Annie Oakley, Union Pacific, California, The Furies, The Moonlighter, Blowing Wild, Cattle Queen of Montana, The Violent Men, Escape to Burma, The Maverick Queen, Trooper Hook, Forty Guns
When asked about the western, which was probably her favorite genre, Stanwyck sighed happily, “Oh, I love to do them. I just love to do them.” She owned ranches for most of her life and also raced horses. Wide-open spaces agreed with her. “Well, I’m particularly fond of reading about the early West,” she said. “I think it was a very romantic era in our country.” In the heyday of her initial years of stardom, the 1930s, westerns were usually relegated to B and Z picture programmers and were rarely major features, but that started to change in the mid-to-late forties. By the fifties, the western in America was one of the most challenging and complex of film forms. In the hands of directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, Budd Boetticher, Allan Dwan, André de Toth, and many others, it was characterized by any number of fresh ideas and attitudes, politically, morally, and aesthetically.
George Stevens’s version of the early life of Annie Oakley (1935) is about as sophisticated politically as you can expect from a film of its era. This is a movie that often hints at a more developed content but usually retreats into period charm and the kind of comedy routines that Stevens learned at the Hal Roach studios while photographing the best short subjects of Laurel and Hardy. “No fiction is stranger than the actual life of Annie Oakley who came out of a backwoods village half a century ago to astonish the world,” reads a title after the credits. But the film does indeed fictionalize parts of her story to suit the conventions of the time. Stanwyck actually does look a lot like photos of the real Annie, who stood barely five feet tall; Stevens makes sure to film her in such a way that she looks small, even dainty, in his over-packed frames.
We first see Stanwyck’s Annie riding in a carriage with her mother. “Gosh, ain’t he pretty,” she says softly, looking at a picture of Toby Walker (Preston Foster), a renowned sharpshooter (in real life, Stanwyck had a helpless respect for male beauty). “That’s not for ladies,” says a barkeep to vaudevillian Vera Delmar (Pert Kelton), trying to keep her out of his barroom, but she cracks, “I’m no lady” and barges right in. Stevens does some fast cuts to nonplussed male faces. “Next thing you know, they’ll be smoking cigarettes!” says one man, while another wonders if there’s nothing sacred anymore. There’s no heat in their objections. Stevens situates his audience so that they can see what relative progress has been made for women since the nineteenth century.
Throughout, Stanwyck is wearing far too much lipstick to play a country girl, and her Brooklyn smarts sometimes don’t match Annie’s more simple common sense, but she has some fine moments early on. Jeff Hogarth (Melvyn Douglas), a scout for Buffalo Bill, offers her his arm, and when she hesitates, her mother nods her approval of his alien, chivalrous gesture. Stanwyck’s Annie takes Jeff’s arm, finally, but her face definitely registers that she thinks such exaggerated deference to her sex is silly.
The real Annie competed with marksman Francis Butler and beat him. Butler retired and soon proposed to her, and they lived out their lives together happily. In this film, Annie goes up against the fictional Toby, and when she and her mother see that she’s going to ruin his career if she beats him, Annie throws the match. Before Stanwyck does this, she looks down for a moment, as if she’s thinking, “Well, life is unfair, we knew that going in.” She didn’t have the heart to beat Toby, she tells her friends: “He was just too pretty,” she repeats, matter-of-factly.
After Jeff brings Annie to the attention of Buffalo Bill (Moroni Olsen), they go out into the waning sunlight so that Bill can introduce her to his mostly male troupe, which responds with confusion and disdain. This sequence is done with a truly evocative series of magic hour shots that highlight Stevens’s eye for pictorial effects. The best parts of Annie Oakley seem to be about a moment in American history when the demarcation line between the sexes was blurry. In the world of this movie, men are too pretty and famous gunfighters like Buffalo Bill have Stanwyck’s 1940s-style hair, while the women are as hard and saucy as Pert Kelton and as capable as Stanwyck herself.
Yet the script and direction ask Stanwyck to be too sweet in too many scenes. There’s not enough of the down-home grit that made Annie a legend in her own time and ours, a precious alternative to Barbies and beauty queens for the tomboys of the world. Foster does well in the most fleshed-out role here, but Douglas is just a dim point in the eternal triangle. “Aim at a high mark, and you will hit it,” said the real Annie, and that’s the spirit that Stanwyck embodied as an actress, desiring and often achieving the crown of “the best of all” in her chosen profession. Both Annie and Stanwyck deserve better than this contrived version of Oakley’s story. For all its ingratiating qualities, this ensemble movie loses all urgency in its final third (for a more daring version of this material, look no further than Robert Altman’s still underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians [1976]).
The little girl who dreamed of being Pearl White relished acting the tomboy heroine in Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific, a railroad epic that begins with Star Wars-style unrolling credits and a rousing score that segues from workin’ on the railroad to my darlin’ Clementine without missing a beat. This is the kind of action movie that kids could see and then act out afterward; in all of its scenes, it only matters what’s happening in the moment and not why it’s happening, particularly.
DeMille, much derided by his fellow directors but an unstoppable force in his industry, was a showman who never quite lost the simplicity of the silent films from the teens; he himself was a contemporary of Pearl White and an important rival to D. W. Griffith. His movies almost always made money (one wag called a picture of his “a movie for De Millions”), and that’s because his hard-driving, circus-like sensibility was close to the confused emotions and instincts of the American public, especially on the issue of sex, where he proved a master at arousing prurient interest, having his cheesecake and eating it too by condemning licentiousness with biblical but slightly winking fervor.
Stanwyck appeared often on DeMille’s radio show, and he was impressed with her lack of temperament on Union Pacific, calling her “a good workman,” his sincerest compliment. As Mollie Monahan, a postmistress and all-around spitfire, Stanwyck is introduced atop a train, shouting happily for her pa and crinkling her nose at him. She delivers her lines in a heavy Irish brogue that announces, “Yes, get used to it! I’m going to try an accent!” This Irish accent, unlike her more effective light one in The Plough and the Stars, “comes and goes,” as people like to say. But Stanwyck is obviously having so much fun physicalizing her role, hitching up her skirts, and throwing up her arms, that she fashions a wholly new, animated style to suit DeMille’s specific needs. For the first half of the film, Stanwyck’s acting is akin to action painting; she throws her colors around vigorously, but if we step back, there’s an order to what she’s doing. In repose, Stanwyck gives Mollie her own watchful urchin look, and she makes a smooth transition to sentiment when asked to lament, to the strains of “Danny Boy” on the soundtrack, the needless death of a man in a saloon.
With her frequent partner Joel McCrea, a man who moves with tough, contained manly grace, Stanwyck has a sisterly chemistry. Rather unexpectedly, she plays out a most revealing scene with him in Union Pacific. “You think I’m an outrageous flirt,” says Mollie to McCrea’s Jeff, as they rest for a moment on the tracks. “Did you never know that flirtin’ gets into a woman’s blood like fightin’ gets into a man’s?” she asks, her face taking on a lyrically high-energy yet contemplative look. “Now, a girl begins coquettin’, to discover if she has the power. Then she goes lookin’, like a fighter after a bully, for the hardest man to conquer. But tis never the man she wants, tis the pleasure of bringing him to her feet!” Mollie concludes cheerfully, less for Jeff than for herself, as if she’s worked something out.
This is a classic explanation of Stanwyck’s relation to men on screen. Union Pacific had many writers, so we can’t be certain who wrote this speech, but it really rings a bell for her. The man she dreams of, Mollie/ Stanwyck continues (aided by McCrea’s horny prompting), will give her the spanking she deserves. This isn’t just sexism, but something else, something having to do with the tender roughness that Stanwyck wanted on screen from men and perhaps, to an extent, in her personal life. She got only roughness with Fay, and a bit of tenderness, but little else, from Taylor, so she never really found the combination she craved—except with Capra, mainly in movies.
California (1946), a Paramount western directed by John Farrow (Mia’s father), was the first film Stanwyck made in color (she only made six in total and remains for most of us, in memory, a creature of lustrous black and white). The film begins with shots of California’s natural scenic wonders, narrated by a bewildering variety of voices (this opening is so goofy that it suggests a parody of one of the “sight-seeing” shorts of the time). We see some wagons circling on a town’s main street, and Farrow’s camera moves to the left until we catch a group of women throwing Stanwyck’s shady cardsharp into the street. It’s quite an entrance (and it looks like she takes the fall herself, frustrated stuntwoman that she was). When Farrow cuts to a closer shot, Stanwyck raises herself up out of the dust and says, “Thank you,” to the women, “thank you very much,” her mouth wide open and her teeth bared in a sneer.
She tries to vamp Ray Milland to get him to take her to California, the state that Stanwyck so loved that she practically never left it from 1929 on. But Milland isn’t buying. Instead, saintly Irish winemaker Barry Fitzgerald lets her tag along with him. The pioneers ostracize her, and Fitzgerald tells her not to take their cruelty to heart. She stares off into space and begins to recite a litany of places she’s been to with pretty names: Natchez, Memphis, Savannah, Biloxi. And all of these cities hurt her, it seems. Stanwyck’s anger in these first scenes is too harsh for the movie to handle; she provides this candy-colored western with a strong belt of bitterness, and suggests that her character, Lily, is a hopeless case. “A woman gets tired knowing too much,” she says. It’s an archetypal Stanwyck line, but when she doesn’t react after Milland slaps her, only to touch her face with pleasure after he leaves, it seems like the screenwriters are just trotting out a familiar routine for her without adding anything new.
Lily gets lost in the shuffle when the narrative settles down and introduces the villain, Pharoah Coffin, played by George Coulouris. Coffin is a lunatic slave trader (the role needs a George Sanders or a Claude Rains to really put it over), and Lily’s motivations for taking up with him aren’t clear. Stanwyck stops sneering and gives the rest of her performance with her red lipstick, which glistens obscenely in some of Farrow’s extreme close-ups. Though Farrow’s camera movements can be extremely elaborate (he favored takes that often lasted close to five minutes or more), they can’t disguise or enhance the perfunctory quality of most of the acting and writing. Toward the end, Fitzgerald has been shot, and we see Stanwyck hurry over to him from the left. The camera glides away to the right and picks up Milland, then glides left again so they can stand over his body, then follows Stanwyck as she exits left. It’s quite a complicated single take, and it must have taken all kinds of time for preparation, but it’s like a long, beautifully written sentence that finally doesn’t say all that much.
Robin Wood, in his admiring but ambivalent essay about The Furies (1950), called it a “hybrid” picture that brought together the western and the woman’s melodrama. But this rich brew of a movie also partakes of daring elements of screwball comedy in its treatment of the blatantly incestuous, tough-funny battle of wits in 1870s New Mexico between T.C Jeffords (Walter Huston, in his last role), a rip-snorting, jocular cattle baron with a shock of thick white hair, and his blond, lovingly competitive daughter Vance, played by Stanwyck.
When he directed The Furies, Anthony Mann was coming off a string of talent-displaying noirs like Railroaded (1947) and Raw Deal (1948), and he had just made his first western with James Stewart, Winchester 73 (1950). Always drawn to the most upsetting implications of violence and revenge, Mann in his best work could sometimes be a bit heavy-handed, which is why the light, almost Sturges-like opening scenes of The Furies come as such a surprise. Maybe Huston and Stanwyck managed these interactions themselves, for she clearly felt some of the same admiration for Huston as an actor that Vance feels for her father.
Like many of Mann’s westerns, this is a Shakespearian sort of film, with T. C. as King Lear and Vance as a Regan or Goneril with a wide streak of Cordelia love. Vance is introduced trying on earrings in her dead mother’s room. Her face is sly yet secretive, her feelings deeply hidden, though we can see that Vance has some private source of amusement that keeps her continually tickled (an unusual mode for Stanwyck). As she chats with her handsome, stooge-like brother, Clay (John Bromfield), Vance idly plays with a pair of scissors that have been lying on a dressing table.
T. C. has kept his dead wife’s room exactly as it was, and Vance is staking her claim to her father by invading it and wearing one of her mother’s old dresses. When she hears T. C. riding up to the house, the knowing Vance, with her hard, adult laugh, suddenly becomes an excited little girl, eager to see and please her daddy. T. C. eyes her from the stairs: “You were in her room,” he says. “That’s right,” Vance replies, testing him. “Her gown befits you,” says T. C. This is a highly-charged moment, and there are a lot of things working to create a queasy mood: the razor-sharp tightness of the framing and editing, the usage of the odd word “befits,” and of course the actors, who are set on their own often bizarre course together.
If this film had been made later on, in the late 1960s or 1970s, it probably would have been more open about the incest theme, and may even have suggested sexual abuse as its basis (this line of attack turns up frequently when modern writers delve into the myth of Lear and his daughters). Under the strict censorship laws of 1950, Mann and his gifted collaborators can only hint at what goes on between T. C. and Vance, and these hints make the film sometimes impenetrably ambiguous. The original slant here is that Mann seems to be positing the relationship that T. C. has with his daughter as a lively and even natural thing, at least in these early scenes.
Vance kisses T. C. happily and unashamedly on the mouth, and there’s no suggestion that she wants to actually go to bed with him, even when he asks her to “scratch my sixth lumbar vertebrae” and she cheerfully obliges. “Pretty good, huh?” asks T. C. in his barroom manner, standing in front of his own portrait; he’s a rampaging egomaniac who dares us not to like him. The Furies is a great movie because it doesn’t demonize this power-mad, instinctual man. It understands that his charm is like a hurricane and that his energy is essential if you want to get anything done. He’s a life force, and the film respects him. Maybe this represents another strand of Stanwyck’s innate right-wing leanings, this mixed admiration for such a crazed capitalist.
Vance thinks and feels so much from moment to moment, in her subterranean way, that it’s often hard to keep up with her, and Stanwyck never makes it easy to understand this character, one of the most multi-faceted she ever attempted. She banters with T. C. in their nearly newspaper comedy style, but then we see her vulnerability with her childhood friend Juan (Gilbert Roland), a man she loves—but not in the romantic way he loves her. Juan and his people have been reduced to being regarded as squatters on their own land, an empire T. C calls The Furies, and Vance is always having to bargain with T. C. to keep him from burning them off the land permanently.
T. C. has his own currency printed as IOUs, and he thinks his money is better than the government kind because his has some cheesecake value (there’s an image of a girl riding a bull on his illegal tender). T. C. is a man of huge appetites, performing his own life and legend for us. It’s clear that he’s sleeping with his Mexican maid, Chiquita, which Vance approves of, even if she doesn’t take the same pleasure in Juan (in the source material, Niven Busch’s novel, Vance is more involved with Juan, but their platonic love in the film is in many ways more interesting).
“You won’t have it easy, finding a man,” taunts T. C., eying his daughter. “I’ve spoiled most of ’em for you.” Vance puts her boots up on T. C.’s desk, and he asks her to scratch his itchy vertebrae again. But there’s a chasteness in Mann that thankfully stops him from going too far with their father-daughter attraction (nor will he conjure the evil that Huston’s son John found in the incestuous Noah Cross of Chinatown [1974]). A lot of different elements make The Furies what it is, not least Charles Schnee’s tangy script and Victor Milner’s low-light, sunset-time black and white cinematography, with its evocative use of grey silhouettes, but it’s Mann that keeps all these potentially explosive elements in line. You can see his acuity at work in the way he chooses his outdoor landscapes so that every bare, runty tree and towering cactus seems to express the inner lives of his characters.
The framing is just as precise indoors, too. When Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey) invades Clay’s wedding party, Mann has Darrow and T. C. stare each other down across his composition, framing Vance coming down the stairs in a tiny sliver screen right, so that she looks like she’s sliding down Darrow’s shoulder. In this one expertly composed shot, the whole narrative of the film shifts, even if Corey is not at all up to his manly-guy role, unfortunately. When Vance dances with Darrow, she asks him if he thinks he’s top man of God’s green earth, the exact same question that she asked T. C. earlier in his office. Vance and T. C. both use other people as chess pieces in their game with each other, and woe betide anyone who gets between them. Observing the budding romance between Vance and Darrow, T. C. rings them out of the room with a large bell (Huston is always game to introduce broad comic touches like this, which Mann observes just dryly enough for maximum tension).
T. C. offers Darrow money to break off his relations with Vance; he had earlier offered her a dowry of fifty thousand dollars if she married a man he approved of. When Darrow accepts the money, Vance stiffens with affronted pride, and Mann cuts to a close-up of T. C. looking lovably boyish and triumphant, as if he’s won back the girl he loves. In this shot, Mann starts to get at the deep-dyed sickness in the repressed, or at least misdirected sexuality in T. C. and Vance. After Darrow leaves with his money, T. C. takes up his old bantering tone with Vance, who has her back to us. When she turns, we see that she’s in tears. T. C. goes in to hug her to him, and a tear shoots out of her right eye onto his shoulder—at this point, their relationship doesn’t seem vital and amusing anymore, just pitiably unhealthy. The Furies works a twisted new template for Stanwyck, who weakens for love as she’s done in the past and then has to strengthen for vengeance, as if this were some Freudian Lady Eve on the range mixed with Electra.
The movie then introduces an alarming new element: Judith Anderson as Florence Burnett, “Flo” to T. C., a widow with connections who makes no bones about her designs on both The Furies and the man who rules over them. Sipping her favorite drink, a cognac with orange juice, Flo brags to Vance about how she got T. C. a meeting with the president, and at one point condescendingly taps Vance’s chin with her black fan. The film takes on a fresh level of excitement now, because Anderson is as formidable an actress as Huston is an actor, and their stage training is of an entirely different order than the one Stanwyck received from Willard Mack. Anderson and Huston aren’t on the same modern, internalized wave length as Stanwyck, but they both have such authority that Stanwyck begins to seem hemmed-in and even routed in her scenes with them. This corralling is something that has never happened before and will never happen again to Stanwyck on screen. Luckily, this upstaging exactly suits what’s happening to her character.
When T. C. asks Flo to scratch his itchy lumbar, Vance absorbs this request as the ultimate insult. Mann gives Stanwyck a pause as she goes upstairs, where we can see Vance experience a moment of recognition about her true feelings for her father. Vance wants to be T. C.’s wife, which is why she put on that dress in the first scene. In her own mind, her relationship with her father doesn’t need to involve sex; we learn later that T. C.’s dead wife was “a lady,” who found it distasteful to fornicate except to conceive children.
Flo is nothing if not bold; she even dares to look at the books on T. C.’s empire Vance has been keeping. Her every “My dear,” when spoken to Vance, fairly drips with aggression, and when she taunts Vance about her failure with Darrow, telling her that she needs to leave The Furies and take the grand tour of Europe, you can practically see Vance on the boat already. Flo Burnett is as steely an enemy and rival as anyone could imagine, and Vance sees no way around her. Sex is one thing that she can’t offer her father, and sex is what Flo is giving him—while also being an unimpeachable “lady” with useful friends in high places. And so The Furies works up to its primal scene, the scene that everyone remembers after they’ve seen it.
In Vance’s dead mother’s room, armed with hot tea, Flo tells Vance that she’s going to marry T. C. Retreating to her mother’s vanity table, Vance asks, “Why? Why do you marry him?” Her voice sounds drained of energy, almost zombie-like, and this isn’t the “I’m not going to expend energy on you” tone that Vance takes when she’s insulting someone. She’s genuinely at her wits’ end. Flo is straightforward and honest, even calling herself “an adventuress” and admitting that the marriage is “perhaps for love of the man, or perhaps for love of The Furies!” (Anderson uses her full Shakespearean iambic pentameter rhythm for this thrilling line reading.)
Vance turns, and her eyes cloud over as Flo tells her that she’s to be relieved of managing The Furies (for her own good, of course). Juan and his people, Flo continues, will finally be thrown off their land. This last bit is what really enrages Vance past all endurance. We see her reach behind her back for the scissors on the vanity table, and after a short, remorseless buildup, aided by Franz Waxman’s steadily boiling music, Mann cuts to a close-up of Vance’s contorted face as she leaps forward with the scissors in her hand. We hear a shrieking, bird-like cry off-screen, and Mann cuts to the scissors falling to the floor, dripping blood, then cuts to Flo’s face, which sports two splotches of gore. Then, in the most gruesome shot, we see Flo covering the left side of her face, blood gushing out between her fingers.
Vance has been backed into a corner, utterly vanquished. And so she does the only thing she can think to do, lashing out with childlike fury and destroying this woman’s face so that T. C. will no longer want to bed her. Stanwyck makes us understand, beat by beat, how a person could be driven to such a vile act, and when she actually strikes out with the scissors, her face says, “Yes, I will dare this.” After that, we’ve crossed a line with Stanwyck artistically that can never be uncrossed. Vance is not a sociopath like Phyllis Dietrichson; this is a mixed-up but industrious woman, and to see her descend to such savagery is more truly disturbing than viewing the remorseless actions of an aberration like Phyllis.
This act of violence presages all-out war between father and daughter. T. C. hangs Juan and then confronts Vance on horseback, provoking one of Stanwyck’s most vivid tantrums. Vance practically spits at T. C. as she vows to take his world away from him, but the film relaxes a bit after this stand-off (it couldn’t possibly continue at such a pitch of intensity). Vance goes around the country buying up T. C.’s IOUs. She has a memorably bitchy exchange with a good-time girl named Dallas (Myrna Dell), who acts friendly and says, “I’m new in town, honey,” only to be met with Vance’s scalding reply: “Honey, you wouldn’t be new anyplace.” Stanwyck gets a laugh by rattling off the line as fast as possible and, crucially, not bothering to even look up from the ground as she says it, a perfect example of her strategically “lazy” way with an insult. Stung, Dallas looks at Darrow when he enters the room, then looks at Vance and says, “I never could see what they see in the thin ones.” Vance quickly says, “It’s not what they see,” a radical statement about the superiority of inner quality over outward charms. Fun as this scene is, it doesn’t fit with what’s gone before; it’s as if the film can no longer deal with the Pandora’s Box it has opened up and is blindly striking out in random directions.
There’s some fetching S & M sex comedy when Vance tells Darrow that he’d like to hit her (he does, and she keeps on smiling at him), and then tells him that he’d like to kiss her. He answers yes. “What’s in it for me?” she asks, exiting the scene by biting lustily yet with feigned disinterest into a chicken leg. This comic scene suggests that Vance has begun to transfer her “bad girl” tendencies from her father to Darrow (Lord knows she’ll probably be a handful in the bedroom). But where does that development leave poor dead Juan, or Flo, both casualties of this father-daughter drama? The film doesn’t forget about Flo; when we last see her, she is covering her disfigured face with a handkerchief and drinking cognac and orange juice to excess. A bankrupt T. C. asks her for money, and she politely refuses. “Money is the only thing that makes loneliness bearable to some slight degree,” Flo says. Anderson gives this line its full weight, especially in the way she lingers on the “some slight degree” and then chokes the words off.
Anderson was the definitive Medea of her time on stage, and in The Furies, she offers as fine a performance as could be wished for in this important role. Her last scene, especially, haunts the movie, putting the lie to its attempt to simply celebrate T. C. and what he has wrought in the final reels. Cast as Juan’s mother, another famous stage actress, Blanche Yurka, shoots T. C. down in the street after father and daughter have reconciled in their own way (Vance has total control now of The Furies, and T. C. admires her dedication, so like his own). What The Furies seems to be saying about American expansionism and the diseased hothouse of the American family romance gets lost toward the end, but that’s because these issues can’t really ever be resolved. This is a movie that presents a large, active, deadly world of its own, and Stanwyck is at her fully committed best in it, stimulated to reach for her highest heights by her fellow actors and by Mann’s scrupulously tactful direction.
Stanwyck made three of her very best films opposite Fred MacMurray: Remember the Night, Double Indemnity, and There’s Always Tomorrow. Her fourth film with MacMurray, a 3-D western called The Moonlighter (1953), has a poor reputation, but it boasts a smart script by Niven Busch, who provided the source material for The Furies, and an effectively dramatic opening. A lynch mob, looking for MacMurray’s moonlight cattle thief, hangs the wrong man (a black prisoner sings and weeps, upsettingly, in his cell as this drama plays out). At first, Stanwyck’s role as MacMurray’s loyal girlfriend seems thankless, but she gets in on some serious action later on, shooting it out with Ward Bond and then doing some rough stunt work when her character falls over a waterfall, and her chemistry with MacMurray gives depth to the script’s sketch of their troubled relationship.
Stanwyck then went south of the border for Argentine director Hugo Fregonese, who has a minor reputation in some auteurist circles. David Thomson has written of the small pleasures of Fregonese’s Blowing Wild (1953), a film shot in Mexico but set in some unspecified country in South America where oil wells keep pumping and bandits are ever lurking. This movie seems to have been made in a hurry, and it leans on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1949) in its opening, with Gary Cooper and Ward Bond as down-and-out male friends who meet up with a third friend (Anthony Quinn), a successful oil-driller who has captured the hand of Stanwyck’s lusty Marina (her part was originally intended for either Katy Jurado or Dolores del Río). They make an odd couple in their first scene, Quinn and Stanwyck, and she treats him dismissively, complaining of his stench, until he forces her into a scorching kiss. Though at first she resists him, she finally responds with gusher-like physical passion (it’s like a cartoon version of the grappling over the sink she does with Robert Ryan in Clash by Night, and it shows that Stanwyck’s sexuality, once awakened, is as incendiary as ever).
Stanwyck trots out her sexy/mercurial mode when she kisses Cooper and then lets her mouth open on his arm for a sensual moment or two. Riding roughshod over hubby Quinn, who has a cowardly streak and has his first oil derrick pumping right outside his house for reassurance, Stanwyck explodes, “Those pumps are driving me nuts!” She soon gets her revenge. Kissing Quinn, she stares up at the derrick and then shoves him right underneath it, first with a sort of “Hah!” expression, and then a blank, “What did I do?” face—junk food acting for a junk food movie. “I committed murder to get you, mur-dah!” she howls at Coop, in a singed voice that sounds slightly Ida Lupino-like. He strangles her for a bit, then leaves her alone, and she covers her ears and pulls back her face with her hands until it looks like a distorted, grotesque mask. It’s a totally ridiculous gesture, and totally right for this tasty pulp fiction.
Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) finds its star at loose ends. As Sierra Nevada Jones, a would-be settler in Montana, Stanwyck wears a red wig that makes her look, at times, like a grown-up Little Orphan Annie—yet several characters remark on this unfortunate hair as if it cinches Sierra’s attractiveness. Bathing in a mountain stream, she’s spied on by Ronald Reagan; the TV-wise charisma he exerted to get him through his eight-year role as commander and chief is in short supply here. There isn’t one interesting scene in this movie, and even the cinematography by the estimable John Alton isn’t up to par; some day-for-night work is so egregious that it looks like its flaws might be deliberate, as if Alton was trying to get a blue sky/black tree Magritte-type effect that doesn’t gel. As Stanwyck herself said of such efforts: “[Y]ou do the best you can—and you privately hope that nobody goes to see it.” The Blackfeet Indian tribe in the cast made her an honorary member after admiring her hard work performing stunts. She didn’t use a double for the skinny-dipping scene (the water was cold, in the mid-forties), and she did most of her own shooting and riding. The name the tribe gave her was Princess Many Victories III. Even in this film, I’d amend that to Queen Many Victories, Second to None.
As a girl, Ruby Stevens went to the zoo to study the way the animals walked, especially the cats in cages, the panthers and tigers, and she adopted their coiled slinking as a way of protecting herself. Of course, “animal exercises” have long been a staple of acting classes; students are entreated to do just what Ruby did to pick up interesting physical behavior that may enliven or reveal the characters they will one day play. In The Violent Men, a well-made Western loaded with sex and violence, Stanwyck plays Martha, a woman who plays at being “the loyal wife” and “the gracious lady” to Lew (Edward G. Robinson), the owner of a vast cattle empire. If her blond hair isn’t a tip-off to her real character, Stanwyck’s stealthy, panther-like movement through a room lets us know this is another of her duplicitous women, anti-heroines who play at false roles in order to get what they want. Once again, Stanwyck is the actress as villain and sociopath.
In Martha’s case, she’s pretended to love her crippled husband for twelve years, but has secretly carried on an affair with his own brother, Cole (Brian Keith). Lew speaks of being only “half a man,” and it’s clear that his crutches are meant to symbolize impotence, but Martha isn’t particularly interested in being sexually satisfied. Instead, she wants Cole around for back-up in the range wars that always seem to be heating up. When she tries to keep Cole away from his Mexican sweetheart, Martha’s eyes get hungry, but she isn’t hungry for this man. Like Lily Powers, she’s a Nietzschean superwoman who lives for power.
Lew’s grand house is set on fire, and this fire leads to the film’s most memorable moment. Lew and Martha appear at the top of some stairs as fire balloons up around them. He loses his crutches and looks to his wife: “Martha, my crutches,” he cries, a once-dominant man reduced to the level of helplessness. Martha grabs the crutches, and Stanwyck freezes in a masterful hesitation as she considers her options. Will I? she thinks. Do I dare? Yes! She chucks the crutches into the fire with fiendish energy, her mouth opening wide, as if her own daring excites her sexually. But Lew somehow survives his wife’s colorful vengeance, and Martha gets her just deserts when Cole’s girlfriend shoots her. Stanwyck does a marvelous fall to the ground when she dies, stiff, straight down, THWACK! It must have killed her bad back, but it was worth it, visually.
In 1945, cinematographer John Alton wrote a book on his craft called Painting With Light, and that’s just what he does in Allan Dwan’s Escape to Burma (1955), presenting a constant series of delights for the eye, especially when experimenting with shadows. There are exciting visual effects achieved throughout with smoke and firelight and an attention to the gradations of color. When Stanwyck’s matriarch, Gwen, moves through a darkened room to turn on a light at one point, the red of the red lampshade practically pops out at us three-dimensionally. Alton shows similar attention to the actors; amid various thrills and spills, Stanwyck is romanced by an unusually relaxed Robert Ryan, and when he first kisses her, Alton has her move in and out of shadows as she wonders if she likes it.
On a script level, Escape to Burma is nonsense, which is why it has a reputation as one of Stanwyck’s worst movies (“Why would a woman like you want to spend her time in a teak forest?” is one of Ryan’s more laughable lines). But Dwan puts this small adventure over with gusto; it’s certainly miles ahead of the same team’s misbegotten Cattle Queen of Montana. Alton goes too far sometimes with the filters on Stanwyck’s close-ups, and the ending resolution is particularly silly, yet on a purely stylistic level there’s a lot to enjoy here. There’s an amusing photo of Stanwyck on the set where’s she’s holding a leopard in her lap; if anything, it’s the leopard who looks intimidated. “She could have been a great animal trainer had she wished,” said Dwan.
A singer named Joni James (she sounds like her name) warbles an insipid theme song under the credits of The Maverick Queen (1956), which is based on a Zane Grey book that might have been finished by Grey’s son. For fifteen minutes or so, we take in some poor acting and some poor editing and some poor framing as the Wild Bunch makes a robbery. Included in this bunch are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Scott Brady). The latter makes a lunge for the film’s ingénue (Mary Murphy), then comes back to his main woman, Stanwyck’s maverick queen, a saloon gal who’s butcher than Butch and Sundance put together.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, take a bath first!” she snipes at Sundance, still dealing with smelly men and their smellier advances. She looks good with light reddish hair, but in her early scenes here, Stanwyck treads perilously close to late Crawford dreadnought camp, putting men down in her low, cigarette-deepened voice. The film has echoes of Crawford’s Johnny Guitar (1954), with none of its quality. Hack director Joe Kane keeps the camera running until people have finished their dialogue, then leaves it on out of sheer inertia once they’ve left the frame. There’s action stuff to keep us awake, including Stanwyck’s climb up a hill after a fall off a horse, but her death by shooting is so indifferently staged that it’s hard to tell if she’s been shot before she quietly expires and the film ends, with more Joni on the track.
“A Chronicle of the West,” reads a card that appears on the screen before the credits come up for Trooper Hook (1957), Stanwyck’s sixth and last movie with Joel McCrea. Given its charged subject matter (Stanwyck plays a white woman who has been held captive by Native Americans and has a child by a native chief), it’s a surprisingly blah film. Stanwyck herself doesn’t seem invested in her role; when, in close-up, her face is first pulled up by the hair by a soldier, she does “stoic” and “inward,” but she just isn’t feeling it. The movie has a cramped, dusty look and suffers from very awkward editing; when Stanwyck is finally reunited with her husband (John Dehner) toward the end, director Charles Marquis Warren dissolves away from him right in the middle of a sentence. The script is vaguely racist—at one point, McCrea tells Chief Nanchez (Rudolfo Acosta) that maybe “you’re more white than you know,” when the chief shows that he cares about whether his son by Stanwyck lives or dies. Trooper Hook has lots of possibilities, and Stanwyck has a good moment or two—shyly responding to a friendly stranger who waves at her, or staring into one of her eternal mirrors and saying her name out loud—but the film needs more dynamic direction and thoughtful writing.
That same year, Stanwyck’s period of western doldrums suddenly ended as she entered into the wild world of total auteur Sam Fuller, a tough-talking former newspaperman who wrote, produced, and directed her in Forty Guns, her last major movie. Forty Gunsis a source of dizzying stylistic excitement, and a kind of farewell and tribute to Stanwyck’s film career. “To work with Stanwyck is to work with the happy pertinence of professionalism and emotion,” said Fuller later. “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.”
Fuller knew what he had in his star and he tailored his film to her measure. He dared her into her most dangerous stunt, where her character, Jessica Drummond—a Catherine the Great of the West who makes her own law with her forty hired guns—catches her foot in the stirrup of her horse and is dragged across a landscape during a twister. The stunt men wanted Fuller to let them control the drag so that they could undo their own feet if the horses’ hooves came too close to their heads. Fuller refused them, so Stanwyck offered to do the stunt herself, Fuller’s way (she did it three times, demonstrating her Lillian Gish-like dedication to the movies). It’s quite an image, seeing her dragged across the plains in steady, unbroken takes—she’s become so elemental by this point that she seems fully the equal of both horse and cyclone.
Forty Guns is a Cinemascope marvel, Stanwyck’s only real widescreen movie, if we don’t count Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow. It begins with a view of the sheer immensity of the western landscape; in another shot, we see the hugeness of the sky, reflecting Fuller’s lust for size and hinting at all the happy jokes to come at the expense of male pride. We hear the thunder of hooves; the editing has a kind of musical rhythm as Jessica and her army of men rumble down a hillside to intimidate the Bonnell brothers, whose leader, Griff (Barry Sullivan), has come to clean up Jessica’s empire. Fuller uses every inch of the Cinemascope frame to grab and hold not just our attention but all of our senses (this film really needs to be seen on as large a screen as can be found).
The brothers ride into town, and Griff talks to a man who’s being menaced by Jessica’s bad seed brother, Brockie (John Ericson). The man is nearly blind, and Fuller shows us several frames from his blurred perspective, providing an alienation effect that contrasts with the clarity of those opening shots out on the prairie. Fuller soon switches moods again; we hear a man’s voice singing the theme song, “Woman with a Whip,” crooning about how Jessica is “a woman that all men desire,” but no man can tame. Songs were standard on the soundtracks of movies in this period, especially westerns, but Fuller confounds our expectations when Barney Cashman (Jack “Jidge” Carroll) walks into the frame, and we see that he’s singing the song for us—or lip-synching it, at least—as the camera follows him in one of the film’s first punishingly long tracking shots. The tone here is blunt and outrageous, close to that of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974), yet it’s married to the most sophisticated visual technique imaginable. Fuller possessed exactly the sort of dichotomous sensibility to make a grand filmic swan song for Stanwyck, who made so much of her career by verbally bridging yawning gaps between disparate ways of living and looking at the world.
This is a film about sex on the range; every gun is phallic, and a lot of the dialogue consists of impudent double entendres. “Ah-yah!” Jessica cries off-screen (it sounds guttural and ugly every time she does it). We then see her striding into jail to ask about her brother Brockie, who has shot the nearly blind man. Stanwyck has a wolfish look here and she speaks harshly, but her long ponytail provides a fetchingly incongruous physical touch (Stanwyck lost a lot of visual mobility after she cut her hair in 1948).
When Griff intrudes on a dinner set for Jessica and her forty guns, Stanwyck puts on such a knowing face that she’s obviously decided to play these next moments for laughs—and she gets them. Fuller frames her sitting very still in her chair, and she dominates the wide frames with her stillness, just as Robert Ryan does playing the criminal mastermind of Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955). The hair around Stanwyck’s face is its by now familiar grey, but something about Fuller’s direction has clawed away all the cobwebs that had grown over her on-screen sexuality, so that she’s as hot-to-trot, don’t-give-a-damn sexy here at fifty as she ever was in her twenties (what a contrasting double bill this movie would make with Capra’s General Yen). Her Jessica is a totally plausible matriarchal dynamo and born ruler, and we can feel Stanwyck’s relief at finally being cast correctly for her age and fully ripened experience (Fuller wanted to make another movie with Stanwyck as Evita Peron, and surely that would have been potent stuff, too).
Jessica asks Griff what he’s heard about her and then bites her lower lip and lowers her eyes before ordering all of her men out of the room. Once they are alone, Jessica offers Griff a job; he says that such a job wouldn’t be his size. “It could be any size you want it to be,” Jessica purrs, and Stanwyck leaves no doubt about what she’s really getting at. Griff takes out his gun. “May I feel it?” she asks. “Uh-uh,” he demurs, not willing to give over control to her. “Just curious,” she says, tauntingly. “Might go off in your face,” he warns. “I’ll take a chance,” she near-whispers, relishing Fuller’s absolutely filthy double entendre (this is the best dialogue she’s had since Double Indemnity). She lets out her “whatever” sigh when she handles his gun, tossing it contemptuously in the air. This is a woman who outright owns the guns and the manhood of forty men, and she’s not easily impressed.
Later, on the range, Griff wonders if Jessica feels “naked” without her army, and then tells her that one of her men has been misbehaving. “You want to spank him?” he asks her. “I just want to see if you can take it,” she says. There seems to be no end to their sex talk, all done barely in code. He tells her she looks upset. “I was born upset!” she declares, one of Stanwyck’s best lines, a line that shows just how deeply Fuller understood her; it reverberates back over the whole length of her against-the-odds career and life.
After she’s been dragged by her horse and survived that twister with Griff, Jessica rests up in a barn and outlines her past in some detail. As a kid, she had to deliver her own brother, and when her mother died in childbirth, Jessica buried her and then took care of Brockie. At fifteen, a man “tried to get rough” with her, and when her father intervened, he got shot. At eighteen, Jessica says, she was “the boss of my own spread.” Stanwyck delivers all this back-story in the most matter-of-fact, Olympian of tones; she’s a winner, “the best of all,” and so is Jessica. There’s no room here for the self-pity of Lily Powers, or what’s left of Ruby Stevens.
“You’ve come a long way,” says Griff. He could be talking to Stanwyck herself, but Jessica is done cantering down memory lane. “My throat’s dry, I’m talking too much,” she croaks, leaning in for a kiss, as if to say, “Screw the past, lets grab what’s good now.” This is Stanwyck’s last hurrah, her summing up, and it is indeed a long way from Capra’s gentle early talkie world to Fuller’s curious modernism. “They don’t normally write parts for women my age because America is now a country of youth,” she told a reporter who asked her about the four-year gap between Forty Guns and Walk on the Wild Side (1961). “Something is gone,” she said, rightly, and spoke of her more “romantic” films. “Now we’ve matured and moved on. The past belongs to the past,” she said, sounding like Jessica Drummond.
Forty Guns is mainly a rollicking western sex comedy for about the first hour of its running time, but then Fuller switches gears, in his ballsy way, into something more serious—all in one dazzling six-minute take. “Am I talking too much?” asks Griff, as he sits with Jessica at her piano; they’re both worried about boring the other with small talk about the past. He keeps telling her how he feels about killing, and she listens to him with an abstracted look on her face as the camera starts to prowl ominously closer. Shots are fired from the back of the room; they take cover. Jessica’s loyal retainer, Ned (Dean Jagger), walks in and says that he had to shoot Griff, and then Griff moves forward and disarms him. After this embarrassment, Jessica stands stock still at the right of the frame as Ned pitifully confesses his love to her. Jagger, never the most subtle of actors, opens himself up very purely and simply both to the camera and to Jessica.
Jessica listens to Ned talk so intently that the film seems to be holding its breath with her, taking in his words. She sits down to write Ned a check to pay him off. “I’m sorry, Ned,” she says, her face impassive, her voice stony and unforgiving. This is a telling choice for Stanwyck; it would have been so easy to act touched by Ned’s sorrow. But she makes us see that Jessica, and people like her who have made themselves winners, can’t afford to sympathize with such abject weakness, even needing to look on it as a kind of contagious disease (it should be remembered again how much Stanwyck admired Ayn Rand and her objectivist philosophy, and how much Lily Powers learned from Nietzsche).
Ned exits from frame left, dropping the check on the ground. Jessica goes to Griff and kisses his hand, mouthing her devotion to him. They hear a thudding noise and move to investigate; Ned has hung himself. Denied love and sex and given money instead, he sees no more reason to live. Is he somehow a necessary casualty? I can imagine Stanwyck answering “Yes.” It’s survival of the fittest: first in Brooklyn, then in an abusive first marriage and a humiliating second attempt, and then in that most embarrassing of roles, the aging actress, lucking into one more seminal film, a film that was loved and admired by the burgeoning French New Wave.
Brockie kills Griff’s brother as he walks out of the church with his bride. Barney croons another song as the now-widowed bride stands in her mourning black on a hillside; he sings that “God has his arms around me, and I’m not afraid,” another drastic switch in tone that works because of Fuller’s “take it and like it” long takes. As the plot starts to resolve itself, Fuller freezes Stanwyck’s Jessica into a still photo under a dissolve to her forty male guns on horses and zooms slowly into the lingering photo, a surprisingly lyrical effect (this movie is always surprising us). “You could still be the boss, if you wanted to,” says her lawyer, but Jessica is about to abdicate, just as Stanwyck herself is pretty much at an end as a star performer.
The lawyer tells her that she’ll lose everything, “everything you’ve built up,” and Stanwyck stares out at us, plunking a melody out on a piano with her finger. At this point, we’re ready for one of those looks of recognition she used to honor us with, but those are gone now. What’s left is an indescribable look, something so deeply personal and labyrinthine that there’s no following it or guessing where she could possibly be in her mind; there’s a kind of psychic wilderness in her face. Stanwyck was always smart enough to perceive what was coming for her, but who can really be truly ready for death, which to her meant retirement from the movies? In this scene, her face says all of this and more that can’t be ascertained, no matter how long we think about her trajectory as a woman and as an artist. “There was a scene loaded with a page of monologue and she knew it perfectly,” said Fuller. “I asked her, before the take, to eliminate the gibble-gabble and show the words in her face.” I’m willing to bet that this is the scene he was talking about.
Fuller had wanted to kill Jessica off, and that would have been more than appropriate, but the studio insisted that she live. She survives a gunshot (crying out, “Oh!” in an orgasmic way as she takes a bullet), and is last seen inanely running after Griff. The more telling moment in these last scenes is when Jessica tries to comfort the blond widow: “You have one thing in your favor,” she says, “Youth.” A reviewer for Picturegoer saw Forty Guns and wrote, “Even the most tactful of picturegoers would have to admit that Barbara Stanwyck is no longer a youngster,” bestowing the kiss of death on her career. It would only be resurrected, in an often bastardized, sentimental form, on television, a cruel kind of shrinkage after the Cinemascope glories of Forty Guns where, Prospero-like, her powers were celebrated and then relinquished.