This book is a heartfelt appreciation of Barbara Stanwyck’s work in movies. While there have been many studies and biographies on female film stars of equal stature—stars like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo—comparatively few books about Stanwyck have appeared. Of these, Al DiOrio’s mid-eighties biography is small but serviceable, while Axel Madsen’s 1994 biography paints a grim, insensitive picture of Stanwyck’s personal life, relies heavily on gossip, and pays only cursory and inexact attention to her films. Back in 1974, Ella Smith brought outStarring Miss Barbara Stanwyck, which is stuffed with...

Barbara Stanwyck had a hard childhood, that’s certain. She didn’t linger over it, and I’m not going to, either, but it’s worth mulling over some of the available information and considering what it might tell us about her. We’ll never be sure just how hard this childhood was and what experiences might have scarred her for life. In his memoir, Robert Wagner writes that he thought she had been “abused” in some way, and maybe she was abused in all ways imaginable. When pressed about this issue late in life, Stanwyck put on her toughest mask and said, “Alright, let’s...

Judging by Joseph McBride’s surely definitive biography of the director, Frank Capra lied about a lot of things, appropriating credit whenever he could, but he could also be brutally frank about others and about himself. There’s something of Elia Kazan about him—but even messier, less calculating. An Italian immigrant, Capra was filled with hate and resentment, and these served as fuel for his work and as a link to Stanwyck, whose own hatred was the slow burning, quietly bitter kind. Capra was more open about most of his feelings. “Mr. Capra was not afraid to show emotion,” she said....

In the same years she was laying the groundwork for her career with Frank Capra, Stanwyck made several films with another director, William “Wild Bill” Wellman, an adventurous teller of tall tales so rip-snortingly vigorous and “manly” that in interviews he almost comes across as a parody of a take-no-prisoners brawler. His reputation as a filmmaker has always been shaky; he made movies fast and furiously and was not always well suited to the subjects he took on. Though his filmography is filled with missteps, it also contains neglected, hardboiled classics likeWild Boys of the Road(1933) andSafe...

There’s been a lot written about movies made before the censorious Production Code cracked down on Hollywood in 1934—probably too much, so that the talkies made from 1930–34 are now endlessly packaged at New York’s Film Forum repertory theater and on DVD as “dirty” old movies, quaint novelties that hint about the more relaxed sexual mores of the time, a relaxation that really began in the twenties, with the first flappers, women like Colleen Moore and Clara Bow. In her early years on screen, Stanwyck found herself in several of these so-called pre-Code items, one of which,Baby...

As she worked out her contract at Warner Bros. and then acted at 20th Century Fox, Stanwyck found herself in some bread-and-butter program pictures and a few bizarre ventures into political intrigue.Ever in My Heart(1933) is a total downer, a bold, somewhat crude but forceful look at bigotry during wartime. The movie is barely known, though it gets eulogized in Ella Smith’s Stanwyck book. It suffers from uninspired direction by Archie Mayo and a short running time that doesn’t allow the various outrages of the plot to gather momentum. But in a way these shortcomings add to the...

Comedy is not something that came easily to Stanwyck, but she stuck to it and eventually mastered the genre. Early on, she professed that she found light material “a vacation—I was playing, not working.” But later, being interviewed by John Kobal, she confessed, “I am not really a comedienne, per se. I’m not very good. But when they are written as well asThe Lady Eve or You Belong to Me(1941) . . . both of those films are with Henry Fonda, whoisa wonderful comedian . . . or if it is a situation comedy, I’m...

Oscar Levant described Frank Fay’s influence over Stanwyck during their marriage as “suffocating and total.” In a drunken rage, he once threw their adopted baby, Dion, into their pool. When he knocked Stanwyck down in front of a screaming Dion (after she had admitted going to a burlesque show), she finally felt that enough was enough and asked for a divorce in 1935. There was a custody battle for Dion, and when Stanwyck won it, Fay seems to have lost interest in the boy. Fay would sometimes drunkenly call and plead with Stanwyck to come back to him; she finally...

Olive Higgins Prouty wrote her bestseller,Stella Dallas, after her three-year-old daughter died of encephalitis. Known today mainly through this novel and a story about another misfit that would become the Bette Davis vehicle,Now, Voyager(1942), Prouty was also the model for “Philomena Guinea,” the famed author of syrupy tales skewered by Sylvia Plath inThe Bell Jar. By 1961, Prouty had fallen so far out of favor that she couldn’t find a publisher for her memoirs and had to have them printed herself. The novelStella Dallasdoesn’t circulate much; I had to read the one non-lending copy...

Kenneth Tynan wrote that Greta Garbo couldn’t be considered a great actress, finally, because she had never put herself to the test in major theater roles; she had never given us her Hedda Gabler, her Masha inThree Sisters, her Mrs. Alving inGhosts. This idea that an actor can only truly prove her talent by scaling the heights of classical theater roles is perhaps an old-fashioned one, tied more to British than American tradition, but stage success is certainly helpful, if not infallible, as a gauge of acting ability. Bette Davis is every bit the equal of Katharine Hepburn...

As we get farther and farther away from the classic Hollywood period of the old studio system, where so many disparate talents flourished, the case of Preston Sturges as writer and director only seems more exotic and unexplained. According to Sturges, he didn’t do much up to the age of thirty, though he helped run the cosmetics business belonging to his mother, Mary Desti. The estimable, bohemian Desti (whose real last name was Dempsey) was best friend and confidante to the flamboyant modern dancer, Isadora Duncan. The prototypical culture vulture, Desti merrily led young Preston around to every museum in...

There were times when Stanwyck cast an envious eye over the kind of material Bette Davis was making her own at Warner Bros. She very much wanted to play inDark Victory(1939), which went to Davis, and she also lusted forMildred Pierce(1945), but her pal Joan Crawford snagged that one. Stanwyck wasn’t especially suited to the woman’s picture of this era, but, as was the case with many another genre, she got several chances to make this type of movie her own. As she had done in other genres, she tackled—and ultimately conquered—the soap opera...

Before moving to direction, Billy Wilder, like Preston Sturges, turned out a lot of screenplays (Wilder’s were usually co-written with Charles Brackett). A prickly Austro-Hungarian refugee from Germany, Wilder’s smart-aleck voice as a writer comes through loud and clear in his scripts for Ernst Lubitsch and Mitchell Leisen. Wilder had a weakness for lines of often-questionable taste; Lubitsch and Leisen could put some of these lines over, but not all. For instance, when Greta Garbo’s Soviet commissar is asked about the Moscow show trials in Lubitsch’sNinotchka(1939), she solemnly intones that “there will be fewer but better Russians.” It’s...

Double Indemnityheralded a new era, one where Stanwyck dominated many a shadowy thriller, some of them failures, some of them overlooked gems, and some likeThe Strange Love of Martha Ivers(1946), which is a qualified success on its own limited terms. The ad campaign forMartha Iversimplores us to only “whisper her name!” If that sounds a little corny, it suits the serpentine, simmering yet often ramshackle movie itself, directed by Lewis Milestone, with a script by Robert Rossen, who later directedBody and Soul(1947) andThe Hustler(1961).

Rossen worked his way up writing socially...

Because Stanwyck never worked at one studio for long, she never had studio backing in the annual Oscar race, and so she went home empty-handed four times, the last time for a movie versionSorry, Wrong Number, an expanded adaptation of Lucille Fletcher’s well-known radio play. Stanwyck made no bones about her disappointment at not winning an Oscar. When she lost in 1937 forStella Dallas, she was quoted as saying, “I put my life’s blood into that one. I should have won.” Certainly she should have won over that year’s winner, Luise Rainer, for her mostly silent, victimized Chinese...

There is no cinema reputation that has made a more dramatic turnaround in recent years than the work of Danish-German émigré Douglas Sirk. In his most productive period, the 1950s, his Universal soap operas and melodramas were looked down on as tearjerker money makers marked with the opulent vulgarity of their producer, Ross Hunter. But in the seventies and ever since, audiences and writers have looked closer at Sirk’s supposed lowbrow “weepies” and discovered their irony, their levels of social criticism, their flamboyant consciousness of sex and neurosis, and their magisterial, often downright icy visual style that traps people in...

When asked about the western, which was probably her favorite genre, Stanwyck sighed happily, “Oh, I love to do them. I just love to do them.” She owned ranches for most of her life and also raced horses. Wide-open spaces agreed with her. “Well, I’m particularly fond of reading about the early West,” she said. “I think it was a very romantic era in our country.” In the heyday of her initial years of stardom, the 1930s, westerns were usually relegated to B and Z picture programmers and were rarely major features, but that started to change in the mid-to-late...

When film roles started to grow sparse in the late 1950s, Stanwyck was eager to get into television with a western series. She appeared on several Zane Grey Theater presentations, but the networks wanted her to parrot Loretta Young’s successful anthology show, where Young swirled on camera in a designer gown, introduced each episode, and then proceeded to act in most of them. For the 1960–61 TV season, Stanwyck succumbed and attempted a similar format withThe Barbara Stanwyck Show. The worst part of the format was that she had to introduce each story as Young did; deprived of...