Here’s something for the weekend—the other day was the anniversary of Barbara Stanwyck, than whom no actress in Hollywood did better to showcase feminine daring in both comedy & tragedy.
Let’s start with the noir, Double Indemnity (1944), directed by the great Billy Wilder from a script he wrote with Raymond Chandler, based on a novel by James Cain. Stanwyck plays a very dangerous woman, who hides behind boredom a murderous disposition, behind cynicism & sarcasm a willingness & ability to seduce & delude, behind her vulgarity a tragic challenge to the American way of life, its freedom, justice, & temptation to reduce humanity to bureaucratic rationalism—needless to say, for a woman with a lot to hide, she’s more than eager to reveal all. Much of Stanwyck’s ability as an actress comes from her confidence in face of men, which suggests she knows not merely their desires, but their weaknesses, how they might be humiliated or even ruined, & this movie is unique for proving what that’s all about. Then, too, there is a certain tenderness in this most vicious woman, since if she didn’t have some hope of a happy love, she would neither be quite so lawless, in disappointment, nor so easily able to unman.
You can listen to my conversation with Terry Teachout below: Double Indemnity is both typical of the noir, it has all the elements, & excellent, rising above its source & the expectations of the audience both. (Or on youtube.)
As for comedy, back when Zena Hitz & I did our series on Preston Sturges comedies, we talked about The Lady Eve (1941), a wonderful view of the difficulties of modern marriage. You get Barbara Stanwyck & Hank Fonda, along with a comic cast that’s hard to beat, for which Sturges was famous, functioning as his own producer, not to say studio head, though merely a writer who’d been allowed to direct for the first time the previous year... Stanwyck plays the daughter of a con man to the rich, part of an entire fake family of fake aristocrats & assorted other respectable wealthy who charm & swindle people gambling. Partly, this is to do with the famous adage, a fool & his money are soon parted, the more so the more the fool is self-important. Partly, it’s do with something the rich secretly desire, but cannot have within the confines of respectability—it’s what we also feel for the duration of the movie, spellbound as we are by this vision of the graceful conquest of fortune. Stanwyck never looked so lovely as in this movie, nor as funny—indeed, she moves from shameless to ashamed to melancholy, from heartbroken to outraged to vengeful—an entire catalogue of the drama of American womanhood in search of the reliable happiness of marriage.
So there’s the story: Daring women, shy men, the competition for money in a classless society, as well as the glamour of aristocratic pretense—it’s all there, & so’s the comic view of the Hollywood director as running commentary on society’s frivolities, in a scene that emphasizes how everything in the movies is made up to fool us while showing us that the fiction is truer to our lives than any documentary. (Listen below, or go to youtube.)