I knew I was in love with Barbara Stanwyck from the first act of The Lady Eve, a 90-minute screwball romp from 1941 where she plays a conwoman on a luxury ship. A lot of it's the look—this shimmery short black top, long black skirt, and kind of mullet-y hair, all perfect in monochrome—and some of it's the way she's introduced to the audience at the very beginning, giving this snappy, snarky narration as other, lesser dames compete for the attention of Henry Fonda, the heir she's aiming to scam. But the movie really gets started when she sticks out her leg to engineer a meet-cute. From that moment on, Fonda is doomed. Hook baited, she takes him back to her room to replace her shoe, and then gores him through the cheek as soon as he bites. That self-satisfied smile as she instantly flips from available femininity to apathetic authority is irresistible. How could you not chase after her?
Stanwyck is one of the best actresses to ever do it. In 2024 she may no longer be a brand-name legend on the level of Hepburn or Bacall, but she's someone whose genre-hopping work from the '30s through the '50s provides an illuminating survey of a rapidly changing film industry. In every performance I've seen, she's a magnet for attention—cunning and sexy and hilarious and sympathetic as the situation demands. I can't get enough of her, and whenever I see a new-to-me film of hers, I'm always looking forward to the scene in which she needs to win an argument or convince another character to do something for her. These are the moments where she becomes a goddess.
Left without parents at the age of 4, the Brooklyn-born Stanwyck dropped out before high school and broke into showbiz as a chorus girl. Reading about her upbringing is like looking through a kaleidoscope of strung-together jobs and connections from an electrically charged era of American entertainment, particularly her work under irrepressible speakeasy impresario Texas Guinan. While her rags-to-riches tale made her into a staunch conservative opposed to New Deal assistance programs, it also, in her work, helped bestow a talent for portraying hungry characters constantly scheming for an angle. The audience could do nothing but pity or laugh at those who stood between her and her goal.
Double Indemnity, the noir classic from 1944, is probably the best-known example of Stanwyck's powers of persuasion. The hardboiled script from Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler gave her a role both nasty and tragic as a housewife dreaming of murder. This version of Stanwyck is a little trashier, a little more desperate and frazzled, but there's a manipulative chill underneath that makes her an unforgettable villain. I love the moment in her first scene where she gets up from the chair, paces for a moment, and then sits back down to cross her legs in the most suggestive way the 1940s would allow. You can feel her grip tightening on what was initially a casual conversation.
Fred MacMurray, as a guy who thinks he's a lot smarter than he really is, serves as an easy mark primed to kill at the sight of an anklet. But Stanwyck makes a less sinister, more artful use of her legs in Ball Of Fire, a very silly 1941 comedy in which a bunch of professors/roommates are writing an encyclopedia and recruit Stanwyck to teach them about slang. Gary Cooper is a wonderful scene partner with a paralyzing fear of womanhood, but Stanwyck's gams, again, are the icebreaker, leading into this stream of one-liners and asides that win her a room in this mansion. There's a loose, spontaneous quality to this whole scene that lights up the camera even as she pretends it doesn't exist.
Her strength's not just in the stems. Another 1941 movie with Gary Cooper, Frank Capra's Meet John Doe, has Stanwyck playing the Platonic ideal of the tough, fast-talking, black-and-white leading lady. She's a newspaper columnist who, when fired by new management, makes up a story on her last day about a man disgruntled with society who vows to commit suicide. It becomes a sensation, and she seizes on it as a way to keep her job, demanding the editor of the paper run with it. This avalanche of a monologue is impressive on just a vocal level, and the compounding force of her words pummel their target until he has no choice but to dive for cover.
It's unbelievable how prolific movie stars were expected to be in this era. In the 1930s, alone, I count 35 credits for Stanwyck. While not all of these films were classics or even hits, this output would have given her a constant presence in the leisure hours of the public. A Barbara Stanwyck film was less an event, then, and more a visit from a neighbor—each one giving you a new angle on a singular talent. Even if the movies vary in quality, I've never been disappointed in her ability to completely own her screen time, whether it's the take-no-shit seductiveness of Baby Face or the chilling sociopathy of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. I'm disappointed when she's not on screen, and that goes all the way back to her breakout performance in Ladies of Leisure.
This 1930 release is pure sentimental Capra, a kind of jazz-age Pretty Woman. The director gets a lot of credit for molding a totally raw Stanwyck into an illustrious actress, and it's true that she performs in this like a hot prospect unburdened by an onerous set of demands from the chair. I can't really praise anyone but Stanwyck herself, however, for the passion she sends out of her eyes and her throat in her climactic monologue. By 2024 standards, it's shockingly unadorned, a blunt object rather than a delicate needle. But I fall for it again and again, imagining what it must have been like for viewers to watch this working-class kid go supernova while screaming about love with all the furious insight that disappears with maturity.
From this declaration, Stanwyck grabbed her audience with two hands and wouldn't let them go in two decades of work. Her screen partners and directors eventually learned what those audiences already knew: Best to get out of her way.
