Ten Cents a Dance (Lionel Barrymore, 1931)

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Ricardo Cortez, Monroe Owsley, Sally Blane, Blanche Friderici, Phyllis Crane, Victor Potel, Al Hill, Jack Byron, Pat Harmon, Martha Sleeper, David Newell, Sidney Bracey. Screenplay: Jo Swerling, Dorothy Howell. Cinematography: Ernest Haller, Gilbert Warrenton. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: Arthur Huffsmith. 

Shopworn (Nick Grinde, 1932)

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Regis Toomey, Clara Blandick, Zasu Pitts, Lucien Littlefield, LeRoy Mason, Oscar Apfel, Maude Turner Gordon, Albert Conti, James Durkin. Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Jo Swerling, Robert Riskin. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Film editing: Gene Havlick. 

Forbidden (Frank Capra, 1932)

Adolphe Menjou and Barbara Stanwyck in Forbidden

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy, Dorothy Peterson, Thomas Jefferson, Myrna Fresholt, Charlotte Henry, Oliver Eckhardt. Screenplay: Frank Capra, Jo Swerling. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Film editing: Maurice Wright. 

If you can bring yourself to believe that Barbara Stanwyck's character would spend her life devoted to Adolphe Menjou's, you might like Forbidden. Its writer and director, Frank Capra, didn't, almost apologizing for it in his memoirs. Menjou was a fine character actor with a film career that stretched from 1916 to 1960, but he was no leading man. He was the guy you called on for suave but starchy, not for a lifetime of illicit passion. In Forbidden he's a lawyer and aspiring politician who meets Stanwyck's Lulu on a cruise to Havana. She's a librarian longing for romance, so she spends all her savings on that fateful cruise. They meet cute, of course: He's a little drunk and somehow mistakes her room, No. 66, for his, No. 99. Unfortunately, he's married (she doesn't know this till later) and unwilling to divorce his wife because she was seriously injured in an automobile accident he caused. But they keep seeing each other after they return to the States, she gets pregnant, and through a preposterous series of events winds up letting him and his wife adopt the child she gives birth to. Meanwhile, his political career takes off, although he has made an enemy of a newspaper editor (Ralph Bellamy), who just happens to be Lulu's boss and who wants to marry her. This elaborate contraption of a plot creaks and groans its way to a denouement that's as improbable as the rest of ir. If anything redeems the movie, it's Stanwyck's professionalism, her commitment to creating a character that's almost credible while you're watching her, but really doesn't when you think about it afterward. Capra also directs as if his story makes sense, which is no small feat. 

Ladies of Leisure (Frank Capra, 1930)

Ralph Graves and Barbara Stanwyck in Ladies of Leisure

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Ralph Graves, Lowell Sherman, Marie Prevost, Nance O'Neil, John Fawcett, Juliette Compton, Johnnie Walker. Screenplay: Jo Swerling, based on a play by Milton Herbert Gropper. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Harrison Wiley. Film editing: Maurice Wright. Music: C. Bakaleinikoff. 

Barbara Stanwyck's mastery of timing and inflection and her sheer camera presence made her a star, and Frank Capra's Ladies of Leisure was one of the first films to showcase what she could do. It's an engaging film at the start, with Stanwyck as Kay Arnold, tossing off snappy banter with Dot Lamar (Marie Prevost), her roommate and fellow "party girl." Soon there's a meet-cute with Jerry Strong (Ralph Graves), a rich guy who wants to be an artist. He asks Kay to model for him, and even though he's sort of engaged to a woman of his society set and his family disapproves of her indiscreet past, they fall in love. That's when the movie bogs down into sentimentality, Capra's fatal flaw. The only thing that holds it together is Stanwyck's obvious total commitment to making the character work. It's too bad that her leading man isn't capable of making a similar commitment -- Graves just looks a little flummoxed at what happens. Still, there's some breathless and implausible eleventh-hour suspense to liven things up at the end. 

The File on Thelma Jordon (Robert Siodmak, 1950)

Wendell Corey and Barbara Stanwyck in The File on Thelma Jordon

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Wendell Corey, Paul Kelly, Joan Tetzel, Stanley Willis, Richard Rober, Minor Watson, Barry Kelley, Gertrude Hoffman. Screenplay: Ketti Frings, Marty Holland. Cinematography: George Barnes. Art direction: Hans Dreier, A. Earl Hedrick. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Victor Young.

The chief problem with The File on Thelma Jordon is casting. Barbara Stanwyck's performance is terrific, of course, Robert Siodmak keeps a complex plot from snarling, and George Barnes's lights and shadows are eloquent. But Stanwyck is paired once again with Wendell Corey, who was her ineffective leading man in Anthony Mann's otherwise splendid The Furies, also made in 1950. Corey has no charisma and no depth. The screenplay may be at fault in not letting us see why Cleve Marshall's antagonism to his father-in-law is driving him to drink -- and into the arms of Stanwyck's scheming Thelma Jordon -- but Corey's hangdog manner doesn't help. Nor does he bring much visible intelligence to Marshall's scheming to undermine his own defense of Thelma when she's brought to trial for killing her aunt -- a murder he helped her cover up. The ending is also a bit of a muddle, largely because the Production Code meant that Thelma's crime had to be punished. What could have been a classic film noir ends up only a passable one.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Frank Capra, 1932)

Nils Asther and Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, Walter Connolly, Toshia Mori, Gavin Gordon, Lucien Littlefield, Richard Loo, Helen Jerome Eddy, Emmett Corrigan. Screenplay: Edward E. Paramore Jr., based on a novel by Grace Zaring Stone. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Film editing: Edward Curtiss. Music: E. Franke Harling. 

Maybe the best way to approach a movie like The Bitter Tea of General Yen today is to think of it as science fiction: a story taking place on a distant planet called t'Chaï-nah. Think of the heroine, Megan Davis (Barbara Stanwyck) as coming from Earth to a planet torn by civil war, seeking out her fiancé, an astronaut tasked with bringing a message of peace. Captured by the forces supporting General Yen (Nils Asther), she discovers all manner of intrigue involving the beautiful Mah-Li (Toshia Mori), one of the general's servants, and Mah-Li's lover, Captain Li (Richard Loo), as well as some exploitative dealing by her fellow Earthling, a man named Jones (Walter Connolly), the general's financial adviser. Megan finds herself strangely drawn to the alien general, despite the prohibition against interplanetary sexual relations. That way we might be able to set aside our objections to the ethnic stereotypes, the yellowface makeup of the Swedish actor playing the title role, the chop suey chinoiserie of its design and costumes, and the nonsensical taboo against "miscegenation." Because Frank Capra's film has a core of good sense and solid drama to it that almost, but not quite, overcomes the routinely racist attitudes of the time when it was made. It has good performances by its leads, some lively action scenes, and a leavening of sardonic humor provided by Connolly's Jones, who admits that he's "what's known in the dime novels as a renegade. And a darn good one at that." It also demonstrates that Capra was a pretty good director when he wasn't indulging in the sentimental populism that his most famous movies bog down in.  

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

Theresa Harris and Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier, Henry Kolker, Theresa Harris, Margaret Lindsay, Arthur Hohl, John Wayne, Robert Barrat, Douglass Dumbrille. Screenplay: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola, Darryl F. Zanuck. Cinematography: James Van Trees. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Howard Bretherton.

Baby Face has a reputation as the raunchy film that helped bring about the stifling Production Code in 1934, the year after it was released. But even in its original version -- for years only the expurgated film could be seen -- it doesn't exhibit much that would bring a blush to today's maiden cheeks. To be sure, its heroine, Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck), sleeps around in her determination to get somewhere, which in her case is marriage to a bank president. But this moral deviance, the film suggests, is the result of having been pimped out by her bootlegger father from the age of 14. So when he's blown up by the explosion of one of his stills, what else can she do but head for the big city and try to better herself? She has, after all, only the guidance of a middle-aged German, a customer of her father's speakeasy, who quotes Nietzsche at her. Her will to power involves the only capital she has: her body. So she sleeps her way up the flowchart of a New York bank until she's the kept woman of a vice-president, and when that ends in his being murdered by an ex-lover who also commits suicide in what the newspapers call a "love nest," she gets paid off -- to prevent her selling her diary to the newspapers -- with a job at the bank's Paris branch. And then she goes straight, fending off the attentions of various men, and making a success of the bank's travel bureau division. It can't end there, however, because when the bank's young president, Courtland Trenholme (George Brent), comes to Paris on a visit, they fall in love and get married, causing a scandal that leads to the bank's closing and Trenholme's indictment for some kind of corporate malfeasance. When he asks Lily to help him out financially -- she has accumulated half a million dollars in gifts from him, and presumably from her former lover -- she refuses, reverting to the ruthless, hard-edged Lily. But just as she's about to leave him she has a change of heart, only to find that the desperate Trenholme has tried to commit suicide. He's not mortally wounded, however, and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital she confesses that she really loves him and he gazes gratefully at her. Fade out. Censors in states like New York bridled at the apparent rewarding of sin and forced Warner Bros. to cut some of the more scandalous scenes and to change the ending so that Lily does penance by returning to her old home town to live a chastened life. But even in its long-lost uncensored version, there's something a little off about Baby Face, a feeling that it wants to be more than just a story about sex and upward mobility. The men in the film, including the young John Wayne, are an unmemorable series of himbos and sugar daddies, easy pushovers for the likes of an ambitious and unscrupulous young woman. The last-minute change of heart and the squishy happy ending feel unearned. What coherence the film has comes not from the script but from Barbara Stanwyck's performance, from her tough likability.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946)

Lizabeth Scott, Barbara Stanwyck, and Van Heflin in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Kirk Douglas, Lizabeth Scott, Judith Anderson, Roman Bohnen, Darryl Hickman, Janis Wilson, Ann Doran, Frank Orth, James Flavin, Mickey Kuhn, Charles D. Brown. Screenplay: Robert Rossen, John Patrick. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier, John Meehan. Film editing: Archie Marshek. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers doubles up on Lorenz Hart's line about "the double-crossing of a pair of heels" to give us a quartet of duplicity. There are no really good guys in the movie, though it tries to persuade us that tough guy Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) and lost girl Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott) are more to be admired than ruthless Martha Ivers O'Neil (Barbara Stanwyck) and her weakling alcoholic husband, Walter (Kirk Douglas). After all, teenage Martha (Janis Wilson)  did kill her imperious aunt (Judith Anderson) and, with the connivance of young Walter (Mickey Kuhn) and his father (Roman Bohnen), not only cover up the murder but also frame someone else for the job. So when Sam returns to Iverstown after 18 years, Martha and Walter naturally think that he witnessed the murder and is there to blackmail them. Actually, young Sam (Darryl Hickman) beat it out the door before the aunt was conked on the head and fell downstairs, so he's ignorant -- until well into the film -- of their crime. It's not exactly clear why Sam, who makes a living by gambling, has drifted back in town, but he's not there long before he hooks up with Toni, fresh out of prison for a theft she didn't really commit, and the two of them get dragged unwittingly into the machinations of Martha and Walter. The movie was Douglas's film debut, so he receives fourth billing after Scott. He feels a little miscast as the manipulated Walter. For one thing, he was nine years younger than Stanwyck, but he also had, even then, a stronger hold on the screen than Heflin. This is, I think, a movie that doesn't have the courage of its own nastiness, trying to make us think that Sam and Toni really deserve a happy ending when it's more likely that they will eat each other alive. Trivia note: The sailor in the car with Sam when he has his accident is played by future writer-producer-director Blake Edwards. 

Executive Suite (Robert Wise, 1954)

William Holden and June Allyson in Executive Suite

Cast: William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Louis Calhern, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, Dean Jagger, Tim Considine. Screenplay: Ernest Lehman, based on a novel by Cameron Hawley. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Edward C. Carfagno, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters.

It has been called "Grand Hotel in the boardroom" more than a few times, because what it has in common with Edmund Goulding's 1932 best picture winner is that it was made by MGM and features an all-star cast. Executive Suite doesn't have much else in common with the earlier film, which was an entertaining stew of intrigue among the glamorous guests of a Berlin hotel. This is a story about power plays in a Pennsylvania furniture manufacturing company, which is about as glamorous as it sounds. The company's president has died without leaving a designated successor. We even see him die -- or rather, we die with him, as the film opens with a subjective camera as Avery Bullard leaves his Manhattan office to take a plane to Pennsylvania for a meeting with his vice-presidents. Through his eyes we see employees greet him as he leaves his office, the elevator doors closing on him, and finally the sidewalk as he collapses from a stroke. A passerby filches the wallet he drops, empties it of cash, and tosses it in a trashcan, thereby postponing the identification of his body. So much for any real action in the movie: The rest is talk, as the company's vice-presidents gather for the meeting and then gradually learn of his death. But one person knew of Bullard's death before them: George Caswell (Louis Calhern), a member of the company's board of directors who from his office window saw Bullard's body taken away by an ambulance and now uses this knowledge to try to pull a fast one with the company's stock. Eventually, there will be a struggle among the vice-presidents to take over Bullard's job as president. It will pit Loren Shaw (Fredric March), the bean-counting company controller, against Don Walling (William Holden), the v.p. for development who is excited about a new manufacturing technique he and his staff have been working on. And that's about as dramatic as it sounds. We all know that Walling will triumph over Shaw, probably because Walling has a nice, faithful wife played by June Allyson and a son who plays Little League baseball, and Shaw doesn't. It looks for a long time like Shaw will win, partly because he is in cahoots with Caswell, promising to make his stock deal work in exchange for his vote. Walling has to win over the other members of the board, who include old-timer Fred Alderson (Walter Pidgeon), who is on his side from the start; Walter Dudley (Paul Douglas), the v.p. for sales who is carrying on an affair with his secretary (Shelley Winters), making him susceptible to blackmail by Shaw; and most crucially of all, the daughter of the company's founder, Julia Tredway (Barbara Stanwyck), who had been involved in a frustrating love affair with Bullard and now threatens to dump her stock in the company. In the end, Walling triumphs with a big speech about the company's ideals and how they're being undermined by Shaw's insistence that the only thing that matters is the stockholders' return on investment, which has led to the construction of cheap and shoddy products. It's a sentimental fable about the "good capitalist" that mercifully doesn't indulge in the red-baiting that might have been expected in a film of the 1950s but ultimately rings false. Ernest Lehman's screenplay does what it can with Cameron Hawley's novel, Robert Wise directs as if it were a better film than it is, and Nina Foch won an Oscar for her role as the company's capable executive secretary, the only woman in the film who isn't completely under the thumb of the men. A trivia note: The narrator and the off-screen voice of Tredway is future NBC newman Chet Huntley.

Gambling Lady (Archie Mayo, 1934)

Gambling Lady (Archie Mayo, 1934)

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Pat O'Brien, C. Aubrey Smith, Claire Dodd, Robert Barrat, Arthur Vinton, Phillip Reed, Philip Faversham, Robert Elliott, Ferdinand Gottschalk, Willard Robertson, Huey White. Screenplay: Ralph Block, Doris Malloy. Cinematography: George Barnes. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Harold McLernon. Music: Bernhard Kaun. Costume design: Orry-Kelly.

Barbara Stanwyck is invariably the best reason to watch any of her movies, and never more so than in Gambling Lady. Oh, her supporting cast is just fine: Joel McCrea is her reliable leading man and Claire Dodd makes the most of her rich-bitch foe. And the story, though familiar enough in its outlines and predictable enough in its resolution, keeps your attention, partly because the Production Code hadn't yet put a choke hold on depictions of the seamier side of life. Stanwyck plays Jennifer "Lady" Lee, an honest woman in a shady milieu: She's a professional gambler who refuses to cheat. It's a familiar Stanwyck character:  tough but vulnerable, and she gets many chances to show both sides throughout the film. Her best moment, perhaps, comes at the film's climax, when the rich bitch triumphs, forcing Lady to lie to save McCrea's character, the wealthy Garry Madison, whom Lady has married, from jail. So we get Stanwyck putting on a façade of cynical laughter as she pretends she has never really loved Madison but was just in it for the money. We who know the truth can see the tears welling up inside Lady, but Stanwyck successfully keeps up the front before she makes her exit and collapses in grief. This is screen acting at its best, so that even if the plotting is contrived and the situation trite, Stanwyck wins us over, making more of the scene, in fact of the whole movie, than it really deserves.

The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938)

Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Mad Miss Manton

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Sam Levene, Frances Mercer, Stanley Ridges, Hattie McDaniel. Screenplay: Philip G. Epstein, Wilson Collison. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: George Hively. Music: Roy Webb.

If The Mad Miss Manton seems to me a laborious misfire of a screwball comedy, it may be because I can't help comparing it to another film that also stars Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, Preston Sturges's sublime The Lady Eve (1941). Stanwyck plays the doyenne of a gaggle of silly socialites who get involved in trying to solve a murder. They tangle with a police lieutenant played by Sam Levene and a reporter played by Fonda in the process, but Stanwyck's character and Fonda's naturally fall in love during the proceedings. It's over-frantic and under-motivated.

Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Robert Ryan and Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night 

Mae Doyle: Barbara Stanwyck
Jerry D'Amato: Paul Douglas
Earl Pfeiffer: Robert Ryan
Peggy: Marilyn Monroe
Joe Doyle: Keith Andes
Uncle Vince: J. Carrol Naish
Papa D'Amato: Silvio Minciotti

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Alfred Hayes
Based on a play by Clifford Odets
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Art direction: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Roy Webb

There's a wonderful directorial touch in the middle of Fritz Lang's Clash by Night that almost makes up for the talky melodrama of the rest of the film: Stealing from the romantic gesture executed by Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Lang has Robert Ryan light two cigarettes at once and hand one of them to Barbara Stanwyck. She looks at it with distaste for a moment, then tosses it over her shoulder, takes out her own pack of cigarettes, and lights one herself. It's possible that the moment is spelled out in Alfred Hayes's screenplay, or in the play by Clifford Odets on which it's based, but I like to think of it as Lang's own employment of Stanwyck's great gift for playing women in charge. In fact, Stanwyck's character, Mae Doyle, is hardly ever fully in charge -- she can't control her life because of the men in it, which she describes as either "all little and nervous like sparrows or big and worried like sick bears." The problem with Clash by Night is not the cast, which is uniformly watchable, or the direction, which does what it can with the material, particularly by exploiting the film's setting -- Monterey, the bay, the fishing fleet, and Cannery Row -- but the screenplay. It's full of Odets characters who can't resolve their internal conflicts but also can't stop talking about them. Even the secondary characters, like Jerry D'Amato's father and uncle, can't help putting in their two cents, often in florid Odetsian metaphor. The title of the film comes from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," in which the speaker laments the loss of faith in a world that has "neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." It's a place where "ignorant armies clash by night." That bleak Victorian pessimism, however, doesn't translate very well to a story in which the clashing armies are men and women, a battle of the sexes that's a little too conventional in concept. Mae returns to her family home in Monterey, and immediately starts making a mess of things by attracting not only the good-hearted Jerry but also his cynical burnt-out friend Earl. Since Jerry is played by the somewhat schlubby Paul Douglas and Earl by the handsome Robert Ryan, we can see immediately where this is going to go, and the wait for it to get there gets a little tedious. There's also a rather pointless secondary plot involving Mae's brother, Joe, and his girlfriend, Peggy, who are played by Keith Andes and Marilyn Monroe. The backstories that stars and their personae bring to the roles they play are often valuable. Here, however, Marilyn's presence in the cast has unbalanced our subsequent reaction to the film, which can never be watched without the irrelevant knowledge of the actress's skyrocketing career, troubled relationship with her directors (including Lang, who terrified her so much that she vomited before performing a scene), and pitiable demise. Peggy is a small role, and she plays it well, but it was never meant to be the principal reason many people watch Clash by Night.

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

Barbara O'Neil and Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas

Stella Dallas: Barbara Stanwyck
Stephen Dallas: John Boles
Laurel Dallas: Anne Shirley
Helen Morrison: Barbara O'Neil
Ed Munn: Alan Hale
Mrs. Martin: Marjorie Main
Charlie Martin: George Walcott
Miss Phillibrown: Ann Shoemaker
Richard Grosvenor: Tim Holt

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty and its dramatization by Harry Wagstaff Gribble and Gertrude Purcell
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Sherman Todd
Costume design: Omar Kiam
Music: Alfred Newman

I'm bothered by an inconsistency in the title character of King Vidor's Stella Dallas. When Stella's estranged husband, Stephen, shows up unexpectedly at Christmastime bearing gifts for her and their daughter, Laurel, Stella makes a determined effort to look "respectable": She rummages through her closet, rejecting all the flowery, overtrimmed dresses she usually favors, and chooses a black dress, removing most of its trimmings, and even goes so far as to wipe off the lipstick she has just applied. But later, when she takes Laurel to a snooty resort, she's a blowsy horror again, swaggering vulgarly through the amused upperclass crowd -- and thereby precipitating the final separation between her and Laurel. What happened to the self-aware Stella who knew how to present herself as a suitable mate for Stephen Dallas? But the thing about this inconsistency, and other little melodramatic clichés that infest the film, is that it doesn't matter: Stella Dallas triumphs because Barbara Stanwyck believes in her and because King Vidor knows how to manipulate our responses to the characters. Stella's appearance at the resort is played as simultaneously comic -- who doesn't laugh at the way she's dressed, swanning around with a white fox fur? -- and tragic -- Stella's insistence on being herself is her fatal flaw. Similarly, when Ed Munn shows up drunk, wagging around a large turkey he has brought for Stella and Laurel's Christmas and stuffing it head, feet, and all into the oven, the scene is hilarious -- Alan Hale is wonderful here -- until it isn't, until we realize the damage it is going to do to Stella and her daughter. And the celebrated final scene, of Stella watching Laurel's wedding through the window, is beautifully performed by Stanwyck, chewing on her handkerchief, and magisterially staged by Vidor. Tears are flowing in the audience as Stella strides across the street, but she's beaming, having accomplished her chief goal: to see Laurel happy. Critiques of the movie's treatment of maternal self-sacrifice, or of marriage as the consummation of a woman's happiness, are many and cogent. But let's just take a moment to reflect on the skill with which these ideas and attitudes, retrograde as we may find them, have been presented on film.

Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941)

Henry Travers, Aubrey Mather, Oskar Homolka, Leonid Kinskey, Gary Cooper, S.Z. Sakall, Tully Marshall, Barbara Stanwyck, and Richard Haydn in Ball of Fire

Prof. Bertram Potts: Gary Cooper
Sugarpuss O'Shea: Barbara Stanwyck
Prof. Oddly: Richard Haydn
Prof. Gurkakoff: Oskar Homolka
Prof. Jerome: Henry Travers
Prof. Magenbruch: S.Z. Sakall
Prof. Robinson: Tully Marshall
Prof. Quintana: Leonid Kinskey
Prof. Peagram: Aubrey Mather
Joe Lilac: Dana Andrews
Garbage Man: Allen Jenkins
Duke Pastrami: Dan Duryea
Asthma Anderson: Ralph Peters
Miss Bragg: Kathleen Howard
Miss Totten: Mary Field
Larsen: Charles Lane
Waiter: Elisha Cook Jr.

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Thomas Monroe
Cinematography: Gregg Toland
Art direction: Perry Ferguson
Film editing: Daniel Mandell
Music: Alfred Newman

If this intersection of the talents of Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks doesn't feel much like a typical film from either, lacking some of Wilder's acerbity and Hawks's ebullience, it's perhaps because it was made under the watchful eye of producer Samuel Goldwyn. In fact, it's surprising to find Hawks working for Goldwyn at all after the brouhaha over Come and Get It (1936) that led to Hawks's being fired and replaced with William Wyler. But Goldwyn wanted the writing team of Wilder and Charles Brackett to work for him, and Wilder wanted to work with Hawks. Like everyone else in Hollywood, Wilder wanted to direct, and he wound up shadowing Hawks on the set of Ball of Fire, learning from the best. Wilder later called the picture "silly," and so it is -- not that there's anything wrong with that: Some of the greatest pictures both Wilder and Hawks made were silly, viz. Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 1959) and Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938). Ball of Fire never quite reaches the heights of either of those movies, partly because it's encumbered by plot and cast. The "seven dwarfs"  of Ball of Fire are all marvelous character actors, but there are too many of them so the film sometimes feels overbusy. The gangster plot feels cooked-up, which it is. The musical numbers featuring Gene Krupa and his orchestra bring the movie to a standstill -- a pleasant one, but it saps some of the momentum of the comedy. Still, Barbara Stanwyck is dazzling as Sugarpuss O'Shea, performing a comic twofer in 1941 with her appearance in Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve, in which she enthralls Henry Fonda's character as efficiently as she does Gary Cooper's in Ball of Fire. There are those who think Cooper is miscast, but I think he's brilliant -- he knows the role is nonsense but he gives it his all.

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

Preston Sturges, who was a screenwriter before he became a hyphenated writer-director, has a reputation for verbal wit. It's very much in evidence in The Lady Eve, with lines like "I need him like the ax needs the turkey."  But what distinguishes Sturges from writers who just happen to fall into directing is his gift for pacing the dialogue, for knowing when to cut. What makes the first stateroom scene between Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) and Charles (Henry Fonda) so sexy is that much of it is a single take, relying on the actors' superb timing -- and perhaps on some splendid coaching from Sturges. But he also has a gift for sight gags like Mr. Pike (Eugene Pallette) clanging dish covers like cymbals to demand his breakfast. And his physical comedy is brilliantly timed, particularly in the repeated pratfalls and faceplants that Fonda undergoes when confronted with a Lady Eve who looks so much like Jean. Fonda is a near perfect foil for gags like those, his character's dazzled innocence reinforced by the actor's undeniable good looks. There's hardly any other star of the time who would make Charles Pike quite so credible: Cary Grant, for example, would have turned the pratfalls into acrobatic moves. The other major thing that Sturges had going for him is a gallery of character actors, the likes of which we will unfortunately never see again: Pallette, Charles Coburn, William Demarest (who made exasperation eloquent), Eric Blore, Melville Cooper, and numerous well-chosen bit players.  

Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940)

Mitchell Leisen directed two films from screenplays by Preston Sturges. The first, Easy Living (1937), is one of the great screwball comedies, in which fat cat Edward Arnold throws his wife's fur coat out of their penthouse window and it lands on penniless Jean Arthur, who is riding by on the top deck of a double-decker bus. Wackiness ensues. But Sturges was so unhappy with what Leisen did with the other script, for Remember the Night, that he decided to direct his own screenplays for then on, resulting in one of the greatest of writer-director careers. He was, however, so delighted with Barbara Stanwyck's performance in Remember the Night that he created one of his best movies, The Lady Eve (1941), for her. Stanwyck and her co-star, Fred MacMurray, are in fact the best thing about Remember the Night, on which Leisen could never find the right handle. It starts as screwball comedy, with Stanwyck playing Lee Leander, a compulsive shoplifter whose theft of a bracelet lands her in court being prosecuted by assistant district attorney John Sargent (MacMurray). It is just before Christmas, and when the judge rules for a continuance until after the holidays, Sargent good-heartedly arranges for Lee to be released on bail rather than spend the holidays in jail. When defendant and prosecutor find that they are both from Indiana, he decides to give her a lift home. Naturally, they fall in love, and not so naturally, the movie falls to pieces. It devolves into a sentimental nostalgia piece, with a few good lines and some nice performances, particularly by Beulah Bondi as Sargent's mother, Elizabeth Patterson as his maiden aunt, and Sterling Holloway as his simple-minded cousin. But the problem is that they have to return to New York and she has to face him as prosecutor, not as fiancé. The Indiana scenes are preposterous: Sargent's family lives on a farm near a small town that seems untouched by the 20th century, a place without electricity where the chief amusements are taffy pulls and barn dances. It's possible that Sturges could have resolved all of this better than Leisen does, but the material needs a consistent touch that the director is unable to provide.

Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

Oscar-bashing is an easy game to play, but sometimes it's a necessary one. Double Indemnity was nominated for seven Academy Awards: best picture, best director (Billy Wilder), best actress (Barbara Stanwyck), best screenplay (Wilder and Raymond Chandler), best black-and-white cinematography (John F. Seitz), best scoring (Miklós Rózsa), and best sound recording. It won none of them. The most egregious losses were to the sugary Going My Way, which was named best picture; Leo McCarey won for direction, and Frank Butler and Frank Cavett won for a screenplay that seems impossibly pious and sentimental today. Almost no one watches Going My Way today, whereas Double Indemnity is on a lot of people's lists of favorite films. The reason often cited for Double Indemnity's losses is that it was produced by Paramount, which also produced Going My Way, and that the studio instructed its employees to vote for the latter film. But the Academy always felt uncomfortable with film noir, of which Double Indemnity, a film deeply cynical about human nature, is a prime example. Wilder and Chandler completely reworked James M. Cain's story in their screenplay, and while they were hardly cheerful co-workers (Wilder claimed that he based the alcoholic writer in his 1945 film The Lost Weekend on Chandler), the result was a fine blend of Wilder's bitter wit and Chandler's insight into the twisted nature of the protagonists, Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) and Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). And as long as we're on the subject of Oscars, there are the glaring absences of MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson from the nominations -- and not only for this year: Neither actor was ever nominated by the Academy. MacMurray's departure from his usual good-guy roles to play the sleazy, murderous Neff should have been the kind of career about-face the Academy often applauds. And Robinson's dogged, dyspeptic insurance investigator, Barton Keyes, is one of the great character performances in a career notable for them. (The supporting actor Oscar that he should have won went to Barry Fitzgerald's twinkly priest in Going My Way, a part for which Fitzgerald had been, owing to a glitch in the Academy's rules, nominated in both leading and supporting actor categories.)

Meet John Doe (Frank Capra, 1941)

Walter Brennan, Gary Cooper, Irving Bacon, Barbara Stanwyck, and James Gleason in Meet John Doe

John Doe: Gary Cooper
Ann Mitchell: Barbara Stanwyck
D.B. Norton: Edward Arnold
The "Colonel": Walter Brennan
Mrs. Mitchell: Spring Byington
Henry Connell: James Gleason
Mayor Lovett: Gene Lockhart
Ted Sheldon: Rod LaRocque
Beany: Irving Bacon
Bert: Regis Toomey

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a story by Richard Connell and Robert Presnell Sr.
Cinematography: George Barnes
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Daniel Mandell
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Meet John Doe opens with reporters and editors at a newspaper being fired because the owner wants it to be, as the paper's new slogan says, "streamlined ... for a streamlined age." And the plot involves a very wealthy man who uses a phony populist approach to try to get himself elected president. Who says a 74-year-old movie isn't relevant today? But the movie eventually falls apart because Frank Capra can't get his story to make sense. I never watch a Capra film without wanting to throw something at the screen, and that includes the beloved It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which makes me faintly nauseated. Meet John Doe has a few wonderful things going for it, principally the opportunity to see Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper at their starry prime. (Though they were much better in a movie they made together in the same year, Howard Hawks's Ball of Fire.) Experience tells, and by 1941 Stanwyck had been making movies for more than a decade, and Cooper had been in films since the mid-1920s. They had the kind of easy, spontaneous, natural manner on screen that could steady even the most wobbly vehicle. Meet John Doe starts to wobble about halfway through, when it becomes apparent that there is no easy way Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin can resolve the director's muddled populist sentiments: Capra always wants to celebrate the "common man" in his movies, but it was clear to anyone on the brink of the entry of the United States into World War II that the common man was a dangerous force to work with. So what we have in the film is an odd mix of sentimentality and cynicism. Stanwyck's character, Ann Mitchell, starts as a cynic, concocting a sob story about a "John Doe" who threatens to commit suicide because he's fed up with a corrupt society. She does it to save her job at the newspaper, and the equally cynical managing editor Henry Connell decides to run with it. That's when they find a homeless man (Cooper) to pretend to be the real John Doe. When he turns out to be an inspiration to the "common man" of Capra's fantasies, bringing about peace and harmony across the land, the sentimentality takes over, converting Ann and Connell, but also playing into the hands of the paper's owner, D.B. Norton, who tries to use John Doe's followers for political gain. And when John Doe is exposed as a fake, the adoring millions suddenly turn into a raging mob. If Capra weren't so invested in making things turn out all right, he could have created a powerful satire, but he couldn't find an ending to the film that would satisfy both his Hollywood-nurtured sentimentality and the logic of the plot.