A Life of Barbara Stanwyck by Victoria Wilson

Stanwyck’s Phyllis is femme fatale as put-on artist, sneering at respectability even as she easily manipulates the respectable people around her. Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity uses sex to get what she wants, but she is not a noir sexpot because she seems remote from desire itself, which gets in the way of what she really wants: the material trappings of middle-class comfort. And it’s what allowed her to go against the genre grain when, in the 1940s, she transitioned into noir films like Double Indemnity and, in the 1950s, into more matronly roles in melodramas like Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow, as piercing a movie about the discontents of marriage as America has ever produced.

Stanwyck’s approach made her as effective in the hard-boiled early melodramas of Frank Capra (pictures like The Miracle Woman and Forbidden) or, comedy in the 1930s and early ’40s being nearly as hard-nosed as drama, films like Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire and the greatest of all American romantic comedies, Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve. Her naturalism is the emotional forerunner of the style that came to dominate American acting as the Method made its way into Broadway and Hollywood, but it is not burdened by the neurotic complications that characterized many of the Method actors. It would be unfair, and wrong, to say that Stanwyck’s performances are uncomplicated. Or a Stanwyck character can break your heart: for example, Lee Leander in Remember the Night, who demonstrates her toughness by choosing jail rather than allowing the assistant DA who’s in love with her to throw away his career by blowing the case against her.Ī typical Stanwyck scene progresses from Point A to Point B with as little ostentation as possible, but also with emotions that run a mile deep.

A Stanwyck character can shock you: for example, Lily Powers in Baby Face, who smiles to herself as she watches the gin mill she grew up in burn to the ground, taking the bastard of a father who abused her along with it.

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck by Victoria Wilson