To some, The Belcourt's decision to devote weekends in April and May to selections from Barbara Stanwyck's filmography may seem peculiar. Underrated both as an actor and a sexy screen presence, Stanwyck wasn't a breathy glamourpuss like Marilyn Monroe or an icy icon like Katharine Hepburn, just to name two Golden Age leading ladies who've been better celebrated. To others, however, a Stanwyck series is long overdue. The Belcourt is just one of several revival houses that have saluted the late actress in recent years. (Just this past February, the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto did a retrospective called "Ball of Fire: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck.")
When I asked Belcourt programmer Toby Leonard why he decided to pay tribute to Stanwyck, he said it wasn't just the actress's allure that made him assemble the series. In her 88-film career, the screen siren racked up quite the track record working with equally formidable directors. In this retrospective, audiences will see Stanwyck from the filmmaking perspective of lots of biggies: Capra, Hawks, Wilder, Sturges. You'll even see her in films by melodramatic madmen Douglas Sirk and Sam Fuller. (Leonard admitted that he's pissed films she did with Fritz Lang and Anthony Mann didn't make the cut.)
By rounding up films from an upper-tier collection of filmmakers, Leonard and The Belcourt show just how enticing and in-demand Stanwyck was as an actress back in the day. Sure, Stanwyck could play a bad-ass Vargas girl come to life, complete with a face and voice that exuded come-hither smokiness. But as the Belcourt retrospective demonstrates, she excelled at playing women who could use those attributes as weapons, whether offensive or defensive, having learned early on how to play the rigged game of a male-dominated world. Stanwyck's most memorable characters didn't mind taking dudes — both on-screen and in the audience — by the balls.
The films in the Belcourt series are filled with guys who don't have a chance when Stanwyck shows up on the scene. Last weekend, the retrospective kicked off with a double feature of The Lady Eve and Double Indemnity, two of Stanwyck's most famous vehicles. In those mirror-image films she played comic and tragic variations of the same character: a con-girl temptress who takes some poor schnook (Henry Fonda in Eve; Fred MacMurray in Indemnity) who should know better for an eventful ride.
But Fonda and MacMurray aren't the only leading men who couldn't resist the gal. There's George Brent and a young, business-suited John Wayne in the pre-Code drama Baby Face (playing this Saturday and Sunday); Barry Sullivan in the batty but exquisitely shot Western Forty Guns (May 23-24); Gary Cooper in the quintessential screwball comedy Ball of Fire (my favorite Stanwyck movie, April 25-26). MacMurray even comes back for more in Remember the Night and There's Always Tomorrow (both May 2-3).
Yet as aggressive as Stanwyck often came across on screen, she brought a streak of hard-protected vulnerability that made audiences want to see more of her. They could see how hard her vamps, put-upon mothers and Wild West matriarchs had fought to get what they had. Much like the actress herself, whose life was rocky and tumultuous way before she became an A-lister — you can read more about her path as an orphan and foster-home kid turned showgirl in Victoria Wilson's epic 2013 biography, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 — Stanwyck's characters were often tough gals who'd learned to keep their inner selves closely guarded. That's part of what makes her best movies seem so fresh and unsentimental. In a society where greedy horndogs not only dealt the cards but owned the deck, her sometimes fatal femmes knew that looking and acting "womanly" could be a lot more useful than being a woman.
A Stanwyck Sampler
Baby Face (April 11-12; on a double bill with William Wellman's socko melodrama Night Nurse) Armed with a volume of Nietzsche and her feminine attributes, saloon gal Stanwyck literally sleeps her way to the top of a corporation — with the camera scaling a story of the skyscraper headquarters with each new conquest. Director Alfred E. Green's 1933 jaw-dropper helped bring about the infamous Hays Production Code, but fear not: This is the uncensored version with its überfrau rhetoric intact ("Exploit yourself!").
Remember the Night (May 2-3) Why Mitchell Leisen's 1940 romantic drama — the first teaming of Double Indemnity lustbirds Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray — hasn't caught on as a Christmas perennial is beyond us. This Preston Sturges-scripted gem about soft-hearted prosecutor MacMurray showing shoplifter Stanwyck a glimpse of a happier life over the holidays offers an affecting blend of verbal comedy, seasonal sentiment and hard-edged pathos. It's on a must-see double bill with ...
There's Always Tomorrow (May 2-3) The final screen pairing of Stanwyck and MacMurray, this devastating 1956 melodrama of smothered passion remains a hidden treasure in the Douglas Sirk filmography. It's something of a sex reversal on his peerless All That Heaven Allows, with MacMurray the lonely middle-aged married man whose fires are rekindled by old flame Stanwyck, over the objections of his rotten kids.
Stella Dallas (May 9-10) Love to cry at movies? A haybale of Kleenexes won't sustain you through Stanwyck's signature role as the most selfless of big-screen moms — a part that shows off her full range from brassy blue-collar siren to tear-stained martyr. The Belcourt's showing it on Mother's Day, no less. Call your mama, willya?
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (May 16-17) No, this isn't the first time the words "Frank Capra" and "erotic drama" have appeared together in a sentence. The early films Capra made with Stanwyck (including the Aimee Semple McPherson roman à clef The Miracle Woman, shown here in a double bill) smolder with pre-Code sensuality — especially this atmospheric 1933 mood piece about a missionary drawn to her Chinese warlord captor (played by Swedish actor Nils Asther).
Forty Guns (May 23-24) Stanwyck moved into a fruitful mid-career phase in Westerns in the 1950s; this hog-wild Samuel Fuller horse opera rides a psychosexual range all its own, as the leading lady presides over a stable of itchy-triggered men — sparking some of the most blatant single-entendre dialogue of all time. "May I feel it?" Stanwyck says, reaching for gunslinger Barry Sullivan's rod. His retort seems like the ultimate in insolent coded sex talk — "It might go off in your face" — but only Stanwyck could get away with cooing back, "I'll take a chance." —Jim Ridley
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