The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Cry Wolf, The Lady Gambles, The File on Thelma Jordan, No Man of Her Own, The Man with a Cloak, Jeopardy, Witness to Murder, Crime of Passion
Double Indemnity heralded a new era, one where Stanwyck dominated many a shadowy thriller, some of them failures, some of them overlooked gems, and some like The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), which is a qualified success on its own limited terms. The ad campaign for Martha Ivers implores us to only “whisper her name!” If that sounds a little corny, it suits the serpentine, simmering yet often ramshackle movie itself, directed by Lewis Milestone, with a script by Robert Rossen, who later directed Body and Soul (1947) and The Hustler (1961).
Rossen worked his way up writing socially conscious Warner Bros. melodramas, and his tentative leftism sometimes shows up in Martha Ivers, with its schematic view of the greedy rich and the tough working class. The film starts out with an astringent sixteen-minute prologue, set in 1928, that acts as a kind of appetizer to the melodrama feast to come. Janis Wilson, the memorably neurotic little girl from Now, Voyager, plays Martha Ivers as an unhappy teenager longing to get out from under the influence of her aunt, Mrs. Ivers (a sinister Judith Anderson). The girl was born Martha Smith, the daughter of a working-class father and a rich Ivers mother. Mrs. Ivers has had her name legally changed to her mother’s maiden name, but this authoritarian aunt can’t change her niece’s character.
Martha tries to run away with bad boy Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman) during a thunderstorm, and Mr. O’Neil (Roman Bohnen), a schoolteacher ambitious for his son Walter (Mickey Kuhn), makes sure that Martha is caught and brought back to Mrs. Ivers. When Mr. O’Neil says that he wants his boy to go to Harvard, Mrs. Ivers wearily tells him that Walter would probably be happier driving a truck, a touch of 1930s leftism that sounds strange coming from her aristocratic lips. Mrs. Ivers, it seems, owns everything in town (it’s even called Iverstown). After Martha is brought back to her, she slaps the girl and says that the best thing her father ever did for her was to die, whereupon Martha snarls out some hatred.
This is a heavy-spirited movie in which it always seems to be raining, as the characters circle their opponents steadily and slowly like boxers until they rush at each other and go in for the kill. Planning to run away again, Martha loses sight of her pet cat. When she sees Mrs. Ivers beating the animal with her cane, Martha pulls the cane out of her aunt’s hand and bops her lightly on the head. Mrs. Ivers then falls down some stairs, dead. This sequence of events is all quite weirdly shot and put together, like a macabre silent film set to Miklos Rozsa’s hard-driving, ever-percolating score, but it suits the movie’s dreamlike unreality, putting us inside Martha’s head and the way she sees and experiences things.
We jump to 1946 and our first course on the Martha Ivers menu, which involves the grown-up Sam (Van Heflin) and his relations with Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott), a sultry ex-con. Scott is one of those curious ersatz figures of this period who talks like she’s seen a lot of movies and is trying to fit herself in with her hissing, sibilant line readings and curdled, tough-girl smiles and tears, both of which make her squinch up her face beseechingly. She’s 100 percent artificial. Because of her lack of authenticity, she is the embodiment of some late 1940s films, a collection of movie signs that can only be read legibly if you are immersed in the style she’s aping.
Heflin usually didn’t play parts as cocky and lover-boyish as Sam Masterson, and he has a lot of fun here, especially when he’s roughing up the grown-up, alcoholic Walter (Kirk Douglas), who’s now a politico married to Stanwyck’s Martha. This is Douglas’s first movie, and he’s expert at playing Walter’s weakness, but he tends to be hammy and too aware of his own charisma (though he had wanted Heflin’s role, he took to the weakling like a duck to water).
Martha Ivers was made during a set decorators’ strike. Sometimes, in order to go on working, everyone would have to stay at the studio (they couldn’t cross the picket line without the risk of being hurt), and Milestone sided with the strikers, so that some of the film was directed by Byron Haskin. Martha Ivers does have a patchwork quality at times; there are some careless, abrupt cuts here and there, and even some dissolves which seem uncommonly rushed. “Everyone had told me how nice Barbara Stanwyck was,” Douglas wrote in his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, “so I was looking forward to working with her in this hostile environment. The crew adored her. They called her ‘Missy,’ and when she came on the set she went around hugging them, asking about their wives and children by name. She was a professional, she was there, always prepared, an excellent actress. But she was indifferent to me.”
Later on, Stanwyck noticed that Douglas might be an up-and-comer. “I could see it happening,” he wrote, “like the lens of a camera turning into focus. She looked at me, made eye contact for the first time. She said, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good.’ I said, ‘Too late, Miss Stanwyck.’” Off-camera, Stanwyck in this peak period could be as ruthless as the characters she played. At Milestone’s suggestion, Heflin had worked out a complicated maneuver with a coin moving over his knuckles to show that Sam is a professional gambler, and Stanwyck took this in, warily. Then, like Martha, she went in for the kill: “Van, that’s a wonderful piece of business,” she said, “but if you do that during my important lines, I have a bit of business that will draw attention away from yours.” Holding Heflin’s eye, Stanwyck pulled her skirt well above her knees. “Any time you start twirling that coin, I’ll be fixing my garter. So be sure you don’t do that when I have important lines to speak.”
Forewarned, Helfin only does the coin trick once in her presence, when Martha is supposed to be flustered by Sam. Assured of her power, Stanwyck also supervised her own lighting, for she had “her own favorite key light,” at this point. She was now a far cry from the wholly vulnerable girl who let Capra take care of everything for her. The “pro” of Martha Ivers is estimable, of course, but sometimes one longs for the still unformed and open Stanwyck from 1930 to 1934 or so.
Stanwyck’s first scene with Douglas inaugurates the main course of the movie, which starts a half hour into the running time. To counteract, or combat, Douglas’s embroidering style in this scene, Stanwyck holds back and lets him manage everything, keeping a poker face and a ramrod posture (Edith Head costumes Martha in clothes that look suffocating and slightly off-center, with hoods and furs piled on for protection). Then, when she sees her opening, Stanwyck bares down on him, bending slightly at the waist and snapping out, “When did you get drunk, where did you get drunk, why did you get drunk,” in one continuous, punching fashion: BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. When she’s made her impact, this stiff, practical woman seduces him a bit, in Stanwyck’s lightest, most distracted seduction mode; Martha knows that she doesn’t have to expend too much energy keeping Walter in line. They’re joined together by guilt: Walter’s father, Mr. O’Neil, had them send an innocent man to the gallows for the murder of Martha’s aunt, and when they learn that Sam is back in town, they worry that he’s there to blackmail them.
Far too much time is spent on Scott’s Toni, who looks less like she got out of the jug and more like she just came from the beauty parlor. And Stanwyck seems to sense that this isn’t a particularly serious movie, so she mainly takes it easy and doesn’t do any of the character work that might spoil the overall atmosphere of unreality. She sets off one tiny flare behind her eyes when Sam tells Martha that he doesn’t really know her, and instead of the all-encompassing moment of recognition Stanwyck achieves in her heavy-hitter roles, she shows Martha thinking, “I hardly know myself.” In her confrontation scene with Heflin, where Martha talks about killing her aunt and then realizes that Sam didn’t see her do it, she makes her eyes shine like a wild animal as she comes at him with a burning branch. Stanwyck stays well within the parameters of her role throughout, using just enough of her talent to make us believe in Martha without overselling the part, which could have been disastrous. She’s playing here for entertainment rather than acting out the reality of Capra or Ford or Vidor or Sturges.
In another slow-burning scene with Douglas, this time with Heflin standing between them as referee, Stanwyck excitingly chooses to shout him down and then pound on a desk and cry, “Then let go!” in a high-pitched voice. This action shuts everybody up for a moment. Walter at one point calls Martha “a little girl in a cage, waiting for someone to let her out,” and the same could be said for Stanwyck the actress, who is only unleashed briefly at the end. Walter has fallen down the stairs (at least Milestone doesn’t have another thunderstorm roaring in the background), and Martha encircles Sam with her spider-like arms. “Now, Sam, do it now,” Martha urges, in Stanwyck’s airy purr. “Set me free, set both of us free.” She switches to a harsher tone: “He fell down the stairs and fractured his skull, everybody knows what a heavy drinker he was!” Then she goes back to purring, “Oh, Sam, it can be so easy ….”
Rozsa’s score works itself into a fine frenzy as Sam walks down the stairs, and then the camera holds Martha in a close-up as she waits for him to kill Walter, her glistening lips open suggestively in anticipation of the crime. But her face falls in disappointment when she realizes that he won’t do what she wants. “Your whole life has been a dream, Martha,” Sam says. The best parts of Martha Ivers emphasize the dreamlike quality of the title character’s mind, which Stanwyck physicalizes whenever she has the chance. She pulls a gun on Sam, but she can’t shoot him; when he leaves, Walter holds the gun to her waist, and she pulls the trigger for him. “Ivers, Ivers,” rings out a male voice on the soundtrack, and Martha murmurs, “No … no … Martha Smith.” According to Rossen, Martha probably would have been happier driving a truck, or married to a truck driver. This isn’t a movie or performance that can stand too much scrutiny, but both have their moments.
The same cannot be said for The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), a dreadful adaptation of a derivative stage chiller, non-directed by Peter Godfrey. Stanwyck was such good friends with Godfrey off-screen that she even helped bring up his three daughters when he and his wife passed away, so she may have been blind to his faults; his Christmas in Connecticut is often poor, but Carrolls reaches a whole new level of miscalculation and incompetence. It suffers from a precocious child (Ann Carter) who keeps spouting “adult-sounding” dialogue at a lugubrious pace, from Franz Waxman overdoing his stormy score, from Nigel Bruce overdoing his drunk friend, and from Humphrey Bogart embarrassing himself as a lunatic painter, widening his eyes amateurishly whenever he feels a crazy spell coming on. As his wife, Stanwyck is incongruously chipper in her first scenes, as if she thinks she can save some of this mess by being “starry.” But she’s also lazy here; when Alexis Smith starts coming on to her husband, it’s hard to tell, at first, whether Stanwyck’s character is amused by Smith’s man-eating or just oblivious, or both. And later on Stanwyck gives some of her lines a distracted, stilted reading (you can’t blame her if her mind is on something else, for she often seems to have wandered onto the wrong set and behaves as if she doesn’t want to be noticed).
Bogart keeps trying to do her in with some poisoned milk, à la Suspicion (1941); he even offers some milk to the cops who lead him away, an insultingly obvious curtain line. It smells like a stinker from the start and only gets worse, and it’s a crime that Stanwyck and Bogart couldn’t have collaborated on something more appropriate. She would have made an ideal Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941), though it’s hard to begrudge Mary Astor one of her best roles.
Compared to the travesty of Carrolls, Stanwyck’s third and thankfully last picture with Godfrey, Cry Wolf (1947), at least gives her something to do. As a woman trying to find out the secrets of an old dark house presided over by a seemingly bored or hung over Errol Flynn, Stanwyck rides horses, runs down dark hallways, makes use of a dumbwaiter to enter a secret laboratory, and skitters around on rooftops. There’s an effective scare or two, but the movie is mired in exposition and that deadly Godfrey pacing.
In the immediate post-Code era, Stanwyck was a noble gambling lady, but in the lost weekend of the late forties, in The Lady Gambles (1949), she was asked to offer a case study in addiction. She does so admirably, even daringly, all along the way, until the script descends into textbook psychobabble (director Michael Gordon said that Stanwyck hesitated about accepting this role and needed a bit of persuasion to take it, for she had just run the histrionic gauntlet of Sorry, Wrong Number [1948]). When we first see her Joan, she’s a blondish woman blowing on some dice in a dark alley, deep in noir land. The men she’s with soon scatter, and two other men beat her up, pretty violently. We see her wheeled into a hospital on a gurney, passed out, her face bruised, as her husband David (Robert Preston) tries to keep her out of jail by telling her story to an indifferent doctor.
Flashback to Las Vegas, where Joan enters a casino looking all fresh and dewy-eyed, her clothes neat and housewife-cute. Stanwyck pitches her voice slightly higher than usual to portray this gullible, open woman, almost stretching her wide range to the breaking point in these first scenes. But Stanwyck really starts to cook when Joan first catches gambling fever, embracing the illicit, clearly sexual thrill she gets from rolling those dice. When she asks a big-time club manager (Stephen McNally) for more money, Joan looks spent, out of breath and scared, like she’s just been through a disaster. When she gets upset about his initial refusal, Stanwyck is desperate in the shamed way of a repressed, bourgeois woman. This is knife-edge, exacting work, always specific to the person she is playing.
The miracle actress who needed Capra’s protection in order to give her all on the first take had developed a formidable technique over the years. In a scene where Joan tries to get money from a pawnbroker, Stanwyck went even further with her character’s outraged gentility and sense of shame, and she did so under trying conditions. Gordon said, “Houseley Stevenson, who played the pawnbroker, was getting along in years and had difficulty remembering his lines. Because the scene was so emotionally draining for Barbara—there were no fake tears in her performance—after several takes I reconciled myself to settling for a less than satisfactory performance on the old man’s part rather than ask her to keep repeating the scene. But Barbara insisted on my staying with it until she knew I felt we’d gotten it right. The wear and tear on her nervous system that day was considerable—but that’s the way Barbara worked.” If you’re going to shoot for being “the best of all,” you must have flexibility and discipline. Stanwyck dug ever deeper into the reservoir of her emotions until it seemed, at times, that the rage and pleasure and agony she needed had no limit.
How did she learn to do this? In a bind like this pawnshop scene, when she had to keep repeating herself, Stanwyck may have used her own version of sense memories. When actors are dry and need a boost, they often have go-to images, thoughts, and visions from the past that can instantly call up what they need. Some of these spurs and triggers have a short shelf life, but the deepest of them can last for an entire career. What, I wonder, was Stanwyck using to come up with the scenes of Joan at the gambling tables, where she sweats and pants like an animal, her tongue sometimes sliding out of her mouth, followed by the “morning after” bliss when she wakes up in the afternoon? Stanwyck makes it crystal clear, and then some, that gambling is sexually stimulating for passionate Joan, so that there’s no doubt that she isn’t being satisfied by her husband (and Robert Taylor definitely wasn’t satisfying Stanwyck at the time, if he ever had). Eying McNally’s Corrigan, who exploits her needs, Joan says that gambling is “noisy and confusing and … just a little dirty”—and she doesn’t mean the dirt that can be wiped away with a homemaker’s dishrag.
Yet The Lady Gambles cannot bring itself to put the blame on Joan’s good-hearted, dull husband and insists on introducing a red herring, Joan’s older sister Ruth (Edith Barrett), a possessive sort who, like Stanwyck’s sister Millie Stevens, raised Joan as her own child after their mother died. Bemoaning her spinsterhood, Ruth cries, “I should have put you in a home!” Stanwyck looks alarmed at this exclamation; her own sister did indeed put her in a home, several homes, in fact—most of them bad. Maybe this is part of the reason Stanwyck hesitated about taking this role, for these first scenes with her on-screen sister hit so close to home that they carry a nagging, unresolved tension.
Joan tries to reform, but she’s soon gambling again. At this point, Stanwyck comes back from the tables looking like she’s drunk, but in the best possible way, hyper-aware and liberated. It’s scenes like this that make me wish we could liberate Stanwyck from this well-meaning but somewhat sterile movie and install her into something like Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels (1963), where platinum blond Jeanne Moreau makes a religion of roulette and offers it to us like a vision of paradise.
Joan looks like a startled little girl when David catches her gambling again, then sinks down into a chair like a ruined middle-aged woman (it’s often extreme age transitions like this that separate the great actors from the merely good ones). She goes back to pimp-daddy Corrigan with childlike misgiving on her face—this is a movie that suggests a lot, but never follows through on its promises. Joan winds up in a low dive, with blond hair, dancing and rolling customers for money. When a low-life forces her to blow on his dice, Stanwyck makes this moment look deeply humiliating, as if Joan is being forced to give head.
In the last scenes, set in the hospital, Ruth is set up as the villain, but Stanwyck and Barrett (who’s quite good) play against the script, so that when Ruth tells Joan that she killed their mother, it seems like there’s a deeper trauma at play. In a few moments here, as David tries to comfort Joan, Stanwyck transcends her material and hits a deep well of fear and remorse that feels bruisingly personal. This performance is the opposite of her Megan Davis in General Yen: too Method, too Lee Strasberg, too much. The doctor uses laughable reverse psychology to talk Joan out of jumping off a ledge, and the film ends with Joan and David looking out at a new day and a new beginning. But Stanwyck has shown us too much hurt and nervy excitement to make us believe that this woman will ever go back to being a housewife.
When the American Film Institute gave Stanwyck its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987, Walter Matthau remembered her in The File on Thelma Jordan (1950, also known as Thelma Jordan), particularly the way she sighed, “Maybe I am just a dame and didn’t know it.” Matthau then went on to knock her co-star, Wendell Corey, an unprepossessing actor who was good when he was doing a menacing type in Budd Boetticher’s The Killer is Loose (1956), but who was hard-pressed to hold his own as a leading man opposite Stanwyck. Thelma Jordan has a fine director in Robert Siodmak, a past master of film noirs like The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1948), and he brings a solemn, German expressionist look to the first scenes of Jordan, where Corey’s assistant DA Cleve Marshall staggers into his office, drunk, trying to avoid a dinner with his wife and hated father-in-law. “Fed up,” he says to his co-worker. “You ever heard that phrase? No, you wouldn’t, you’re not married.”
Siodmak frames a long hallway behind Cleve, and he does the same thing in Cleve’s house, where Cleve’s slightly whiny wife nags at him over the phone. The director is trying to set up the same sense of gentle disillusionment he found in Charles Laughton in The Suspect (1945) and in George Sanders in Uncle Harry (1945). But Siodmak is defeated by Corey’s limitations and also by the extremely wordy script by Ketti Frings, which always goes out of its way to dissipate any momentum with tangents and unnecessary exposition.
Still, Siodmak works up to a fine entrance for Stanwyck’s Thelma, who is revealed in a slight shock cut near the office door, breaking into Cleve’s dreamy inebriation with her direct look, her white Edith Head dress and gleaming gold necklace, and her somewhat ritzy manner (lots of British “a’s” in these first scenes). Cleve and Thelma get to know each other at length, and as their scenes plod along, it’s hard not to wish someone like Dana Andrews were playing Corey’s role, someone with some charisma and presence. Andrews could have kept Thelma Jordan from descending into the doldrums, as it often does during its first half hour or so.
We get lots of chatty dates between Thelma and Cleve, yet the screenplay barely establishes Thelma’s rich aunt (Gertrude Hoffman) before having her shot off-screen. The narrative is more interested in “whodunit” than character, and Stanwyck puts the brakes on, merely walking us through Thelma’s back-story, which involved being a hostess at a gambling house and dreams of becoming an actress, both of which sound promising but get little follow-through. When Thelma and Cleve run around the scene of the crime, things start to get unintentionally comic because they keep panicking. “Touch the safe!” he tells her. “Wait, what about the window?” she asks. “I left a note!” she remembers. They wipe fingerprints off things, put new fingerprints on other things, turn the corpse over, and so on. Stanwyck’s “fear” feels lazy, or at least unconvincing—which might be the point, but couldn’t Thelma show some acting talent?
Siodmak told an unsettling story about working with Stanwyck on this film. “Barbara always had the character completely worked out,” he said. “Before we started shooting, she would be sitting in her chair, her eyes closed and her concentration on the scene she was to play.” This sounds like her, but then he added: “One day, before a very difficult scene, I tried to give her some last minute advice. That was the only time she showed any temper. She brushed me impatiently aside. I didn’t mind, for I was sure she knew what she wanted to do.” Judging from her rote work in Thelma Jordan, it’s a shame that Stanwyck gave Siodmak the brush-off. He was often an exceptional director of actors, and he could have helped her deepen parts of this character that needed deepening, especially the sense that Thelma is a frustrated actress, which never really comes through in Stanwyck’s performance. You’d think it would be catnip to her as a performer who, at her best, was always aware of the levels of role-playing everyone engages in.
Things improve slightly when we get to court, where Thelma is tried for murder, even if there are unwelcome echoes of Remember the Night, a far superior film, as Cleve deliberately throws the case out of love for his mistress. When Cleve shows Thelma a photo from her gambling girl past, we see Stanwyck in a blond wig, usually a scary sight, but here it looks so fake that this photo reveal gets another unwanted laugh. There’s a good scene with Thelma’s crooked lawyer (Stanley Ridges), where he details his crookedness from the shadows; this is the only point where Stanwyck seems genuinely engaged in the film. The climax gives her a nasty bit of business with a cigarette lighter in a car, and then a tearful bedside confession where she talks about her good/bad nature and wonders, “You don’t suppose they could just let half of me die?” before expiring. We are left to wonder what Stanwyck might have accomplished with Siodmak if she had been more open to him and if Frings’s script had been more concise.
As it is, Thelma Jordan is the kind of movie that can be viewed several times without any memory of past viewings. Perhaps Stanwyck was suffering from noir fatigue: “My God, isn’t there a good comedy around?” she asked at the time. “I’m tired of suffering in films. And I’ve killed so many co-stars lately, I’m getting a power complex!” Screwball comedy with feelings, for Preston Sturges, had been much more agreeable to her than noir and its restrictions, but she never did get another comedy role (it’s a shame she didn’t work for Hawks again in the early fifties, or for Blake Edwards in the early sixties).
Stanwyck had much more enthusiasm for No Man of Her Own (1950), which reunited her with Mitchell Leisen. Director Leisen, who got such exceptional work from her in Remember the Night, gave her a book he was interested in called I Married a Dead Manby Cornell Woolrich (written under the pseudonym William Irish). She was so taken with its morbid plot that she insisted to Paramount that it be her next picture for them. Woolrich stories have been made into many fine films, most notably Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). This Hitchcock-type material is sometimes not in Leisen’s comfort zone, yet he manages to personalize a lot of it (Woolrich was gay, as Leisen was, and there’s a sensibility at work here that makes their outsider status plain).
The opening scenes, which were written by Catherine Turney, are inventively done: Leisen begins with an image of an idyllic suburban street, as Stanwyck starts to talk to us on the soundtrack: “The summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield. They smell of heliotrope and jasmine, honeysuckle and clover.” She pitches her voice higher here, which suits the woman she’s playing, Helen Ferguson (the same name as that of Stanwyck’s longtime publicist and special friend, a former actress who sometimes lived with Stanwyck and protected her from the press).
Helen urgently describes the hush of the evenings, the stillness in a place like this. “The summer nights are pleasant in Caulfield,” she says, “But not for us. Not for us.” She will repeat this “not for us” mantra again. It refers specifically to her and her boyfriend Bill (John Lund) as they ponder what to do about an inconvenient murder. But in Stanwyck’s reading the line also speaks to the outcasts of this world, the people who aren’t welcome in homes like this, the Lee Leanders, the Mitchell Leisens, the Cornell Woolrichs—and the Barbara Stanwycks, of course. She was as secure as she’d ever be in Hollywood in 1950, and as socially accepted. She was politically conservative, so she had no fear of the blacklist of that time. But some worldly people can only go so far in their pursuit of a happiness that stems from a feeling of unthinking security, and her Helen Ferguson discovers as much—just as Lee did, and just as Stanwyck did.
Leisen takes you inside a large, comfy house, and Helen talks about the cleanness inside (“the smell of wax,” Stanwyck emphasizes, so forcefully that you begin to smell it). We see Helen sitting across from Bill with a blond-headed baby boy in her lap. The couple seems to be at the end of an argument, locked in stalemate. “This is a thing apart,” says Helen, “this is murder.” She goes upstairs to put the baby to bed, and Leisen darkens his frame so that we can only see Stanwyck’s eyes glowing from the shadows. Helen’s voice continues on the track, leading us into a flashback. She says she was desperate, and we see her in a phone booth, down to just a few pieces of change, pregnant and stranded in New York.
In this flashback, Stanwyck makes her face into a stony mask with a shining forehead; she wears little or no make-up. We see Helen dragging her pregnant bulk up some stairs, and then she begins to cry desperately at a closed door. We see her betrayer, Stephen (Lyle Bettger), and his new woman, a blond (Carole Mathews). Helen has begged there before, for she has nowhere else to go, and Stephen slips some money into an envelope and slides it under the door to her. Helen opens the envelope and pulls out a train ticket to San Francisco. She thinks for a moment and finally accepts the situation with Stanwyck’s familiar stoicism, grown a bit grim with time. Leisen shows us Helen lumbering back down the stairs of the rooming house, then pulls back so that we see the money left on the landing. She still has some pride, it seems.
Leisen and Stanwyck create an intense mood of static despair in this first flashback sequence, and they keep to this mood when Helen gets on her train. She’s seated in an uncomfortable position and looks old and tired until Hugh Harkness (Richard Denning) offers her his more spacious seat. Responding to his offer, her face seems to grow years younger, so that she seems like a grateful little girl: Ruby Stevens at twelve or thirteen, surprised by some bit of random kindness. When Hugh’s wife Patrice (Phyllis Thaxter), who is also pregnant, asks about Helen’s husband and finds out that there is no husband, she’s embarrassed. “Funny, you never think, do you?” Patrice asks, so polite, so cheerful, so unmarked by life. “No, you never do,” Helen murmurs, in a way that takes in her own foolishness and Patrice’s radically different ignorance, seeming to measure the enormous distance between the two and then melding the women together so that they can somehow share the same small space. It’s as all encompassing a line reading as her, “That’s it, we’re smart,” from Leisen’s Remember the Night, only much more beaten down and resigned. Lee Leander is still young enough to wonder at life, but Helen Ferguson is old enough that she has to do the hard work of continuing to exist, even though her existence has been given over to sordid repetitions that she can no longer truly learn from.
In the ladies’ room, Patrice comes out with hearty American bromides like, “Don’t let anybody tell you that Europe is cheap,” and she insists that Helen try on her wedding ring. There’s a real ambivalence in these scenes: Leisen is alert enough to how grating Patrice can be, but he also sees how her basic kindness is something that everyone longs for, the kind of kindness that leads a man to not only give up his more comfortable seat to a pregnant woman, but also try to be friendly with her because she so obviously needs a friend. It’s a more complex attitude, finally, than the Leisen/Sturges representation of the perfect family in Remember the Night, even though it doesn’t last for long. We can intuit Leisen’s ultimate feeling about this all-American couple, these non-outcasts, by the gleeful, abrupt way with which he dispatches them. Trying on Patrice’s wedding ring, Helen looks into a mirror, and no sooner has Patrice insisted, “I couldn’t have bad luck,” than the mirror shatters (upsettingly, given the consistent relationship on screen between Stanwyck and her mirrors), and the train flips all the way over.
The restroom set where Stanwyck played this scene with Thaxter was built inside a steel wheel. Leisen suspended a camera from a catwalk, and when the train was supposed to be hit, he rotated the wheel all the way around with both actresses inside doing their own stunts. The effect is unnervingly realistic in its violence. Helen is taken from the wreck on a stretcher, which leads to a shot from her perspective looking at a ceiling as doctors cut off her coat and save her baby through caesarian section. When she wakes up, Helen is suffering from a concussion, which Stanwyck suggests by making the emotions behind her eyes seem liquid, unmoored to her mind. Leisen gives nearly Capra-esque attention to Stanwyck’s plain, intensely girlish face in the hospital bed. After Helen realizes they’ve mistaken her for the dead Patrice, she tries to tell them the truth, but she’s too ill and upset to do so. Stanwyck allows herself to be extremely vulnerable in these scenes, and Leisen is sensitive to every small shift in her expression.
Going to meet Hugh’s well-off parents, Helen says, “It isn’t too late, I can still back out!” several times in voiceover to the rhythm of the train’s wheels on the track. Just as she spoke to us so tantalizingly after the opening credits, Helen’s voice reappears every so often to tell us her thoughts. This is an interior sort of cinema, and it’s saved from gimmickry because its experimental nature isn’t stressed. Stanwyck’s voice isn’t exactly in sync with the train wheels—as it would be, say, in a Rouben Mamoulian movie from the early 1930s. It’s enough here to suggest a correlation between things like outside sounds and inside worries.
Helen is met at the station by Hugh’s mother, played by the stage star Jane Cowl (whose popularity in the twenties meant that Ruby Stevens became Barbara Stanwyck instead of Jane Stanwyck, according to the former Miss Stevens herself). Given that this is a Leisen movie, Helen’s baby boy is soon placed on a plush satin pillow. It must be said that when the plot starts to get more contrived and improbable, the director seems to retreat into his own distinctive set design and lighting, which—because this is a melodrama with a noir patina—is much darker than usual.
Helen keeps making mistakes, of course; she’s never sensible enough just to say as little as possible to Hugh’s family (but maybe her concussion hasn’t worn off yet). Helen is “passing” in these scenes, as Leisen and Woolrich had to, as Stella Dallas tried to. Helen Ferguson, living a lie! (Whatever the truth of the lesbian rumors about Stanwyck and her publicist, Helen Ferguson, who could be very motherly and controlling with her best client, Leisen may have had a private laugh over this character name). Everything up to the train wreck and hospital stay is effectively dreamy, but in this perfect house where Helen is passing, and where family members sit around the piano just as they do in Remember the Night, things start to get sleepy rather than dreamy. A part of the problem here is Lund, one of those movie actors from this period who seems to have been employed precisely because of his stolidity and lack of charisma. He’s playing a man whose motivations throughout are a mystery, and Lund can do nothing to enlighten you.
Helen gets a threatening telegram. Of course, Stanwyck has to read it to us again on the soundtrack after we’ve read it ourselves, but it’s more dramatic when she reads it, so we can forgive the reiteration. The unsavory Stephen turns up to blackmail Helen, and Stanwyck has little to do but look worried. (Leisen shot a scene where Stephen slaps her around, and Stanwyck insisted on Bettger actually hitting her, naturally. But this scene was cut, probably because it was too rough, and so we’re missing perhaps a key example of Stanwyck’s masochistic “hurt me when I tell you to” streak). Stephen forces Helen to marry him (she’s set to inherit money). Stanwyck gets a bright idea as she hears the section about “til death do us part” in the marriage vows; you can almost see a thought balloon that says, “I know, I’ll kill him!” at this moment. Stanwyck milks the moment as if she’s decided to play this one scene comedically—if they weren’t going to give her comedies anymore, she’d just have to make her own opportunities. This wild choice punctuates the overly languorous mood of the film quite nicely.
Helen goes to kill Stephen. He’s already dead, it seems, but she fires the gun anyway and then gets the weirdly loyal Bill to dump Stephen’s body off a bridge. This is another shot, like the train crash, where Leisen surprises us by not cutting away when we expect him to; he lets us see the corpse as it flops over in the air on its way down. “God forgive me,” Helen whispers, finally, and Leisen lets her off the hook with an ending in line with the blonds equal danger theme running through Stanwyck’s career. Like many of her movies of this period, No Man of Her Own is uneven, but it deserves a lot more exposure and comment than it has received.
Actor Joe DeSantis remembered that there was much tension and “personal unhappiness” on the set of The Man with a Cloak (1951), an atmospheric period thriller shot right after the ordeal and humiliation of Stanwyck’s divorce from Taylor. It begins promisingly, with David Raksin’s ominous score under the credits and some tense low angle shots of 1848 New York, where the saturnine Dupin (Joseph Cotton) observes the arrival of gamine Madeline (Leslie Caron), a French girl who has come to win some money for her fiancée from his reprobate grandfather Thevenet (Louis Calhern). Stanwyck makes her star entrance walking down some stairs in the Thevenet household, her face a mask with little glimmers of contempt burning away underneath, her voice precise and false. She plays Lorna Bounty, a once-celebrated stage actress reduced to keeping house. Lorna is a schemer, almost a Mrs. Danvers type, a stone butch eying young Madeline’s Paris lingerie with Sapphic bemusement. Stanwyck parcels out some of her behavioral modes here like individually wrapped gifts, then pulls back into a steady, watchful look.
Recalling her work on this film, Caron remembers the star as a steely pro who tried to deliver the goods on the first take. “Barbara Stanwyck was very steady and always ready with her lines,” Caron says. “She was sure of herself and acted with conviction. She had chosen her interpretation and stuck to it—I don’t think she ever needed more than one take or two. The second take might have been for the soundman or the camera operator, but rarely for her. Of all the actors I’ve worked with she was probably the one who had the least nerves. She was immensely disciplined.”
At times in this film, there’s almost a feeling of a pretentious Albert Lewin movie, but The Man with a Cloak is really only interested in being a mystery story with an inane twist at the end, one which reveals Dupin’s future identity as a famous writer (an increasingly bored Cotton gives no indication whatever that he might be playing the author of “Annabel Lee”). In its first half hour, the movie has a chamber music quality that is not uninteresting, and Stanwyck’s own sorrow on set deepens some of her effects while making others muddier; when she sizes up Dupin, this familiar Stanwyck action is opaque and unreadable. Fletcher Markle, the director, reported that Stanwyck rejected a change that would have made her sinister character more sympathetic, clinging to the integrity of her original conception.
There are some exchanges here where all Stanwyck plays is, “I’m a cool customer.” But this choice pays off in a scene toward the end (which must be the one Markle was referring to) where Lorna explains herself a bit and tells some of her sad history in a way that’s so crisp and good-humored that it becomes briefly exciting, delivering a small frisson of “the past can’t hurt me” that might have given Stanwyck herself some relief from her own suffering. A scuffle between Dupin and DeSantis’s butler at the climax verges on slapstick, but there are moments of value in this picture.
Jeopardy (1953) was originally a twenty-two minute radio play, and it was expanded enough to make a sixty-nine minute feature, directed for no-frills action and impact by the reliable John Sturges. “Traveling the United States is wonderful,” says Stanwyck, in a voiceover at the beginning, and she goes on to extol the highways and then Tijuana as a travel destination. There’s a faint air of condescension in this narration, but to the film’s credit, it’s this same condescension that will get Stanwyck’s character into a jam. She plays Helen, a happy wife and mother of a small boy, for the first pedestrian fifteen minutes or so, but once her husband (Barry Sullivan) gets caught under some pilings from a rotting peer, Sturges and Stanwyck leap into action.
In a few hours, the tide will be coming in and the husband will be drowned. It’s been established that this woman doesn’t react well in emergencies. When she tries to ask for help from some Mexican locals, she mispronounces the Spanish word for rope, which her husband had told her; the locals want to assist her, but they can’t understand what she’s saying. Arriving at a rest stop, Helen runs around a bit (Stanwyck is compellingly panic-stricken) and finally finds some rope. She turns, and as she does so, Sturges frames a hulking man (Ralph Meeker) behind her. Helen runs to him—she sees that he’s an American and blindly trusts him, but he turns out to be Lawson, a killer on the run.
Sexy/scary Meeker gives the film a boost of energy. He gets a rise out of Stanwyck, trading slaps with her in his car and leering at her until she realizes that the only way she can save her husband is if she can seduce Lawson. Helen wonders aloud if “every wife” wonders what she would do in a situation like this, a query she repeats at the end of the movie. Earlier, looking out at their deserted vacation spot, she had said, “I hated that jetty the minute I saw it.” These lines reek of bad radio drama—and that isn’t the only problem here.
When this woman starts lighting her cigarettes and staring down the convict next to her, Stanwyck loses whatever character she was playing and substitutes one of the strongest aspects of her mature star persona, the Tough Broad Who’s Seen It All. This persona doesn’t remotely gibe with the weak-willed woman we’ve seen up to this point; in fact, the gap between where she starts and where she ends is so great that it winds up being rather funny, while also confirming just how large Stanwyck’s range was. So she got tired of playing this mousy ‘50s wife; who can blame her? “Savin’ your kisses for your husband?” snarls Meeker, as he takes Stanwyck roughly in his arms. Helen puts out for this guy, but we get no sense of what she really feels about this capitulation and what it costs her. The last scene features two unlikely changes of heart for both Helen and Lawson, so that the only thing left to do is admire how Sturges puts over the suspense mechanics of this skimpy drama.
There are several pluses attached to another skimpy movie of this time, Witness to Murder (1954), an independent production by screenwriter Chester Erskine for United Artists. The biggest plus is George Sand-ers’s hilarious villain, Albert Richter, an ex-Nazi still spreading fascist propaganda in post-war Los Angeles. In the peremptory opener, Stanwyck’s interior decorator, Cheryl, awakens from a restless sleep, goes to her window and gives a start. In a reverse shot, we see Richter across the way strangling a blond, ringing her neck until she falls down dead. Erskine’s name then appears over the murder window, and his name has pride of place in the end credits, too; he’s listed before director Roy Rowland, who stages the various scenes set in offices very lazily, having the actors just line up in front of desks to spout their boilerplate lines.
If anyone, aside from Sanders, deserves some credit here it’s cinema-tographer John Alton, who expertly frames the shadows in the opening scenes as Richter tries to hide the body, then startles the eye with a bright shot through a chandelier when the police, headed by Lawrence Mathews (Gary Merrill), come to investigate Cheryl’s story. “Writer, huh?” asks Lawrence, when he spies one of Richter’s books. “That’s one crime of which I am guilty,” Richter replies (Sanders gives him a hoot-worthy little shiver of false modesty).
“A mash of Nietzsche and Hegel,” says Lawrence of Richter’s work after having him investigated. When this villain’s true colors come out toward the end, his ideas sound like a mish-mash of something, but of what I can’t be too sure. Alton lights Sanders satanically as Richter confronts Cheryl in her home, and the naughty actor actually widens his eyes with bloodlust before going into a paroxysm of shouted German (you really do have to see this to believe it). He then grabs Cheryl up in his arms and natters on about how there is hate in love, or love in hate, until she struggles free and runs shrieking for the door.
Stanwyck does a lot of shrieking and running for the door in this picture, and she doesn’t get to have even a fraction of the fun that Sanders is having. Cheryl is so weak-minded that Richter easily railroads her into a stay in the bughouse, where she encounters a fearsome Juanita Moore, nursing slashed wrists and a broken heart, and an exhibitionist blond played by Claire Carleton, who can’t remember taking her clothes off in the street. Even these cameo players are given more to chew on than Stanwyck, whose character foolishly runs away one more time so that we can have a climax atop a half-finished skyscraper. Her docility with an insulting asylum doctor is particularly hard to take, even if Cheryl is trying to please him to get away from the scene-stealing lady crazies. This is a woman who needs to put on her white gloves before rushing out to find clues about her tormenter, and Stanwyck looks like she knows what a simp she’s playing.
Crime of Passion (1957), a confused but often intriguing crime thriller, comes toward the end of Stanwyck’s starring career in movies, and she seems rather burned-out in it—even if there are still some smoldering embers looking for a place to rest and singe us. Her face looks much heavier than usual, even swollen, and when she goes into one of her trademark hysterical tirades, it seems like she’s just switching on a faucet and letting the water splash wherever it will.
We first see her character, Kathy Ferguson, reading over some mail. She’s a newspaper writer who specializes in advice to the lovelorn. “There’s gotta be some happy people left in San Francisco,” says her flunky, also reading her mail. To which she croaks, “Not if I can help it.” He reads her a letter from “Foolish 17,” who is in love with a married man; what should she do? “Forget the man, run away with the wife,” says Kathy boldly, setting up the next few scenes, where this Stanwyck woman is as close to a lesbian character as she gets before Walk on the Wild Side (1962).
Her last name is Ferguson, of course, the last name of Stanwyck’s publicist den mother, Helen, so that it seems like scriptwriter Joe Eisinger might even be coding this role and throwing a bone to Stanwyck’s Sapphic fans. When Kathy gets involved with a murder case (a husband killed by his wife), she comes up against the sexism of policeman Alidos (Royal Dano), who bluntly tells her, “Your work should be raising a family, having dinner ready for your husband when he gets home.” Kathy reacts dreamily and uncertainly to this chauvinist junk, but she still manages to get back at the cop by obtaining the address of the murderous wife, and then withholding the information from Alidos. We expect a little more feistiness from Kathy in these early scenes, but Stanwyck needs to prepare us for what’s coming, so she walks a shaky line between satisfaction and skittishness (in the newsroom, director Gerd Oswald gives her several close-ups to register her distracted unrest with the boss at her paper, who runs articles twice because he thinks no readers will care).
Oswald then delivers a montage of women reading Kathy’s column. We see a wife in bed, staring unhappily at her sleeping husband in the twin bed next to her, followed by an image of two girls cuddled up together blissing-out over Kathy’s woman-on-woman copy: “Where can we turn, except to the heart and understanding of another woman?” Where indeed? Two B-girls at a bar commiserate over Kathy’s newspaper come-ons, and two extremely butch female cabbies nod their heads over it, as if Oswald is about to stage a lesbian revolution.
No such luck, of course, but at least the film includes such options in its opening half hour. When cop Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) talks to Kathy over dinner about the virtues of a home and family for a woman, Kathy quite rightly shuts him up by saying, “Propaganda, not for me.” Oswald then gives Stanwyck a lingering close-up, as Kathy talks about wanting to go to sea (just as Lee Leander did in Remember the Night). In this scene, where she looks so sad, so heavy with sorrow and marking time, Stanwyck gets across an entirely new and very painful sense of nihilism and foggy hopelessness, a far too strong and upsetting emotional coloration for the larval narrative that follows.
Kathy marries Bill, for reasons that seem purely self-destructive, and then she tries to adapt to being a housewife. She says that she wants to be “a good wife,” as if the repressive mores of the time have finally gone to her head, and she’s grabbing at them like a drowning woman grabbing at a lifejacket. Maybe she’s gone a little crazy; how else to explain a Stanwyck character who says, even in the late fifties, that she wants nothing more than to darn a man’s socks?
Right away, Kathy is completely lost in Bill’s working-class milieu. The women chatter inanely about their TV sets, while the men talk about salary hikes. The worldly Kathy is knocked like a pinball between two opposing hells, not at all right with the women and not accepted by the men. Neither group is worth trying for, but Kathy’s identity crisis has her gravitating naturally to men—even unworthy men—over women. Is Kathy a completely repressed, never-active lesbian? And could Stanwyck identify with that uncomfortable state?
Crime of Passion raises all kinds of questions like this, but it can’t begin to answer them; to do so would have been impossible in 1957. So why does Oswald set up those obviously lesbian cabbies as a kind of visual alternative for Kathy? In the pre-Code Ladies They Talk About, the film sets up the presence of a butch lesbian who likes to wrestle and Stanwyck’s layered, almost impressed reaction to her. These characters and her relation to them set Stanwyck up as a lesbian icon; it doesn’t matter if she never did anything sexually with a woman off-screen. On-screen, especially as she got older and her voice lower, Stanwyck could sometimes throw subliminal, perhaps subconscious hints out to the girls. To be a great actor and a great star, you need androgyny—not too much, but just enough to keep everyone on their toes.
Another montage shows how the vapid talk surrounding Bill’s friends and their wives makes Kathy sick, and Crime of Passion begins to seem like a feminist nightmare, short on sense and rhetoric, but long on suggestions of despairing mood and feeling. Kathy rails against the “mediocrity” she sees around her, and it’s easy to feel that this is Stanwyck herself passionately condemning a conformist culture that is about to put her out to pasture on television—that little box that all the dull housewives here chat about. But when Kathy starts to scheme and wheedle to get Bill promoted, it becomes an open question whether she is “unnatural,” in this film’s terms, because of her drive and her need to work, or if the sexist society she lives in is entirely to blame.
The film wants to have it both ways, so that most audiences in 1957 could see Kathy as just a misfit, yet when we see this film now, it’s impossible not to think she’s being driven crazy by a sick, unfair society. What is Kathy’s damage? We never really learn, and when she tangles with Raymond Burr’s police bigwig, this encounter further muddies the waters. He lays Kathy (which is almost laughably unconvincing, given their lack of chemistry), and then says he’s going to give a good job not to Bill but to the odious Alidos, who started this whole mess with his sexist challenge. It all ends in murder, of course, and the incarceration of a woman who would have been far happier meeting up with, say, Agnes Moorehead or Jan Sterling at a bar and setting up house afterward.