Barbara Stanwyck Pre-Code Scorchers

Baby Face and Night Nurse

read the original censor's notes for Baby Face (6.8 Mb PDF file)

 "She climbed the ladder of success - wrong by wrong!"

This "uncensored" print was Restored and Preserved by the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division under the supervision of Mike Mashon, Library of Congress Motion Picture Division Curator. He said, "When the New York State Board of Censors rejected the first version of BABY FACE in April 1933, Warners cut the negative and released the shortened version nationally. We're thrilled to be able to show the film in its original, even more salacious form."

This new release print was made by Warner Brothers Classics with special thanks to Linda Evans-Smith and Marilee Womack.

"Parents: do not bring your children" was how BABY FACE was advertised in 1933.

TIME Magazine, July 3, 1933:

"When the Hays organization ordered portions BABY FACE changed, it caused one of the studio rows between Darryl Zanuck and Harry Warner as a result of which Zanuck quit Warners, formed a new company called Twentieth Century Pictures, Inc. to release films through United Artists. "

WIRED

The 'hidden film history' of Baby Face, named to the U.S. National Film Registry 

Wednesday, December 28, 2005 9:32 a.m. ET

By Brooks Boliek

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - When Mike Mashon, head of the Library of Congress' moving image section, sent for a print of the 1933 Barbara Stanwyck movie "Baby Face" for an exhibition abroad, he was expecting the original release, kept at the library's Dayton, Ohio, facility.

The film has become famous in the past few years, with historians hailing it as a superior example of a studio movie made before the imposition of the Hays Production Code, which clamped down on smut. It showed, it was argued, that before the code was established, Hollywood was making adult-themed movies with an edge. When the code was instituted in 1934 after a public outcry about the frank nature of many films, the studios turned to tamer fare.

"Baby Face" is about a woman who climbs to the top of the heap using her "womanly wiles."

"It was the sort of picture that pushes the envelope of proprieties," Mashon said. "People fight a film like 'Baby Face.' "

The movie was banned by New York state's censorship board. And if it wasn't going to be shown in the Big Apple, Warner Bros. had little hope of making any money. The studio recalled the film and cut a few minutes so that it would pass the censors.

"The uncut version was seen as a lost film," Mashon said.

That was about to change thanks to the sharp eyes of George Willeman, who oversees the nitrate vaults the library maintains on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. The library actually had two negatives, Willeman discovered. This was because "somebody, somewhere had kept a fine-grain, master positive," Mashon learned later.

"When I started watching it, I knew within five minutes we had the original, uncut version," he said. "Archivists live for that kind of a moment. I was giddy like a schoolgirl. I shared it with my colleagues quite loudly."

The film, which grew in length by five minutes, was the real deal. A record of deleted scenes was kept by the studio, and those deletions matched the footage that was in the library's "new" print, Mashon said.

Scenes dealing with the philosophy of Nietzsche, like the one where one of the characters tells Stanwyck to go to the city and use what's she got to get what she wants, were among those cut. It was one of these scenes in the early minutes of the rediscovered film that tipped off Mashon.

The uncut version of "Baby Face" was one of 25 films selected Tuesday for inclusion into the new National Film Registry.

 

Baby Face

Movie Mirror Original 1933 Review
A poor woman goes to the city and ruthlessly uses her charms with men to gain wealth at their expense.

Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) serves drinks in the speakeasy of her father (Robert Barrat), who leaves her alone with Ed. She pours coffee on him and fights him off; but Ed tells her father he's going to the police. In a fire her father dies, and Lily with Chico (Theresa Harris) goes to the city. Lily goes to a private room with a young man to get a hearing in the personnel office. Soon Jimmy McCoy (John Wayne) is urging his boss Brody (Douglass Dumbrille) to give Lily a position. Lily puts off McCoy and gets Brody to hire her. Stevens (Donald Cook) fires Brody and Lily, but she persuades him to make her his receptionist. Brody goes to see Lily, but she won't see him. Lily drinks with Stevens, and he kisses her. At the office Lily embraces Stevens as his fiancé Ann Carter (Margaret Lindsay) comes in. Ann goes and cries on the shoulder of her father Carter (Henry Kolker), who tells Stevens to let the girl go. Stevens tells Lily she is fired; but she kisses him and says she won't see him if she is. Carter gives Stevens some time off. Carter tells Lily that Stevens is engaged; she pretends not to know and pleads she loves Stevens. Carter has dinner with Lily, who suggests he give her money. Stevens learns Lily has moved. Lily and Chico wear furs. Lily gets a letter advising her to change her life. Stevens calls on Lily, who says she won't see him anymore. Carter asks Stevens what is wrong, and he says it is Lily. Stevens barges in on Lily and says he'll kill himself is she won't marry him. Stevens finds Carter. Shots are heard, and Lily finds them both dead. Papers report the murder-suicide.

Trenholm (George Brent) takes over the bank, and Lily is called before the board, which wants to match the $15,000 newspapers have offered her for her story; but Trenholm says they will send her to Paris to work there. In Paris Lily works in the bank, and Trenholm gives her a ride in his car. He takes her dining and dancing and says he loves her. Newspapers report their wedding. Bank officers call Trenholm back and blame him for the bank failure. Lily looks at her jewels and money. Trenholm comes in and says he was indicted and needs her money he gave her. Lily says no and tells Chico to pack for a trip. Lily thinks of Trenholm, gets off the boat, and goes back to find that he shot himself. She cries and says she will give him everything. In the final scene, which the censors made the studio add, the board says how Lily gave the money to save the bank, and she and Trenholm went back to work in her old factory town.

A WANTON WOMAN'S WAYS REVEALED, 71 YEARS LATER

January 9, 2005
By DAVE KEHR , New York Times

STARRING a slinky young Barbara Stanwyck as a bootlegger's daughter who sleeps her way to the top of a New York financial empire, "Baby Face" is one of the most notorious films from the pre-Code era - that period of much relaxed censorship that Hollywood enjoyed from 1930 to 1934.

Last summer, Michael Mashon, a curator of the motion picture division at the Library of Congress, received a request for a print of "Baby Face" from the organizers of the London Film Festival, who wanted to show the film as part of its annual tribute to pre-Code rambunctiousness. The library's collection, Mr. Mashon discovered, contained two negatives of "Baby Face." One was the original camera negative; the other, identified as a duplicate negative, looked slightly longer.

What he saw was a revelation. "It was a moment that archivists live for," Mr. Mashon recalled. "I knew in the first five minutes that this version was different. I can't begin to describe the sheer joy of discovery, the feeling that I may have been the first person since 1933 to see 'Baby Face' uncut."

What Mr. Mashon had unearthed was, indeed, "Baby Face" in its raw - very raw - state, much as it had been submitted to the Motion Picture Division of the State of New York Education Department, otherwise known as the New York State censorship board. The board's decision, received by Warner Brothers on April 28, 1933, consisted of one word: REJECTED.

The board did not give any reasons, perhaps because they seemed obvious enough. "Baby Face," directed by Alfred E. Green from an original story by Darryl F. Zanuck (who was then in charge of production at Warner), remains one of the most stunningly sordid films ever made, a standout even among the wave of risqué entertainments that filled American screens in the early years of the Depression. Even the cut version is a jaw-dropper; with its five full minutes of sleaze restored, it has to be seen to be not quite believed.

The heroine of "Baby Face," Lily Powers (Ms. Stanwyck), was raised in her father's second-story speakeasy in a working-class neighborhood of Erie. Pa. Dad (Robert Barrat), apparently, has been offering her services to the local steelworkers (one describes her as "the sweetheart of the night shift"), but when he sells her in a whispered conversation with a corrupt politician (we see a greasy wad of bills passing between them), Lily has had enough. The pol tries to touch her thigh, and she dumps a cup of hot coffee on his hand; obviously a slow learner, he comes up from behind to grab her breasts, and Lily smashes a beer bottle against his forehead and knocks him cold.

And that's only the first reel. Urged on by a not-so-kindly old cobbler (Alphonse Ethier), who recommends that Lily read Nietzsche - and "Be strong! Defiant! Use men to get the things you want!" - Lily hops a freight train to New York. A favor performed behind closed doors for a tubby office boy at the Gotham Trust Company gets her a job as a file clerk; with similarly persuasive techniques, she wriggles her way up the corporate ladder, ducking through a door marked "Ladies Rest Room" for a squalid encounter with one supervisor (Douglas Dumbrille) and deliberately destroying the impending marriage of another (Donald Cook). Finally, she agrees to be kept in an uptown apartment by the bank's elderly vice president (Henry Kolker). Lily musses his hair and calls him "Fuzzy-Wuzzy."

These all can be seen in the new print of "Baby Face," which Mr. Mashon showed at the London festival last month, and which will have its American premiere in New York at Film Forum on Jan. 24. But in the version of "Baby Face" that has been known for the last 71 years, most of those moments were either compromised or eliminated. In the censored version, the politician's first look at Lily is no longer a leering panning shot that begins with Stanwyck's legs and rises slowly, almost reluctantly, to her face; money no longer changes hands between her father and the politician; she's now the "sweetheart of the night (blip!)"; and the incident with the beer bottle has been dropped entirely.

But still missing from the new print, unfortunately, is a scene in which Lily (accompanied by her best friend, a young black woman played by Theresa Harris) negotiates the fare to New York with a willing brakeman (James Murray). "Scene ends with brakeman's glove falling beside lantern and his hand turning the lantern out," reads the description in a Warner Brothers censorship file.

Warner Brothers voluntarily made these cuts, along with quite a few others, in response to the New York board's blunt rejection. They worked: on June 17, 1933, the board passed the revised version, and the film opened soon after, to good reviews and good business.

Though many of the changes were crudely applied, others were more subtle and made with some skill. Instead of "Ed propositioned me at the funeral," Lily says, "Ed made me a proposition at the funeral" - a shift in tone that made all the difference to the New York censors.

In an attempt to give the film a moral voice, the Nietzschean cobbler was transformed into Lily's Jiminy Cricket. In the uncut film, he sends Lily a congratulatory copy of Nietzsche's "Thoughts Out of Season," urging her to: "Face life as you find it, defiantly and unafraid! Waste no energy yearning for the moon! Crush out all sentiment!"

In the revised scene, the title of the book has been obscured, and the cobbler writes to her: "You have chosen the wrong way. You are still a coward. I send you this book hoping that you will allow it to guide you right." These "compensating moral values," as the Production Code office called them, did much to make "Baby Face" acceptable.

"'Baby Face' was certainly one of the top 10 films that caused the Production Code to be enforced," said Mark. A. Vieira, author of an illustrated study of the period, "Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood" (1999). "We all assumed that we would never see those scenes. Now, through an archival miracle, we have them."

 

Baby Face

by Kendahl Cruver

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/05/37/baby_face.html

Endnotes Dave Kehr, "A Wanton Woman's Ways Revealed, 71 Years Later", The New York Times, 9 January 2005. Mark Vieira, Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, Abrams, New York, 1999, pp. 148-49. Vieira, pp. 148-49.

 

Budget

$187,000 (estimated)

Rentals

$452,000 (USA)

Copyright Holder

Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.; 16 July 1933; LP4019

Soundtrack for

• "Baby Face"
  (1926)
  Music and Lyrics by Benny Davis and Harry Akst
  Played during the opening credits
  Played as background music often
  Reprised on a phonograph record
  
  
• "St. Louis Blues"
  (1914)
  Music and Lyrics by W.C. Handy
  Played during the opening credits
  Sung a cappella by Theresa Harris several times
  Played as background music often
  
  
• "Let Me Call You Sweetheart"
  (1910)
  Music and Lyrics By Beth Slater Whitson and Leo Friedman
  Played on a player piano in Powers' speakeasy

Bad Girl

In 1933, Barbara Stanwyck starred in 'Baby Face,' what was to be the last seriously adult Hollywood movie for 35 years

By Richard von Busack, Metro

EVERY YEAR, new research and new biographies come out disproving the certainties that film fans once relied upon. When Gary Wills examined John Wayne, for example, it turned out that the Duke hated horses and dodged the draft.

Still, there's one rule that's unshakable. Other actresses were more iconic, others were more famous, but no studio-era actress was as completely versatile as Barbara Stanwyck.

She starred in the most indispensable of all film noirs, Double Indemnity, as well as the most irreplaceable of romantic comedies, The Lady Eve. She was a self-created woman: a Brooklyn orphan called Ruby Stevens who assumed a great lady's name and who became a great lady.

And the 1933 movie Baby Face shows the will-power with which she took control of her life. The recently rediscovered uncensored version of Baby Face brings back scenes that are loaded, even by the loose standards of the pre-Code era. "Blue and nothing else!" Variety said of the film. But it is something else.

In Erie, PA., Lily Powers (Stanwyck) has a status just above the bar rag in her father's speakeasy. Her father tries to whore her out for protection to a local politician, but she clubs with a beer bottle after he tries to cop a feel. Then the liquor still explodes, taking the father with it.

Lily and her female traveling companion Chico (the amazing Theresa Harris) head to New York. In a newly discovered scene, Lily leases her body for the train fare, as an amused Chico sings "St. Louis Blues" to encourage the trick.

Once in Manhattan, Lily makes it to the top, encouraged by liberal quotes from Nietzsche—"The greatest philosopher of all time!" Lily trapezes her way up by using the execs. One of her saps follows her into the women's restroom for a tryst. Indeed, Lily almost breaks the Gotham Trust Company with the power of sex.

The essence of Stanwyck's appeal is all here: the hard shell and the soft center; the self-amusement of letting her roots show a little, or of watching her male prey struggle a bit. Though glamorized by James Van Trees's art-deco photography, Stanwyck has the appeal of commonness. Yet she's never an infantile floozy.

Baby Face gives a woman's view of male respectability. Censors correctly understood they were dealing with something subversive. They forced a grafted-on ending in which Lily returns to work off her sins back in Erie.

Now free of that preaching ending, Stanwyck is a variety of women: the nail-tough gamine, the fur-wrapped penthouse dweller, the unrepentant hustler and the sorrowing lover whose heart overrules her head.

In Baby Face, Stanwyck has the DNA of all Hollywood movie heroines, and she keeps the shifts in mood intact through force of silky personality, and her rock-hard sense of humor.

Baby Face is double-billed with 1931's Night Nurse. Here, Stanwyck puts Clark Gable in his place, in the same way she makes short work of John Wayne in Baby Face.

Also included is a hallucinatory short directed by Three Stooges auteur Jules White. "The School for Romance" (1934) has the vaudeville phenomenon Lou Holtz playing the French accented "Count Romansky" teaching the ladies (and one guy!) how to kiss, as Betty Grable looks on from the chorus line. Shorts like this are what brought out the reformers, and barred the American cinema from the realms Stanwyck fearlessly trod.

Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) is hired by the less than scrupulous Dr. Ranger (Ralf Harolde) to care for the Ritchey children, two little girls suffering from poor health. The girl's mother (Charlotte Merriam) is an alcoholic involved in a self-destructive relationship with Nick, her criminally-inclined chauffeur (Clark Gable, in an early performance minus his trademark mustache). It soon becomes apparent to Lora that the children are being slowly starved to death by the doctor and Nick as part of an insidious plot to gain control of the children's inheritance. Although she surprises her employer by taking an active interest in the little girls' welfare, she also places herself in a dangerous situation.

Often overlooked as a minor feature in the collective careers of Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable and director William Wellman, Night Nurse (1931) is actually more engrossing than some of their more highly regarded films. For one thing, the often sordid subject matter is directed with considerable verve; Wellman punches up the film's raciness with a steady stream of double intendre wisecracks, mostly delivered by Stanwyck and fellow compatriot Joan Blondell, as they parade around in various stages of undress. The violence in the film is rather strong for the period as well, with Gable beating Stanwyck to the floor in one scene and then carrying her semi-conscious body off to his bedroom for an off-screen rape. More controversial was the depiction of the film's villains - so callous they could murder children for profit - and the movie's pro-vengeance ending which suggested that the police and the courts were completely ineffective in dealing with certain unlawful situations. Of course, all of this makes Night Nurse one of the more fascinating pre-Code melodramas that Warner Brothers released in the early thirties; It also led to tighter censorship controls over content.

Seen today, Night Nurse is particularly interesting for Barbara Stanwyck's performance as a working class gal who knows how to use her brains as well as her fists. Her tough, seen-it-all attitude comes through memorably in such scenes as the one where she finds Mrs. Ritchey, lying drunk on the floor while her two young daughters are left unattended. Looking down on her with digust, Stanwyck mutters under her breath, "You Mother!"

Night Nurse was the first of five films Stanwyck and Wellman made together and the actress would later state that he was one of her favorite directors. She was also bedazzled by her co-star Clark Gable. In the biography, Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck by Ella Smith, the actress recalled that she and Joan Blondell grabbed each other's pinkies in awe when they first laid eyes on him: "The instant Clark walked onto the set I knew - we all knew- that here was a striking personality. He commanded attention." Wellman also realized his potential and wrote in his autobiography, A Short Time For Insanity, that in Night Nurse, Gable was "one of the most despicable heavies imaginable, and he did it with such savoir faire that he became a star. The powers-that-be at Warner Brothers liked his performance but decided he was not worth fooling with, not star material: his ears were too big. They forgot to look at his dimples and listen to his voice and see his smile." MGM noticed though and signed him to a long-term contract the same year. By the end of 1931, he had already established himself as one of the studio's top male leads due to his charismatic performances in A Free Soul (opposite Norma Shearer) and Possessed starring Joan Crawford.

Director: William Wellman
Screenplay: Oliver H.P. Garrett, Charles Kenyon, based on the novel by Grace Perkins (aka Dora Macy)
Art Director: Max Parker
Cinematography: Barney "Chick" McGill
Costume Design: Earl Luick
Film Editing: Edward McDermott
Original Music: Leo F. Forbstein
Principal Cast: Barbara Stanwyck (Lora Hart), Ben Lyon (Morlie), Joan Blondell (Maloney), Clark Gable (Nick), Blanche Frederici (Mrs. Maxwell), Charlotte Merriam (Mrs. Ritchey), Charles Winninger (Dr. Arthur Bell), Edward J. Nugent (Eagan).
BW-72m.

by Jeff Stafford for Turner Classic Movies

The Music Box has been showing a weekend matinee series of Pre-Code films from the early '30. These are movies that pushed the limits of decency in film and are in part responsible for the infamous Hays Code, a list of industry do's and dont's. Single beds, characters of ill repute (bootleggers, fallen women and gangsters) always met a bad end, and subdued references to illicit behavior like drinking, drugging, and prostitution were the norm by 1934.

Night Nurse is the poster child for pre-Code Hollywood film. Ostensibly about the trials and tribulations of a student training in a hospital (Monday--maternity ward, Tuesday--ER, Wednesday--surgery) the story really kicks into high (or is it low) gear when Barbara Stanwyck is assigned her first job as night nurse to two young girls under the care of a quack doctor.

For a movie that sounds like a porno movie--but isn't--student nurses Stanwyck and Joan Blondell sure spend a lot of screen time with their clothes off. Every third scene, at least one of them was stripping down to their lingerie (vice strike one) and more often than not they were dressing and undressing each other (strike two.)

Stanwyck's love interest is a good-hearted bootlegger (strike three) with ties to the mob ("I know a couple a guys…"--strike four.) There's child endangerment (the little girls are being starved to death for their inheritance--strike five,) their mother is a drunk ("I'm a dipsomanic! And I'm proud of it!"--strike six,) and she's under the thumb of Clark Gable, in a small role as the thug chauffer who beats women around (strike seven.) I won't tell you what befalls his character, but suffice it to say, strike eight.

And the underlying theme of Night Nurse? Get this--ethics in the medical profession. Hilarious.

MOVIE MIRROR MAGAZINE 1931 review

Adapted from Dora Macy's novel, a nurse discovers an attempt to starve children to gain a trust fund and saves the children.

At a hospital Dr. Bell (Charles Winninger) helps Lora Hart (Barbara Stanwyck) get a job as a nurse without a diploma. Miss Dillon (Vera Lewis) tells her the rules, and Hart rooms with Maloney (Joan Blondell). They sneak in late, and Hart finds a skeleton in her bed. Dillon puts them on the night shift, and Hart gets in bed with Maloney. Hart treats the wounded arm of a bootlegger known as Pal (Ben Lyon) but doesn't report the bullet wound as required by law. In surgery Maloney helps Hart stay conscious when the patient dies. They graduate and take the Florence Nightingale pledge.

Hart works as night nurse for a rich family. The day nurse Maloney tells her the children are anemic and only get milk. Hart learns their sister died, and they tell her the chauffeur Nick is horrid. The children say they are hungry, but Mrs. Maxwell (Blanche Frederici) tells Hart not to believe them. A drunk gropes Hart against her will. Nick (Clark Gable) comes in and knocks him out. When Hart tries to call a doctor, he slugs her and carries her to another room. Hart tells Dr. Ranger (Ralf Harolde), who denies there is a problem. She says they are starving and resigns. Hart goes to Dr. Bell, who won't intervene because of "professional ethics." He advises her to go back on that job, and she apologizes to Dr. Ranger. Mrs. Ritchey (Charlotte Merriam) gives Hart $100.

At a drugstore Hart sees her Pal, who notices she got hit. He says he quit the rackets, but she doesn't believe him. Mrs. Maxwell tells Hart she is worried, and Maloney says that Nanny is worse. Hart looks for Mrs. Ritchie at a party and finds her drunk. Hart pleads that Nanny is ill; but Mrs. Ritchie says she is a dipsomaniac. Hart knocks down drunk Mack, while Mrs. Ritchie passes out. Hart calls Dr. Bell and leaves a message that Nick overhears. Pal comes in looking for Nick, delivering booze. Hart asks him to help and sends him out for milk, which he steals, so they can try the milk bath Mrs. Maxwell keeps recommending. A drunk Mrs. Maxwell tells Hart about Nick and Mrs. Ritchie's custody of the children's trust fund. Hart accuses Nick of murder with Dr. Ranger. Nick chases Mrs. Maxwell out. Dr. Bell comes in and advises a blood transfusion. Hart offers her blood. Nick punches Dr. Bell; but Pal makes Nick leave. Dr. Bell tells Hart that Nanny will recover. Hart says she is going to the police, and Pal takes her, saying he told his friends he didn't like Nick, who is taken to the morgue.

The movies have never known a better actress than Barbara Stanwyck.

By Jim Emerson 

Sure, there were other Hollywood stars of greater renown, other screen goddesses more likely to elicit our awe and reverence, but none showed greater range and vitality than Stanwyck, who died January 20, 1990, at age 82.

While celestial luminaries like Dietrich and Garbo (whose beautifully sculptured, artfully lit faces were lovely but impenetrable masks) were worshipped from afar and gazed upon as if they were impossibly distant and unreachable stars that could be viewed only with the aid of a (telephoto?) lens, Stanwyck -- born plain old Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn, July 16, 1907 -- was utterly down-to-earth, a recognizable woman of flesh and blood rather than a gossamer fantasy spun from studio light(ing) and shadow.  

She was no glamour girl; she seemed much too savvy, practical, and natural for that sort of vanity (although she could certainly look stunning). But she was powerfully sexy and charismatic on the screen -- especially when she talked. Stanwyck was sassy and gave lots of lip; you got the impression she could hold her own with just about anyone.   And sure enough, she applied her tart tongue, nimble wit, and precision timing to scripts by some of Hollywood's most linguistically agile screenwriters, from Preston Sturges to Billy Wilder.

She could play bright screwball comedy or darkly treacherous film noir, melodramatic weepies or rousing westerns -- all with unpretentious ease. As a comedienne, she had a flair for cheeky, scintillating delivery to which only very few (like maybe Jean Arthur, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, or Carole Lombard) could hold a candle. And in sinister, duplicitous  femme fatale roles, she was rivaled only by the likes of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

Think about it: Stanwyck was totally convincing (and moving) as both the eternally self-sacrificing mom of King Vidor's 1937 Stella Dallas and the alluring but deadly viper-in-an-ankle-bracelet, Phyllis Dietrichson, of Billy Wilder's 1944 Double Indemnity.

Best-known for her roles as a wisecracking, street-smart, working-class heroine, Stanwyck herself was a working girl (and former Ziegfeld chorus girl) whose on-screen occupations included seamstress (both in and out of quotation marks, in Ladies of Leisure and Stella Dallas), evangelist (Miracle Woman), con artist (The Lady Eve), nurse (Night Nurse), stripper (Lady of Burlesque), newspaper reporter (Meet John Doe), rancher (Forty Guns, Cattle Queen of Montana), sharpshooter (Annie Oakley), nightclub singer/dancer (Ball of Fire), shoplifter (Remember the Night)…  She was more than competent at all of them.  When she picked up a notebook, or a stethoscope, or a microphone, or a gun, or a horse's reins, she was one of the few female movie stars of her time who could convince you she really knew how to use it.

"Maybe I'm just a dame and didn't know it," she confesses in Robert Siodmak's 1949 noir thriller, The File on Thelma Jordan. But Stanwyck herself always knew who she was and where she had come from. It was part of her presence that she was Ruby Stevens, and she didn't pretend (to her audience or the picture crews she worked with) to be anything more (or less) than "a dame" in the best sense of the word.

Oh, she could assume the guise of phony, upper-class "respectability" for a while -- as a con artist posing as a princess, for example, in Preston Sturges' 1941 The Lady Eve, a role written for her -- but she couldn't help poke fun at her pretensions just the same.  She may have fooled Henry Fonda for a while, but she never tried to put one over on us, her audience. To watch her was to share her confidence in who she was playing; she was believable -- even when her characters were not to be trusted.

No matter what the material, she rarely turned in a flat or one-note performance; she was always looking for those ambivalences and contradictions just below the surface that made her characters real.  When Stanwyck was a "good girl," there could be something appealingly (refreshingly, healthfully) naughty about her, too -- just waiting for the right fella who could bring it out in her. And when she was deceitful and "rotten to the heart," as she described her part in Double Indemnity, she wasn't an inhuman, one-note monster -- that just wouldn't have been very interesting. So, in the end, even the scheming Mrs. Dietrichson seems surprised at herself when she can't fire that second shot at her lover and partner in homicide, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). Stanwyck was orphaned as a little girl, and maybe that contributed to the rich and volatile mixture of hard-boiled independence, determination, and vulnerability that we sensed in her.

She worked with many of the great Hollywood directors. But she began by becoming the favorite heroine of a young Italian-American director named Frank Capra in a number of remarkable early pictures that still bristle with the vigor and excitement of major talent blossoming: the absolutely delightful 1930 Ladies of Leisure with Marie Prevost (Stanwyck's fourth feature and first hit); 1931's remarkable The Miracle Woman (in which she plays a charismatic evangelist, based on Aimee Semple McPherson); 1932's three-hankie weepie Forbidden; and the luscious and ambitious 1933 The Bitter Tea of General Yen -- a mysterious and atmospheric near-masterpiece that's unlike anything else Capra ever did (although its epic exoticism does prefigure Lost Horizon). In the latter, Stanwyck is held captive by, and strangely attracted to, a Chinese warlord played by Nils Asther. It should have been a career-making hit for both Capra and Stanwyck -- it was selected as the -- opening attraction at Radio City Music Hall -- but Capra was devastated when it didn't receive the popular and critical acclaim it deserved.  (Which reminds me once again of how much I'd love to see a double bill of General Yen and Broken Blossoms.)

In his winningly brash, self-mythologizing autobiography, The Name Above the Title, Capra wrote: "I fell in love with Stanwyck, and had I not been more in love with Lucille Reyburn [whom he married] I would have asked Barbara to marry me after she called it quits with Frank Fay."  Capra biographer Joseph McBride (in his definitive American Madness: The Life of Frank Capra) claims that Stanwyck and Capra became lovers.   But, as is the case with many great actress-director pairings, the love affair is consummated on the screen, no matter what happened when the cameras weren't rolling. Capra and Stanwyck re-united professionally in 1949 for Meet John Doe.

Stanwyck also made memorable pictures (and a few masterpieces) with such prominent filmmakers as: Sturges (The Lady Eve), Howard Hawks (Ball of Fire), Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity), Douglas Sirk (There's Always Tomorrow), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night), King Vidor (Stella Dallas), John Ford (The Plough and the Stars), William Wellman (Night Nurse, Lady of Burlesque), Anthony Mann (The Furies), Jean Negulesco (1953's Titanic), Rouben Mamoulian (Golden Boy), Cecil B. DeMille (Union Pacific), Samuel Fuller (Forty Guns), Robert Siodmak (The File on Thelma Jordan), Lewis Milestone (The Strange Love of Martha Ivers), George Stevens (Annie Oakley), Edward Dmytryk (A Walk on the Wild Side), and many others. It's one impressive résumé for anyone, but perhaps especially for plain ol' Ruby Stevens from Brooklyn.

And among her leading men were stars such as Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, William Holden, Joel McCrea, Fred MacMurray, Robert Taylor (to whom she was married for a time), James Mason, Robert Ryan, Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou, Edward G. Robinson, Ray Milland, Anthony Quinn, Clifton Webb, Ronald Reagan, George Sanders, and Elvis Presley. Her more frequent co-stars, Cooper, McCrea and MacMurray, shared with her a down-to-earth appeal and a natural easiness with comedy or hard-boiled drama. What a shame that Stanwyck never got to spar on screen with the equally adept and unaffected James Stewart or Cary Grant, perhaps in a screwball comedy directed by George Cukor or Sturges or Hawks…

When William Holden, a young actor making his debut opposite her in Rouben Mamoulian's 1939 Golden Boy, was about to be fired by the studio, Stanwyck fought for him -- and became his life-long friend and mentor. Holden publicly credited her with launching his career and often wished that she would be given an Oscar. And when Stanwyck finally did receive her Academy Award, only months after Holden's death, she offered a simple, heartfelt gesture to "my golden boy." It was one of the classiest, most affecting moments in Academy Awards-show history.

Her "bosses" (as she'd put it) praised her as a trouper, a consummate professional, but Stanwyck was uncommonly beloved by those at the bottom of the studio hierarchy for being unmannered, non-temperamental and down-to-earth. She knew the gaffers on her pictures, remembered their names, and often spent time chatting with the crew between takes. Accepting her honorary Oscar in 1981, Stanwyck thanked "the remarkable crews we had the privilege to work with… my wonderful group, the stunt men and women who taught me so well."

Stanwyck could make you believe she was part of the everyday world we all live in, not just a fantasy on the silver screen. She could easily be the woman down the aisle in the supermarket, driving that car in the next lane, or working in the office down the hall. While other stars went for the "larger than life" roles, Stanwyck -- as an all-American working girl or a cunning seductress -- generally kept her feet planted firmly on the ground. In fact, she enters Double Indemnity feet-first, striding down the staircase wearing an anklet that snags Walter Neff (MacMurray) by the libido, like a hook on a line. (The anklet may be the hook, but she's the bait.) Stanwyck used that foot to lure Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda, among others. It's a peculiar erotic pattern in her work (see Babs' Foot Fetish Page for more details and images), but men who stooped to take her foot in hand found themselves on their knees before a passionate woman, not an unapproachable goddess -- and they fell, instantly and irrevocably, under her spell. (Fonda almost faints when she gets him to slip a pump over her tootsies!)

In both The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire -- two of her most dazzling and endearing comic performances, from the same year! -- Stanwyck acts as a leveling life-force, puncturing all pretensions and knocking her co-stars' bumbling intellectual noggins out of the hazy cerebral clouds. What she achieves is not unlike what a much ditzier, flakier, upper-crust screwball heroine, Katharine Hepburn, does for/to bespectacled paleontologist Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby.  But Stanwyck brings salvation from the streets rather than the penthouse. Jean Arthur in Easy Living (1937) -- written by Sturges --   is a delightful working gal, but Stanwyck is far more streetwise. Tough, strong, and smart, but no less feminine than some of her screwball sisters, she has learned to survive in a cut-throat world, living by her wits. She's at her best when she's in control, and she usually is. In many of her most famous movies the unspoken truth of any given scene is that she knows exactly what she's doing -- until, perhaps, her emotions sneak up on her and overthrow her instincts, by unexpectedly allowing her to fall   head-over-heels for her (relatively) naive and helpless male prey.

Stanwyck slices right through class conventions and social formalities, immediately addressing Gary Cooper's Professor Bertram Potts by the more casual nickname of "Potsy." Likewise, Fonda's Charles Pike, heir to the Pike's Ale fortune, becomes "Hopsie" (after a key ingredient in the family brew). The very notion of someone with such a direct, spontaneous, and unrefined disposition masquerading as a blueblood is, as Preston Sturges realized, a terrific premise for comedy.

In Ball of Fire (directed by Hawks and written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett), Stanwyck's Sugarpuss O'Shea, gangster's moll and nightclub singer decked out in a dress that produces spontaneous fireworks, unceremoniously thrusts her cold, damp foot at befuddled Professor Potts in an attempt to persuade him to let her spend the night. (She's hiding from a supoena; he's cloistered in a big house with a team of elderly academics, working on an encyclopedia article about American slang. Think of it as Sugarpuss and the Seven Fuddy-Duddies.)

When one of Potts' fellow eggheads acknowledges a "slight rosiness" in her throat, she cracks: "Slight rosiness? It's as red as the Daily Worker and just as sore!"  Turns out that Sugarpuss (as suggested -- among other things -- by what W.C. Fields would call her "euphonious appellation") is bursting with such vividly expressive  language. Soon, she's sweetening the stale, academic air with her colorful lingo, inviting Potsy to feel her cold feet while melting his heart.

The clichés of conventional (screen) romance are too sappy, too corny (and probably too oblique), for Stanwyck's heroines. By being so forward, so daringly "earthy" and cutting through fuzzy romantic illusions, she forces her men to see and appreciate the living, breathing woman in front of them. In one of the funniest and most erotic scenes in movie history (all played out in a tight two-shot), Stanwyck's "Lady" Eve teasingly and seductively demolishes Fonda/Hopsie's safely abstract fantasies about the "ideal" woman he thinks he's never met and makes him face reality: "How are her teeth?" she quizzes him. "Well, you should always pick one out with good teeth. It saves expense later." Her own fantasy mate, she confesses, is "a little short guy with lots of money." "Why short?" asks Hopsy. "What does it matter if he's rich?" she explains. "It's so he'll look up to me, so I'll be his ideal."   She's so pragmatic.

Barbara Stanwyck herself may have been the least idealized or glamorized of Hollywood's great leading ladies, but she's certainly someone to look up to. That scene from Sturges' incandescent The Lady Eve shows her in top form; it's just the sort of deliciously sly, double-edged material that she could bring to life like no one else. She was never more beguiling than when feigning conversation about some subject (whether dental hygiene or a sore throat or the speed limit) while the light in her eyes and the tone of her voice pierce right through the rhetorical smokescreen and speak directly, alluringly, of sex.

In most cases, that's seen as a healthy quality; but not always. At the climax of Double Indemnity, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) finally sees through Mrs. Dietrichson's deceptions and blows it back in her face.  "Just like the first time I came here, isn't it?," he says, perching again on the arm of the couch in her shadow-streaked, spider-web living room. "We were talking about automobile insurance… only you were thinking about murder." Indeed, from the moment they meet, these two flirt by speaking in suggestive riddles.  Stanwyck appears at the top of the stairs, wrapped in nothing but a towel, when MacMurray's insurance salesman comes calling about an expired policy: "The insurance ran out on the 15th. I'd hate to think of your having a smashed fender or something while you're not, uh… fully covered."  "Perhaps I know what you mean, Mr. Neff," she replies. "I've just been taking a sun bath."  Neff is a sucker in heat, another man doomed by his indiscriminate lust. But you can't fault him too terribly for his weakness. When smoldering Stanwyck cranks up the temperature, even the coolest of cucumbers has been known to break a sweat. 

At another point in Double Indemnity, Stanwyck's femme fatale skillfully negotiates a verbal high-speed chase through an obstacle course of erotic innuendo, with MacMurray's aggressively impudent insurance salesman practically riding her bumper in hot pursuit. Then she maneuvers to cut him off and shut him down (while, of course, simultaneously revving his already overheated engine): "I wonder if I know what you mean," she says with a caustic breath as cool and dry as air conditioning. "I wonder if you wonder," counters MacMurray as he slips out the door. These two enjoy playing risky games together; they're meant for each other. She's willing to let him have the last word this time, because she already knows she's got him snagged by the libido -- right where she wants him. So, for now, she lets go, into the stifling heat and honeysuckle-scented air of another long Los Feliz afternoon.  She knows he'll be back….

OK, I admit it: I could go on and on about this Stanwyck broad until the cows come home. So, I'm just gonna cut the bull and come right out and say it: Babs was one helluva dame.  Someday, she's gonna get her due and take her rightful place in the firmament with the greatest of movie stars -- not because she was a goddess or a symbol, not even because she was such a consummate pro, but because she was among the most natural, fresh, and versatile working actors of Hollywood's heyday in the '30s and '40s. Meanwhile, in my book, she's simply tops -- a solid sender, a real killer-diller, and strictly yum-yum. There will always be only one star worthy of uphold that snappy and unpretentious nickname: "Babs."