Barbara Stanwyck Double Bill

Stanwyck deserves her own post. Well - something does. More generic movie post below this one - Babs gets her own.

Baby Face - This is the proximate cause of this series. A rediscovered version of the film that was rejected by the censors, leading to some changes - a couple new scenes, a couple shots redubbed, the references to Nietzsche taken out... Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, daughter of the saloon, in Erie. Dad pimps her out to the proletariat, but she's sick of it - then dad's still blows up and Lily and her black maid head off to NYC with 4 dollars in their pocket, but no other disadvantages. In the big city, Lily wastes no time talking her way into a job, then sleeping her way through better jobs. There's no sentiment or moralising - Lily uses what she has. The men are more than happy to take advantage of her - most of them think they are taking advantage of her, but she lets them, and plays them for whatever she can get. Toward the end there is some slight slipping toward melodrama, though it's hardly a problem - Lily deserves to be able to take her some rest.

Night Nurse - good, and interesting, as Baby Face is, it is still just a film. It's nice - fast moving, decent looking, and Stanwyck is spectacularly good... But it's still... But Night Nurse - it's directed by William Wellman, and it shows - Baby Face can be clumsy, and obvious - Night Nurse is smooth and sharp. The cast is better too - Joan Blondell is on hand, taking off most of her clothes (along with Stanwyck - basically, they strip to their skivvies in every reel) and being hard-boiled, sexy and funny; the supporting cast - up to Clark Gable, as an evil chauffeur - is also lively and memorable. The film is split in half - the first half has Stanwyck and Blondell going through nursing school: this is hard bitten fast moving comedy, plus skivvies... The second half is a fast moving, hard bitten melodrama - they've become the day and night nurses for a pair of sickly children, surrounded by Badness: a drunken mother ("You mothuh!" says Babs in their face-off); swarms of nasty houseguests; a twitchy quack doctor; a sinister looking, but rather well meaning housekeeper; and Gable, swaggering through with a smirk and a black uniform, beating up the women, starving the kids, and loving it... Babs discovers the plot - she tries to get help, but no one quite believes her - except her pal the bootlegger! Who proves useful. More pre-code goodness - the bootlegger saves the day, then has Gable taken for a ride.... This is one of the sharpest, best, of those wonderful Warner Brothers working class women's pictures of the thirties - fast, hard edged, funny - even their melodramas and suspense films played like comedies.

And Barbara Stanwyck. If there has ever been a better, sexier, cooler actress, I don't know her. She is magnificent - her beauty, her voice, her presence on screen - that edge she has, the way she moves, the way she looks at things - she is spectacular. She was sexy and fearless - in this period, and even later, she never gave a hint of weakness or vulnerability, that wasn't chosen, deliberate, a choice to accept something outside herself. Baby Face throws Nietzsche quotes around (real or feigned, hard to say) - but Stanwyck herself is a Nietzschean presence in films, in the best sense. She's self-made, self-determined - to a fault, in Baby Face, where at some point, her self-realization takes a back seat to a kind of drive to win over other people. Seen that way, the ending, where she starts to soften, isn't necessarily a betrayal of the character - she simply stops living for an idea of herself, and lives for herself, which may require other people. When the "will to power" becomes too politicized, defined too much in terms of ones image, one's power over other people - it becomes alienating. You start to turn priest... The way out of that is a problem - films solve various ways: Stanley Cavell's comedies of remarriage is one - a union of equals. Like Fred and Ginger... Stanwyck, though, is the perfect vehicle for that kind of film, though Baby Face is too clumsy to pull it off. Some of the Capra films she was in (Miracle Woman, prominantly) come closer, and Stella Dallas (especially Cavell's reading.). And Night Nurse, without the pretense of Capra (or even Baby Face) - where her strength is tied more closely to her sweetness - not softness, never that - but a kind of openness and generosity that runs through her unbending personality...

And finally - with Mulvey in town, one's mind turns to theory - to the male gaze, and the limits of said theory. I don't think these films fit very well within theory, at least not the simplified version.... That is: while Stanwyck is positioned as the object of our gaze - she is also, consistently, the subject of the gaze. She looks as much as she is looked at. She is the protagonist of the story - she acts - chooses - her desire drives the story. She's shown acting - she's shown as a unified person (though there are some fetishizing shots) - she is a character. Some of this might be due to the timing - I don't know for sure if the full effect of the objectification of women in Hollywood came later (I mean, in the full Hitchcock sense) - a lot of it, I think, is a trait at Warner Brothers. It's true even of more conventional early works - 42nd Street say - where Bebe Daniels, though perhaps not the star, is the real center of the plot, and is given the one uninterrupted, un-Berkeleyized musical number...

These two Stanwyck films, meanwhile, are interesting for a number of reasons. The fact that there aren't really male audience surrogates in the films, for instance. We see them looking at her - but we still feel that from her point of view - and it is usually linked to her own presentation of herself as an object to be looked at - through which she manipulates them. In Baby Face, none of the men stay with her long enough to become characters - they are conquests, loved and discarded. The exception is at the end - it is instructive. When George Brent appears, the film changes a bit. In this section, we start to see Stanwyck as he sees her - we start to see him emerging as a character, with interests and thoughts other than getting into her dress. We also start to see more fo the conventional glamour shots of old Hollywood - closeups of Stanwyck, alone, being looked at - by us, at least. It is interesting that in the rest of the film, we consistently see Stanwyck looking at things and people - see her composing herself - see her eprforming. In the final section, though, these shots disappear - she is far less self-conscious, far less in control of her image, and so on. It is an interesting change....

There is nothing like that in Night Nurse. She is the protagonist - again - she looks, she acts, she is seen in the round, as it were (shot as an active character, shown in the middle of a three dimensional space). Closeups and similar shots are there to serve the story and the character - to show heightened emotions, decision points and so on - not to present her as something glamourous to be looked at. She is a subject, even when she and Blondell are stripping. It's remarkably modern, more modern than most contemporary films. She was very lucky to be a star at that point in Hollywood's history.