ODE TO BARBARA STANWYCK by Craig Hammill

Today, just a humble song of praise to classic Hollywood actress Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990).

There are the movie stars that still burn bright in our imaginations partly because they became (willing or unwilling) a cog in the visual American iconography machine-Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Charlie Chaplin. Hell, you probably saw or knew someone who bought a poster with all of them on it.

But then there are the Hollywood stars and actors who everyone knows but don’t get their praises sung enough. In this programmer’s opinion that’s the wildly spirited, ridiculously talented, always game to take a chance Barbara Stanwyck.

Stanwyck was one of those bedrock actors who had a career from the age of 20 (as an uncredited Showgirl in 1927’s Broadway Nights) to her late 70’s (in the prime time TV soap opera The Colbys). When Stanwyck had the chance to play bad, she PLAYED BAD. When TV came along and the movie offers weren’t gushing, she did TV.

In a way, Stanwyck always radiated practicality and adaptability. She was no wilting lily. No delicate flower. She was a desert succulent and she was gonna survive and thrive no matter what happened around her.

What this programmer admires most about Stanwyck was her willingness to take chances on roles. Like Gene Hackman, like Jimmy Cagney, like Toshiro Mifune, like Isabelle Huppert, Stanwyck could play romantic comedy, the heroine in a drama, and the femme fatale villain in a noir with equal aplomb.

Look at her in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe. She’s the hard nosed, hard working, always seeing the angle journalist Ann Mitchell who creates a national hero out of thin air to save her job. Here Stanwyck gets to lean into a number corners of range-her facility with comedy, romance, hard nosed drama, even teary-eyed melodrama-all get flexed here.

Then check her out just four years later in Billy Wilder’s acid black noir classic Double Indemnity. As seductress, murderess, Phyllis Dietrichson, you know Stanwyck is the smartest person in the room. Maybe not the most ethical, moral, or likeable. Damn, she’s like a libidinous shark in sunglasses and lipstick. But she makes all the men look like rubes.

What’s great here is Stanwyck’s willingness to play rotten, to play bad. It’s this programmer’s belief that those actors with the talent and willingness to play everything from the lead to the horrifyingly great villain character part are the ones who can write their own ticket. They can’t get boxed in as a single “type”.

“Oh,” you can hear a studio exec say. “She’s only good as the clumsy love interest.”

But you wouldn’t hear studio execs say that about Stanwyck. Unless they were dunces who had never seen her movies.

Finally, look at her in an infinitely complex and brutal film like Anthony Mann’s western The Furies. Mann made a career out of complex and brutal films. And The Furies, though not as well known as Mann’s later Western cycle with Jimmy Stewart, shows a passionate, iconoclastic Stanwyck as cattle heiress Vance Jeffords who is as fiercely independent as her cattle ranch owner father T.C. Jeffords (a wonderfully brash Walter Huston). As in so many Mann westerns, the psychological undercurrents of psycho-sexual tension and love ripple. And Stanwyck commits whole heartedly to loving AND hating her father exactly because she is so much like him.

And when Stanwyck gets mad in this movie, watch out. She’s a cyclone.

There are of course too many other great roles to get into here-Stanwyck does screwball in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve and Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire. Stanwyck does the tearjerker in Stella Dallas. Stanwyck does the cult movie in Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns.

But for all those actors out there who want to see what the real deal looks like. Look no further. Type in Barbara Stanwyck into your ROKU and watch absolutely everything that comes up.

Written by Craig Hammill. Founder.Programmer of Secret Movie Club.