Barbara Stanwyck

  • Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

    Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) It took me too long to warm up to Barbara Stanwyck as an actress (as opposed to a collection of great performances) but now that I have, nearly every film in which she’s involved is worth at least a first look and sometimes a second. In Sorry, Wrong Number, she has the advantage of being paired up with Burt Lancaster in one of his first roles, playing against this leading-man good looks. Both are well-known actors born only six years apart, but they are not often associated with the same period in film history (her: 1930-40s; him: 1950s-60s), so it’s interesting to see that pairing on-screen, toward the end of Stanwyck’s glory days and the very beginning of Lancaster’s rise. Sorry, Wrong Number’s other two assets are a devilishly effective premise (an invalid woman hearing her own murder plotted on a phone) and an utterly merciless ending that still manages to shock decades later. In-between those highlights, however, the film can occasionally drag—In an effort to expand the original theatrical story into feature-film length, this adaptation includes flashbacks explaining everything about the characters and where they’re coming from. Some of it is effective, some feels like padding even at a total length of 89 minutes. Stanwyck is effective as always (she was nominated for an Oscar for the performance), while Lancaster feels almost subdued in a shifty role. There’s a good reason why Sorry, Wrong Number remains a film noir landmark—the fatality of its last third weighs heavily in a movie that does not reach for a preposterous happy ending. Not bad—but you may want to watch something cheerier afterwards.

  • These Wilder Years (1956)

    These Wilder Years (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) It’s curious that, considering their lengthy careers spanning roughly the same decades, there is only one screen pairing of James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck—These Wilder Years, a straightforward drama that barely makes use of their most distinctive skills. Oh, it’s not bad and it does start with a strong scene, as a steel magnate advises his board of directors that he’s taking an indefinite leave of absence and will go as far as the moon if he needs to. The mystery is soon cleared up — having given up his son for adoption twenty years earlier, he’s out to find him and reunite. This being the 1950s, there are considerable obstacles in his way, most of them incarnated by a steely orphanage administrator (Stanwyck) who will simply not allow him to bribe, bully or force his way in their files. A romance develops, although that’s really not the end of the story. As a drama, it’s surprisingly compelling — the plotting is straightforward, and there are a few intriguing last-film twists. Cagney sells the remorseful business tycoon characters, and Stanwyck is in fine determined form in a late-career role. Still, there isn’t much here to make their roles suited to their screen persona — it’s a script that could have been handed to any pair of actors without too much trouble. Still, it is fun to see those screen veterans in antagonistic/romantic roles, prodding at each other in ways that add depth to the words on the page. Make no mistake: These Wilder Years would be almost instantly forgettable if it wasn’t for those two leads. But given that it does offer the sight of Cagney and Stanwyck sharing the screen, I’m glad it exists.

  • Illicit (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) I’m always a bit amazed at the way 1930s films, either pre-Code or post-Code in a comic mode, treated the so-called institution of marriage: People got married on a whim, divorced quickly and filled the in-between with bickering, adultery, cynicism and everything that movies then spent decades downplaying. Illicit isn’t all that different from other Pre-Code films, but the biting (if theatrical) dialogue is still mordant. Barbara Stanwyck’s first starring role gets quite a bit of attention considering the risqué subject matter: two long-time lovers seeing their relationship sour after finally marrying, and straying far apart before ultimately reconciling. At times venomously cynical about marriage, Illicit doesn’t quite hit all of the right notes, but it does match enough of them to still be eyebrow-raising even for Pre-Code fans. This being said, let’s not be too enthusiastic about it: It’s not that scandalous (as per him having an affair and not her), and the conclusion seems remarkably unconvincing in its sudden espousal of traditional values. Coming from the early-1930s, the staging is sadly too theatrical, and the subject matter suffers the sad fate of being daring, but not daring enough for us viewers ninety years later. Still, Illicit can be worth a watch for a frank treatment of shifting social more before the Production Code infantilized American cinema.

  • The Woman in Red (1935)

    The Woman in Red (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Liking classic films doesn’t mean giving a free pass to those with particularly idiotic plotting or lopsided structure. The main draw of The Woman in Red is easy to see: here’s Barbara Stanwyck getting a chance to play a character going through terrible events — a horse rider hobnobbing uneasily with the New England elite, with a cross-class marriage leading to further trouble and then, in the last half-hour of the film, a death that brings up even more trouble, especially when the characters become morons who won’t tell the truth. The Woman in Red feels like three movies smashed together, from romance to rich-person drama to murder/courtroom thriller. But maybe Stanwyck’s latter stature now gives the film too big a set of expectations to satisfy — in most other aspects, this feels like the kind of seat-warmer that Warner Brothers (like most other studios) churned out on a near-weekly basis throughout the 1930s. Stanwyck certainly elevates the material, but there’s only so much substance to elevate in The Woman in Red. It’s a rather disappointing part of her filmography, but not every film can be a triumph.

  • Ladies They Talk About (1933)

    Ladies They Talk About (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) The history of women-in-prison films is much older than I thought, as demonstrated by Ladies They Talk About, an early-1930s film describing life in jail for a female bank robber. This being said, even this Pre-Code film is nowhere near the same leagues as the exploitation subgenre that began in the 1970s with The Big Doll House — it may be titillating at times (notably with girl-on-girl fighting and ladies wearing not much by Code standards) but nowhere near as exploitative as later takes on similar material. While audiences at the time may have been intrigued, modern viewers may find more to like in an early Barbara Stanwyck performance as the protagonist — she’s nowhere near as polished or unforgiving as in later performances, but she’s already showing the mixture of beauty, steel and versatility that would mark her as a leading actress across decades. This being said, the script itself can be really odd at times — strange twists and turns, including an impromptu musical number (starring a picture of Joe E. Brown!), an unusual lack of spatial unity for a prison film, and an ending in which the heroine shoots a guy but immediately regrets what she’s done (it qualifies as a flesh wound and a happy ending). Watch it for Stanwyck more than anything else — although it’s interesting to see the film’s messiness at times.

  • The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947)

    The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Some films have far more curb appeal than actual polish, and The Two Mrs. Carrolls is a fine example of those. It’s hard not to get intrigued by a film featuring no less than Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck in a domestic thriller. But there’s a reason why the film is far less often mentioned as those two stars’ best work: it ends up being a clunky mixture of miscasting, undercooked screenplay, dull direction and its own inability to stick to a gothic presentation. None of this applies to Stanwyck: She owns the film’s best moments, and while she’s playing a naïve character far away from her usual tough dames, she plays her with the kind of elegant dignity she could lend to any dramatic role at that point in her career. Sadly, Bogart doesn’t do so well, and much of it has to do with a double mismatch with the screen persona he took up in the 1940s — his shtick was a roguish but ultimately honourable man’s man, not the insane gothic villain painter that the script requires him to be, all the way to an over-the-top conclusion in which he crashes through a window with a murderous look in his eyes. He simply doesn’t fit the requirements of the story — a similar problem that many domestic thrillers of the 1940s found in casting likable leading men in darker roles (such as Cary Grant in Suspicion). It really doesn’t help that The Two Mrs. Carrolls is saddled with an unsatisfactory script: adapted and beholden to a stage play, it piles on the implausibilities and incoherences, with a female protagonist who should have figured something well before she laboriously pieces everything together. The film always seems to be holding back — perhaps due to its stars being unwilling to commit to a truly gothic take on the Bluebeard tale, perhaps by elevating director Peter Godfrey beyond his competencies at the time. The result is far from being unwatchable — but The Two Mrs. Carrolls’s interest is how odd of a film it is, and how it simply doesn’t meet its own objectives. Further reading on the film’s troubled production history reveals more of the backstory: Filmed in 1945 but held back for a variety of possible reasons until two years later, it suffered from a cavalcade of issues, not the least of which being a too-strong similarity with similar evil-Bogart vehicle Conflict.

  • Clash by Night (1952)

    Clash by Night (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) On paper, Clash by Night feels like a must-see film: An intense small-town drama directed by Fritz Lang, featuring a late-career performance from Barbara Stanwyck and one of the first featured turns from Marilyn Monroe? Who can resist that? Alas, the film itself is not quite as gripping. While the drama’s bubbling into melodrama can be momentarily intense, the film feels poorly paced, with numerous lulls, overdone moments and an unsatisfying conclusion. The relatively small stakes (in a small coastal town setting) don’t add much more, and you can almost feel Lang itching to take the film firmly into noir crime thriller territory, while being held back by the material stemming from a realistic Broadway play. In other words, Clash by Night feels far from being even the sum of its parts — not a particular highlight for its time, and a minor entry in everyone’s filmography.

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, August 2021) It’s not so easy to assess films that competently do something that you just happen to not like very much. So it is that Clash by Night does have a clear intention in mind, as it follows a woman coming back to a small town after years living in the big city. The film is clearly split in two acts, and the melodrama inherent in the premise means that no one will be all that happy with the ending. It’s a story about picking between a dangerous but exciting man and a safe but dull one, set against a small fishing community. As the lead, Barbara Stanwyck here clearly demonstrates why she’s widely considered one of the best actresses of Classical Hollywood, and then there’s a younger Marilyn Monroe doing well in a supporting role. Robert Ryan and Paul Douglas play the poles of masculinity that the lead gravitates to. The small-town atmosphere is effective and clearly weaved into the plotting. Fritz Lang’s direction is straightforward, and perhaps less beholden to the film noir style he was using in other movies at the time. That drama is strong (fittingly for a film adapted from a play) even if it frequently dips into what twenty-first century viewers will see as melodrama with a woman making poor choices and creating all sorts of problems for herself. Of course, that’s the point of the film: the lack of temporal unity is deliberate, as are the theatrical anguish, overdone antagonist and manipulative elements of the conclusion. All of which may explain why I end up appreciative but generally cool to the results – Clash by Night is a fine melodrama with good performances, but I’m having a hard time mustering any enthusiasm about it.

  • My Reputation (1946)

    My Reputation (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Barbara Stanwyck’s chameleonic persona as an actress meant that she could play in anything from drama to comedy and elevate the level of the production almost singlehandedly. In My Reputation, she leans almost exclusively on the dramatic side, as she plays a WW2 widow who comes to love another man, much to everyone’s dismay and disapproval. This being a wartime picture, the second man is a soldier, and the ending stops short of providing immediate gratification to anyone. The film itself is rather ordinary — not bad in its depiction of a long-married woman trying to find a life for herself, and not bad either at tackling the complications of a widow getting back in a relationship relatively soon after the death of her husband. There’s some diffuse criticism of the way she gets treated (married men make passes at her; married women don’t know what to do with her while disapproving anyway) but it’s Stanwyck who proves to be the film’s single best asset, anchoring the heavy-handed drama with her skills as a versatile actress. There isn’t much to be said about My Reputation’s utilitarian approach to sets, cinematography or direction — it keeps the romantic potboiler warm enough to make audiences satisfied and nothing more. As I said: forgettable without Stanwyck.

  • Annie Oakley (1935)

    Annie Oakley (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) It took me a longer time than I care to admit for me to warm up to Barbara Stanwyck—not because she’s anything less than a terrific actress, but because she was never quite interested in creating a distinctive screen persona. Unlike other actors in the Hollywood star system, her many great roles span a number of genres and personality types. This makes it difficult to rely on a Stanwyck screen persona like many of her contemporaries. For someone who delivered striking performances in farcical comedy, thrilling noir, pre-Code provocation and straight dramas, seeing her take up the biography of Western sharpshooter Annie Oakley is just yet another puzzle piece in a wonderfully diverse filmography. Despite many liberties taken with the character (the least of them being upgrading Oakley’s looks to Hollywood standards), Stanwyck remains the centrepiece of the film. There’s a playful quality to the way the film reinterprets Oakley’s life to fit with remembered history, and that basic narrative thrust propels the film forward. Those who don’t care much about westerns will have to rely on star power and the film’s gradual escape from the Wild West into more urban society, as Oakley becomes an entertainment star. Those who chronicle native presence in western films will note a far more sympathetic role than expected for Chief Thunderbird as Sitting Bull—at a time where Native Americans seldom had any role in westerns beyond being violent antagonists. This grab bag of interesting elements does help make Annie Oakley worth a look—but if you’ve trained yourself to pay attention to Barbara Stanwyck’s chameleonic screen persona, it approaches being a must see.

  • Remember the Night (1940)

    Remember the Night (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) It’s hard to go wrong with Preston Sturges, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, even if Remember the Night is a portent of better things to come for all of them. An incredible contrivance is at the heart of the story – a District Attorney taking an accused shoplifter with him on a long car trip to spend Christmas with his parents. It’s a splendid excuse for a romantic comedy, though – with Stanwyck as the corrupt temptress and MacMurray as the letter-perfect officer of the law, working at tempering their differences and gradually falling in love along the way. (Their climactic kiss takes place in front of Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side.) This was the last film exclusively penned by Sturges before he took up directing (Mitchell Leisen directed this one), and it’s filled with great moments, good dialogue, clever plotting and well-sketched characters. Remember the Night manages the impressive trick of being both archetypical enough to summarize quickly, and has a stuffed plot to make the moment-to-moment watching of the film engaging enough. It’s both a Christmas film and something that can be watched any other month of the year: when it’s funny, it’s very funny, and when it’s romantic, it’s very romantic. And yet, all three major players here would go on to bigger and better successes, sometimes even with each other – Stanwyck and Sturges in The Lady Eve, Stanwyck and MacMurray in Double Indemnity, and, of course, Sturges by himself with an extraordinary series of films over the following few years.

  • Witness to Murder (1954)

    Witness to Murder (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) I count at least four excellent reasons to watch Witness to Murder. For one thing, it has a really good late-period film noir premise, as a woman looks outside her apartment window and witnesses a man murdering another woman. The second reason is that our heroine is played by Barbara Stanwyck, in a late-career role (her first was in a 1920s silent film!) that does much to reinforce her chameleon-like acting range. The third reason is her opponent – a deliciously slimy George Sanders, with his haughty attitude complementing a character that delights in covering his track and making the heroine feel as if she’s going crazy. Finally, the fourth reason to watch the film may be more striking to modern audiences: the encroaching paranoia as the heroine tries to convince the authorities that a murder has taken place, but no one will believe her. The film isn’t afraid to rile audiences against impassive authority figures, and that does give, along with a role as a single career woman for the mature Stanwyck, a progressive kick to the result. A fifth, perhaps most visible reason to watch Witness to Murder would be the terrific cinematography, which luxuriates in strong black-and-white imagery to give the film an undeniably film noir visual polish that elevates the script into something worth seeing. No matter the reason, Witness to Murder does rank as a very enjoyable thriller, more for the above-average execution than the sometimes-frustrating nature of the script.

  • Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

    Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) One of the central tenets of my evolving Grand Unified Theory of Christmas Movies is that for one to succeed, it must simultaneously depend on Christmas and yet be interesting outside of it. In other words, farther away from quantum uncertainty: The plot must be made possible by Christmas, yet be interesting enough to be watchable anytime from January to November. On those two metrics, Christmas in Connecticut succeeds admirably: It features a comic premise in which a single childless columnist having never set foot outside Manhattan is forced to pretend to be the exemplary rural housewife of her columns due to a Christmas publicity stunt. At the same time, it quickly becomes the kind of farce that’s well worth watching at any time of the year. It certainly helps that it features Barbara Stanwyck at her funniest, with capable character actors such as S.Z. Sakall and Sydney Greenstreet to keep things funny even when she’s not on-screen. The complications, deceptions and convoluted plans pile up as quickly as the romantic tension between the protagonist and a war hero targeted by the charade, leading to a climax in which everything is revealed. As a comedy, it’s quite good enough to satisfy even without the Christmas element, but removing it would make the film collapse under its own contradictions. (If the lesson here is that Christmastime makes people behave irrationally, well, I think that’s my point.) The depth of Hollywood Christmas movies is such that I hadn’t seriously looked at Christmas in Connecticut before this year, but now that I have, I can see it become a season favourite.

  • Baby Face (1933)

    Baby Face (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Every time I think I’ve seen enough of the Pre-Code era, TCM unearths another example of the period from its archives and I’m left agog at how good 1930–1934 movies could be. To be fair, Baby Face is an exemplary example of the form (“The Citizen Kane of Pre-Code movies,” as it’s been memorably called), with Barbara Stanwyck playing a young woman who uses sex to climb up the social ladder. Through a series of seductions and some incredible chutzpah whenever danger threatens to bring her down, she spends the film going from success to success. There are clear plot similarities here with Red-Headed Woman, as Warner Brother was trying to outdo MGM in the salaciousness department. But Baby Face still has the power to astonish by its very direct references to the lead characters’ carnality and her utter amorality—it’s no wonder that it’s often mentioned as one of the dozens of movies that specifically caused the Hays Code to be imposed on Hollywood in 1934-35. Now that it has been unearthed from the archives (and even included in the National Film Registry!), it’s a welcome reminder that the “innocent” Hollywood of 1935-60ish was an imposed fabrication rather than a representation of people who didn’t know any better. Stanwyck is remarkable here, although, as usual, her role is strikingly different from any of the other movies she’s known for: he managed to evade pigeonholing, at the expense of developing a consistent screen persona like so many of her contemporaries. Elsewhere in the cast, a young John Wayne shows up as one of the seduced men. I was really enjoying most of the film until the ending—after so much status-seeking depravity, it seems a bit cheap to have the protagonist see the errors of her ways at the very end. But that may be asking a bit too much for even a Pre-Code film: a completely amoral ending that respected the character would have been going too far. Still, the rest of Baby Face is definitely worth a look: Pre-Code Hollywood is special.

  • Executive Suite (1954)

    Executive Suite (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I am fascinated by tales of boardroom intrigue, a fascination that comes from my background as a white-collar office drone, constantly aware and at the mercy of senior management shenanigans. I also suspect that such high-level executive machinations are perhaps the closest modern equivalent to palace intrigue, what with the king having to deal with his scheming courtiers in modern attire. No matter the reason, I found myself very quickly drawn into Executive Suite’s steely-eyed depiction of the feeding frenzy that follows the death of a furniture magnate, as two visions of the company battle it out in a succession drama played in voting shares and personal grudges. The film’s opening moments are remarkable, as a first-person point of view of someone sending a telegram and going out to take a taxi turns tragic when the person dies and his wallet is stolen. It turns out that we’ve just seen the death of a company president, and the wallet theft means that no one (except for one executive using this knowledge for insider trading) will realize what happened for another day. The film settles down a bit after this fantastic opening sequence, but the sides are steadily described, what with a quality-conscious designer going up against a penny-pinching financial officer for control of the company. There are many similarities here with 1956’s Patterns, but Executive Suite is a solid drama of moves and counter-moves (with a seriousness underscored by, well, the lack of a score), with a likable hero played by William Holden and decent supporting roles for Barbara Stanwyck, Fredrick March and Shelley Winters. Director Robert Wise’s approach to the material is decidedly close to the ground, but there’s a decent understated flourish to the script, as it quickly sketches characters, and sometimes catches them in compromising positions. I don’t expect everyone to be as enthralled by Executive Suite as I was, but there’s something carefully balanced about its dramatic plotting and its almost realistic approach to the material.

  • B.F.’s Daughter (1948)

    B.F.’s Daughter (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I know, intellectually, that there are thousands of perfectly enjoyable movies that have been more or less forgotten by history. Still, it’s always fun to catch some random film on TCM and be unexpectedly charmed by the result. I probably recorded B.F.’s Daughter because it stars Barbara Stanwyck—she’s one of the few stars of the 1940 that I find interesting in her own right and not simply as a variation on leading lady stereotypes. But the story of the film does have a way of drawing audiences in, as our protagonist, the daughter of a rich self-made man, decides to trade off an ambitious upper-society lawyer boyfriend, for a humble working-class academic. It does help that the male lead is played by Van Heflin, a likable actor I’ve recently put in perspective thanks to such movies as East Side, West Side. But that whirlwind romance is only the beginning of a story that stretches over ten years and into World War II, as our hero becomes a noted academic and a trusted advisor to the upper sphere of the US government thanks to hard work… and an initial secret push from his wife. Their romance is prickly, complicated by other factors and severely put in jeopardy thanks to a crucial evening. Much of the third act is dedicated to the resolution of two crises, as the heroine suspects her estranged husband is having an affair (he’s not in the film, but he was in the original novel), and her old flame is presumed dead over the Pacific. It’s not really a great movie, but I thoroughly enjoyed Stanwyck and Heflin at work, and the look at the professional progression of an academic over a few years is the kind of material I actually enjoy watching. By the time the film raises issues about selling out principles in favour of access, I was as invested in those ideas as the central romance. Some movies, for lack of better descriptions, simply click and B.F.’s Daughter is one of those: I approached it without too many expectations and was very pleased by the results. Now let’s keep watching older films to see what other happy surprises are hidden in the archives…