Stanwyck apparently picked him out for herself. They share one short scene together where she reads him a poem, and it’s warm and suggestive. If this movie gave her nothing else, at least it gave her some pleasure in her personal life.
Webb has some amusing high-bitch moments, chiding Stanwyck about how he tried to “civilize the kind of girl who bought her hats out of a Sears Roebuck catalog,” and spitting out his words with supreme contempt. He winces when Stanwyck yells at him and gets several laughs by chopping up his words: “You cra-zy woman,” he snipes. When she tells him that their little boy is not his son, the revelation doesn’t come as a shock; it’s unimaginable that Webb could have had children with Stanwyck by any means other than artificial insemination. There’s some arch writing on display when she tells him about the man who impregnated her, and Stanwyck delivers it archly. And she can’t do anything with her scene with whiskey priest Richard Basehart, a wholly expendable character. Brian Aherne, as the dignified ship’s captain, and Thelma Ritter, as the Molly Brown figure, give some energy to what is a fatally stiff first hour. By the second hour, there’s nothing to do but wait and hope for this dull ship to hit that iceberg already. When it does, the movie comes to life, even though there are still a few snafus here and there.
In their parting scene, Stanwyck and Webb suddenly become a touching and believable couple. Lowered into the lifeboat, with her husband and son still on board ship, Stanwyck gives herself over to imagining the disaster: “I looked up at the faces lined along the rail—those left behind to die with the ship,” she told Hedda Hopper, describing her experience of shooting these scenes. “I thought of the men and woman who had been through this thing in our time. We were re-creating an actual tragedy and I burst into tears. I shook with great racking sobs and couldn’t stop.” It took an event of this size to break the floodgates open for Stanwyck, so she couldn’t stop once she’d started feeling and she couldn’t regain her usual control. It’s too bad that the film doesn’t give her a proper frame for emotions of that size and depth.
Executive Suite (1954) is a crackling, if shallow, business drama, a kind of Grand Hotel of the boardroom in which Stanwyck took many of the unappealing aspects of her soap heroines and transfigured them through careful character layering mixed with unabashed going-for-broke effects. This is bloodless 1950s prestige filmmaking, and if it has its virtues, they’re due to the overall neatness of the script by Ernest Lehman and the clear-cut direction by Robert Wise. In the first scenes, secretary Nina Foch introduces us to the film’s main players when she sets up a board meeting: rogue Louis Calhern, emotional second banana Walter Pidgeon, Babbitt-like Paul Douglas (with mistress Shelley Winters), and bottom-line-watcher Fredric March.
Outside the office walls, there are many scenes with William Holden, who plays an idealistic, hands-on sort with a tirelessly (or is it tiresomely?) devoted wife (June Allyson) and perfect little boy. Enough time is spent with these men in grey flannel suits and their women that any sensible audience might wish that Lily Powers could saunter in and bust the place apart. But it’s easy to see why Stanwyck decided to play Julia Tredway, the damaged daughter of the company’s founder, even if she really only has about eight minutes of screen time to make an impact (in the last twenty minutes, she’s confined mainly to silent reaction shots at an all-important meeting called to elect the next company president). Justifiably cocky, Stanwyck once said: “Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don’t care what happened before. I don’t even care if I was in the rest of the damned thing—I’ll take it in those fifteen minutes.”
She does take Executive Suite—and by force at times. She has the flash part, the pay-off part, and it pays off in the expected histrionic ways, but it also lands deeper in several key moments. Twenty-one minutes in, when we first see Julia, she is staring out a window, her face flabby with preoccupation and worry (we later learn that her father committed suicide in 1933 by jumping out of a window). She’s an abandoned woman, and she knows that her controlling stock in the company is the only thing that binds her to Bullard, the man who saved her from a breakdown and saved her father’s company. A silly little hat sits forlornly in the middle of her graying head and she wears little white kid gloves. This costuming makes for a telling picture of a pampered girl gone sour and neurotic in middle age.
Stanwyck’s transitions can be a bit abrupt here because she’s playing for maximum impact to make each moment count, yet she also offers some interesting, subtle moments of almost humorous inertia. Julia Tredway is one of the few Stanwyck women to have a guilty conscience about being manipulative, and in the middle of making demands and exhibiting her self-pity with Pidgeon’s understanding exec, she draws back several times into a wry self-awareness that lets us know Julia is a smart woman. She understands most of her own urges and miseries but feels she can do little to change them. Julia fondles Bullard’s chair and then caresses his pipe; her romantic attachment to him is unavoidably part of her unresolved daddy issues.
Julia’s second scene lasts less than a minute. The telephone rings and we see a woman’s hand reach out to pick up the receiver. We hear a voice say hello, and it’s the Stanwyck voice at its most cigarette-scorched. Wise cuts to her face when she hears of Bullard’s death, and it stays completely still. Stanwyck makes us feel that Julia has somehow prepared herself for this moment, and she conveys all of this without moving her face at all. She doesn’t even have a verifiable expression in her eyes, yet she somehow gets across exactly what Julia is experiencing and then closes her eyes, not fast, but not slow, as if a curtain is being lowered. Eleanor Parker was originally set to play this part, and if she had, she would have torn the scenery and maybe even the whole film itself to shreds, whereas Stanwyck has only to stare and smolder to place a whole blasted life right in your lap.
Foch and March do fine work in their own right, but no one can really compete with Stanwyck’s bravura style here—not even her onetime golden boy, Holden, who shares the screen with her in a climactic confrontation scene. Julia is throwing away her personal papers into a roaring fire. Holden’s Macdonald, who needs her support to take the top spot in the company, assails her directly, and she responds briefly, but then draws back into herself, the kind of “I’m watching everything from a distance” quality we saw in her first scene, times ten.
Julia retreats into a cold kind of remove, just as Stanwyck herself hid behind a mask in some of her poorer soap operas. But in Executive Suite this masking is revealed to be a necessary and even admirable survival strategy. Plunking down in a chair, her hands set in a sort of Zen yoga position, Julia concludes, “No matter how horrible things are, they can always get worse.” This is an indelible moment, and it touches a very deep part of Stanwyck’s creativity, the part that knows about depression so overwhelming that only the lowest energy level can possibly deal with it. She knows, and Julia knows, that if your energy is as low as possible, there’s a good chance it won’t sink any lower. A sudden rise in energy and Julia could go right out that window like her father did.
Holden’s Macdonald keeps poking at her, and a lioness emerges, only to slink back to her cage. Stanwyck alternates between cold and hot like this until he draws blood. “I gave him ten years of my life and all my love, isn’t that enough!” she cries, her eyes wide and credulous like a little girl, as she starts to pound on her accuser’s chest. When he leaves her, Julia breaks down as she did in 1933, weeping brokenly over a desk and beating it with her arms, as she must have done many times before. She goes outside and she could easily jump off that executive tower, but then some bells start to ring (the film has no score), and this hard, massive sound sets something off in Julia. She lets out a fearsome howl and covers her ears with her hands, then shivers against a stone wall.
It’s a bold choice. Joan Crawford covered her ears like this in many of her films, but with her it was too much a melodramatic surface gesture. With Stanwyck, it sets a visual capper on this volcano inside her character, and because the source is so genuine (and because we’ve been shown Julia’s mentality and life experience in such rapier-like thrusts), this ear covering is a flourish that feels justified, or earned. We can believe that Julia has had a life-saving epiphany in the last boardroom scenes because Stanwyck has prepared us for its possibility at every opportunity. Total self-knowledge doesn’t destroy Julia, as it does Stella Dallas; it sets her free.
Such a role was even worth being second-billed to the unctuous Allyson, and Stanwyck might have won an Oscar for her performance if she’d allowed herself to be run in the supporting category. Foch got a nomination in that category. She remembered that Stanwyck kept hitting the desk after the Holden confrontation, bruising herself. “She showed off the bruises,” Foch recalled. “It was as if she was proud of the pain.” This is the dark side of Stanwyck, the deep-dyed physical masochist, but it offers an insight into her process and how it relates to her life.
Julia has to pound on that desk until she’s bruised and until the bruises don’t hurt anymore before she can put all of the baggage of her past behind her. Stanwyck was a woman who had battle scars related to events that were completely beyond her control, like the cigarette burns on her chest. But she dedicated her real life, her artistic life, to mastering self-inflicted hurts of her own in order to use them constructively—this time in the service of Julia Tredway’s fall and rise. It’s probably the smallest part she ever played, but it’s also one of the most impressively virtuosic of all her performances.
It’s a shame that Stanwyck was never paired with James Cagney—her male equivalent and then some—when they were both under contract to Warner Bros. in the mid-thirties. Instead, the two most exciting and trailblazing American actors of the time wound up in an end-of-the-line MGM adoption drama, These Wilder Years (1956), a poorly written and directed film that seems determined to act as a tranquilizer on their respective gifts. Between static takes, you can practically hear director Roy Rowland mutter, “Ah, I guess we should cut now, do a new angle on this scene, huh?” and the movie gives Stanwyck little to do but sip coffee from dainty cups and saucers and address envelopes. She’s introduced holding a baby close to her grey curls and soon mentions the man who invented the safety pin. When Cagney offers that the inventor might have been a woman, Stanwyck chirps, “Women never invent anything, except men,” which has to be a contender for the worst line of dialogue she was ever asked to utter.
Stanwyck would have been more at home as an unscrupulous baby broker than as the kind of noble bureaucrat who would never have allowed her to adopt Dion. She tries to keep our attention here by doing clear “beats” in her relentlessly prosaic scenes, sitting down to her kitchen table with a plop of exhaustion, or eating a meal Cagney has prepared with quiet appreciation for the food. And there are a few precious two shots where the stars connect slightly and just riff with each other without any defined goal. Who knows why no one thought to put them in a crime drama instead, playing two tough old birds who turn each other on by their mutual amorality. Or even a musical; these two ex-hoofers delighted their crew with impromptu dances on the set. I’d gladly give up all of These Wilder Years for a documentary short subject on their remembered dance routines.