The Bride Walks Out, Breakfast for Two, The Mad Miss Manton, You Belong to Me, Christmas in Connecticut, The Bride Wore Boots
Comedy is not something that came easily to Stanwyck, but she stuck to it and eventually mastered the genre. Early on, she professed that she found light material “a vacation—I was playing, not working.” But later, being interviewed by John Kobal, she confessed, “I am not really a comedienne, per se. I’m not very good. But when they are written as well as The Lady Eve or You Belong to Me (1941) … both of those films are with Henry Fonda, who is a wonderful comedian … or if it is a situation comedy, I’m alright. But—just for me to be funny—I’m not a funny person.”
In the mid-thirties, screwball comedy was in vogue, and practically every actress of note tried it, sometimes with spectacular results (Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn) and sometimes not (Loretta Young). We can take Stanwyck at her word that she wasn’t a naturally funny person, and certainly good humor is not the first thing we think of when we think of her. But unlike, say, the always-serious Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, she successfully extended her technique in some small comedies before finally grasping the brass ring with Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks.
Her director on the RKO film The Bride Walks Out (1936), Leigh Jason, admired the fact that Stanwyck “was the only one I ever worked with who would dig to the bitter end for what you really wanted—and then give it to you.” The main thrust of the plot (engineer Gene Raymond won’t let bride Stanwyck work, even though he brings in only thirty-five dollars a week) is consistently irritating. “Women have always worked,” says Stanwyck’s Carolyn, when she wants to continue modeling clothes for fifty dollars a week. “Why shouldn’t they do it in a shop instead of in a kitchen?” Raymond’s unlikable Michael never has a good answer whenever she asks about this, and that’s because there is no good answer (it might be worse if he tried to define his sexist feelings, of course).
During the film’s leisurely eighty-one minutes, there are four separate, would-be humorous references to wife beating. The most disturbing one comes from Stanwyck’s mouth: “Hit me, that would be the manly thing to do,” Carolyn says to Michael (suddenly it becomes clearer that some of the attitudes of this era were to blame for Stanwyck getting smacked in the face by Frank Fay). In many ways, this movie prefigures a sort of fifties conservatism. The married couple sleeps in separate beds, and in this time of the working girl—the high noon of Jean Arthur and so many other career women of the thirties—it feels absurd, even cruel, to put the mighty Stanwyck in an apron in a tiny kitchen in a small apartment and expect her to pinch pennies on milk, when what she really wants is the trunk full of cash and gems belonging to Baby Face Lily Powers. She can’t cook, of course, and why should she have to? Because that’s what a “real, bona-fide wife” does, according to Michael.
This lunkhead Michael is another Fay figure, and he isn’t remotely worthy of Stanwyck, as usual, but The Bride Walks Out has time for all kinds of diversions around its main plot. Hattie McDaniel has one of her better roles. In her first scene, she talks about the many men in her life, then cracks that “one or two of them I jilted!” In a later, even more telling scene, McDaniel wonders why white men don’t want their women to work (it’s interesting, from a modern perspective, that the black servant McDaniel plays is obviously more liberated and happier than the stymied white woman she works for). Stanwyck has a ball in a short dance scene with Raymond, jumping up on his thighs and thrusting her legs straight out into the air. And she finally pulls off a drunk scene with the help of pro-farceurs Billy Gilbert and Helen Broderick.
Broderick’s crack timing is notable. Creditor Gilbert takes away the couple’s furniture and finally comes to Broderick, who is sitting in the last chair. “What you’re sitting on does not belong to you,” he says, whereupon Broderick thinks this over for a second or two (a priceless take), and then slowly rises. Jason said that Stanwyck blew a few takes because she was laughing so hard at Gilbert. That’s a treasurable image: the self-denying pro finding that her profession could be fun and not all tears and slaps and gunshots. After she marries Michael, Carolyn starts to cry. Stanwyck makes sure to pull back just enough so that they’re clearly comic tears, a small adjustment that I would think brought her a certain amount of relief and maybe a feeling of power—or at least expanding horizons.
In her next comedy, Breakfast for Two (1937), Stanwyck is completely out of her mid-thirties transitional period and almost fully developed into her streamlined, titanic 1940s self, an actress of near total flexibility and strength. She had just made Stella Dallasand saw this rather rough screwball comedy as a relaxation. She was thirty now, and if something was lost in the passage of time—a certain vulnerability, a certain type of raw exposure—this loss was more than compensated for by gains in confidence and control.
In Breakfast for Two, Stanwyck plays a Texas heiress named Valentine, and she’s decked out in a white fringe dress and white fur coat in the first scene, recovering after a night on the town with irresponsible playboy Jonathan (Herbert Marshall). Stanwyck has made a huge leap forward in her handling of fast, sophisticated comic dialogue, throwing her mammoth fur over her shoulder as she tosses out repartee as if it came naturally to her. Over breakfast, Jonathan asks if he proposed to her the night before; apparently he does so whenever he picks up women. “Ah, I don’t remember,” Valentine murmurs, and Stanwyck makes this brief moment of genuine disappointment the linchpin of her fierce performance.
This is another RKO film. It has distinctive art deco set design by Van Nest Polglase, and the direction by Alfred Santell is somewhat static, so that the settings are made to feel oppressive (which might have been the intent). Valentine plots revenge against Jonathan and snaps up his ailing company with the idea of making a real man out of this idle-rich parasite. She compares her plan to training a horse: “Slip a bit in his mouth and make him like it,” she purrs. It becomes clear that the victimized chorus girl has it in her now to dish out some full-fledged, dominatrix-style abuse. Valentine puts this guy in his place verbally, and thus brings out the caveman in Jonathan, who sneers, “You’re the type of woman who wants to wear the pants—alright, Mister, wear them, trip over them and break your neck!” The male/female hostility between these two breaks into all-out brawling. When Jonathan’s effeminate butler (Eric Blore) tries to stop them from putting on boxing gloves to fight, Valentine cries, “Keep out of this, I was raised with six brothers!” She socks Jonathan in the jaw, and there doesn’t appear to be any fakery here; Stanwyck really seems to give Marshall a whack.
Valentine takes some expert swings at her prey, but he holds the crown of her head until she knocks into a door. Then she turns, and suddenly, out of nowhere, there’s feral little Ruby Stevens, age twelve, learning to fight in the streets. This startling image carries through the whole fight, which Valentine wins, of course (it’s a much more satisfying bout than a similar one in Nothing Sacred from the same year, where Carole Lombard’s character is too ill to really get into the battle of the sexes). Later, we see a doorknob fall out of Valentine’s glove. When it hits the floor, I could hear, “Ruby don’t fight fair!” in my head, coming from some ghost of a Brooklyn boy from 1919 scared of what a girl’s anger can do. Breakfast for Two is a screwball comedy about antagonism between a man and a woman in its purest possible state, ending in more violent slapstick and finally a wedding, celebrated by holding those boxing gloves in the air.
Katharine Hepburn turned down The Mad Miss Manton (1938), a low-grade mystery about a loopy debutante who keeps finding dead bodies and must solve the murders herself with the aid of her society girlfriends. It’s easy to see why RKO offered it to Hepburn and easy to see why she nixed it. Why Stanwyck took it is another matter. She had rejected a lot of scripts from RKO and Fox, and I suppose at a certain point you just have to give in and do something or other. Henry Fonda got stuck playing the male lead, Peter, a newspaperman, and he was so miserable that he rudely ignored Stanwyck on the set. But he and Stanwyck already have sexual chemistry together in this first film they made together; maybe his initial rejection of her peaked Stanwyck’s masochistic interest.
There are so many m’s in the title that it doesn’t have room for the heroine’s first name (Melsa). And Stanwyck can’t play the farcical obliviousness of this dizzy dame, though she tries and even scores a laugh or two, mainly with physical business. Her Park Avenue friends seem like a Stage Door (1937) hangover, and writer Philip G. Epstein keeps slipping in joking references to communism that might have rankled right-wing Stany if she hadn’t been so busy running around solving crimes and eying Fonda with interest (it was close to one hundred degrees the summer this movie was shot, and the girls were in fur coats, so getting the project done quickly was a priority). It’s a film where people keep throwing water at each other, and the biggest laugh comes when Stanwyck jabs a fork in Fonda’s rear. The only grace note is the ending, where Peter insists that he’ll happily live on Melsa’s money, a refreshing reversal from Michael’s pig-headedness on this subject in The Bride Walks Out.
The perils of being a working woman come into play again in You Belong to Me, Stanwyck’s third pairing with Fonda after their triumph in The Lady Eve, and this issue is resolved most satisfactorily, for once. The action starts out with some Hal Roach slapstick on skis, as Fonda’s Peter tries to impress Stanwyck’s Helen by yodeling and making hairpin turns until he lands headfirst in the snow. Helen pulls Peter out, and they ride together back to their hotel (Fonda looks very happy to be snuggling up to Stanwyck, while she looks a bit embarrassed—or forbearing).
When Peter finds out Helen is a physician, he asks, “Are there many women doctors?” and Stanwyck answers, “A few,” in her huskiest, most melancholy voice (she’s bleached all the Brooklyn out of it here, whereas Melsa Manton sounds more like Prospect than Central Park). Stanwyck is a knockout in her tight white sweater and long hair, and she has great fun using nonsense medical terms while she cares for Fonda, nattering on about the posterior and the tibia and the fibia. The whole movie has that creamy Columbia look of the forties, with lots of satin bedcovers and silky robes. Wesley Ruggles, the film’s underrated director, realizes that his picture is basically Stanwyck and Fonda and their chemistry with each other, so he keeps them in lingering two shots so that they can create the kind of give-and-take you might see at a good live theater performance. Fonda’s “little boy” act can get a bit grating, but he eventually offers a fine portrayal of a rich brat who has nothing but time on his hands to be suspicious of his wife and her male patients.
Stanwyck seems like a doctor, and when she talks about how much her work means to her, it’s easy to believe her. She does some inventive physical bits. After a fight leaves some of her hair over her eyes, she takes a moment to see the hair, actually crosses her eyes slightly, then blows the hair back with one big puff (proof that if Stanwyck wasn’t a naturally funny person, she could certainly find “humor” if she looked hard enough for it). The plot seems to be turning in an unwelcome direction as Helen decides to give up her practice to be a “good wife,” but it quickly gets back on track for a final scene that lets us see that Peter understands how important his wife’s work is to her.
Christmas in Connecticut (1945) is the sort of holiday movie that seems to have been made as bland as possible so that audiences can watch it after stuffing themselves with turkey and cranberry sauce. The movie revolves around a single, entirely predictable situation: Stanwyck’s city girl writes a popular newspaper column where she poses as a country wife and mother, and when her publisher (Sydney Greenstreet) insists on spending Christmas with her, she has to acquire a husband, a baby, and an antique-stuffed farm in short order. It’s the kind of script that might come alive with any halfway-competent comedy director, but Peter Godfrey directs in a plodding, totally uninterested manner.
“Nice firm rump,” says soldier Dennis Morgan, staring at a cow, and Stanwyck straightens up for a second, as if she’s afraid he’s talking about her, but the timing is way off. Stanwyck isn’t even at her second best here. In one of her last scenes, she rattles off a list of things she’s tired of and finishes with, “In short, I’m tired!” giving this last “tired” a too-cutesy upwards inflection. She begins the film as another craven journalist, but soon the script asks her to be unaccountably ditzy when she falls for Morgan. Surely it would have been more intriguing to see Stanwyck go head-to-head with Greenstreet in a melodrama, à la Flamingo Road (1949).
Only Stanwyck’s love of horses can possibly explain why she chose to do The Bride Wore Boots (1946), a woeful comedy in which she plays the horse-loving wife of horse-hating Robert Cummings (maybe her worst leading man). This is a fifth-rate script, and Stanwyck speeds us through most of it. But what’s odd here is that she seems to be giving a performance made up of spare parts borrowed from other comediennes. She tries out some Jean Arthur dithering when she has to be dizzy in a divorce court, scatters practically every other moment with Irene Dunne “ums” and “ahs,” and often falls into a Katharine Hepburn “a-ha-ha” laugh. Indeed, this movie asks her to laugh through her scenes so often that the strain really shows. Stanwyck isn’t a laugher, and she looks put out by her two obnoxiously bratty on-screen children, one of whom is a blond little Natalie Wood.
In one particularly distasteful plot twist, the mother of the Stanwyck character has the kiddies eat too much, so that they’ll throw up and reunite their warring parents over their sickbed. This lapse in taste was reflected off-set when director Irving Pichel ordered Cummings to do a perilous stunt ride over and over again, only to be stopped by a coolly disgusted Stanwyck, who told Pichel in no uncertain terms that if he ordered a further take, he wouldn’t direct her in another scene. I wish Pichel hadn’t directed her in anyscenes, and I sorely wish that Stanwyck could have done something less actively unfunny for what turned out to be her last film comedy.