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

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."

The femme fatale is one of the most alluring characters in a novel, comic or film. They are usually beautiful, charming and seductive. She uses her exquisiteness and deep sexual attraction to manipulate men in order to reach her goal. She flaunts, flirts and switches between seductress to damsel in distress at the drop of a hat. More than capable of changing the tyre on her car, but would rather wait by the roadside and let some man run to the rescue and do the dirty work. She looks on, powdering her nose and contemplating what other uses the hapless fool may have.

Like a black widow spider, weaving a web of emotion and tempting you in with offers of love, money or sex in return, then sucking you dry, leaving an empty husk! The victim falls for it hook, line and sinker; more often than not the victim is left broke, heart broken and in more sinister cases, dead. The femme fatale is always entertaining; maneuvering through plots, leaving a trail of sweet destruction along the way. They dress like they're parading the catwalks of Milan and smell as sweet as Chanel No.5. What hot-blooded male wouldn’t fall victim to such exquisiteness? They certainly add a bit of spice to the plot and shove 2 (perfectly manicured!) fingers up to political correctness.
 

Barbara Stanwyck: Double Indemnity

Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson is one of the great film noir super bitches, Joan Collins in Dynasty aint got nuthin' on Phyllis! Prior to this role, Stanwyck had mainly appeared in melodramas and sentimental comedies, but this became her tour de force. She plays a rich, bored, ruthless, sexy and man-eating lady of leisure in 1940’s Los Angeles. She persuades insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) to sort her husband out with an accident policy then murder him and collect the cash on it's "double indemnity" clause. Neff is so enraptured by Phyllis, he's putty in her hands; he doesn't stand a chance!

Stanwyck's performance is pulsating. She uses all her feminine wiles to get exactly what she wants; she stays cool throughout the whole film. Never raising her voice, just calmly calculating her next move, whilst MacMurray becomes a nervous wreck. He is enthralled but out of his depth, in a world he can’t understand. Throughout, Stanwyck glides through the film in long evening dresses, minks, silk pyjamas and lip-gloss. Showing no emotion when her husband is murdered, and being cold hearted to her lover. Only when a gun is pressed to her head does she show any remorse, albeit briefly. Her performance has become a blue print for many femme fatale roles, homage indeed. A cautionary tale for any insurance salesmen out there!

Au début de la Première Guerre mondiale, le cinéma crée le personnage de la vamp. La première vamp, Théda Bara, est apparue en 1915 aux U.S.A. mais elle n'a pas tardé à faire des émules dans tous les pays d'Europe. Pendant un demi-siècle, le personnage de la vamp a été exploité à satiété et des noms sont dans toutes les mémoires : Musidora, Gréta Garbo, Marlène Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth, Lauren Bacall. Le cinéma français n'a pas su élever ses vamps à la hauteur d'un mythe comme son homologue américain. Certaines vamps comme Viviane Romance ou Ginette Leclerc ont été des "battantes" opiniâtres et ont lutté pour leur survie. A ces actrices le cinéma français doit quelques chefs-d'oeuvre dont les titres sont restés dans nos mémoires : La Chienne, Pépé-le-Moko. Le Corbeau, Panique... Pendant plus de quinze ans, le personnage de la vamp disparaît de nos écrans mais, miraculeusement, par le truchement du film noir, le cinéma américain à l'immense privilège de permettre la résurrection de la vamp et de nouveaux noms apparaissent sur les écrans : Jessica Lange, Linda Fiorentino ou l'inclassable Sharon Stone. Si la vamp d'hier a disparu, longue vie à la vamp de demain, souhaite l'auteur qui a connu et reçu les confidences de quelques vamps du cinéma français.

Qui fut la plus grande femme fatale? 

•    Barbara Stanwyk - Phyllis Dietrichson dans Assurance sur la mort (1944) (32.7 %)  

•    Mary Astor - Brigid O'Shaughnessy dans Le faucon maltais (1941) (9.9 %)  

•    Ava Gardner - Kitty Collins dans Les tueurs (1946) (7.9 %)  

•    Gene Tierney - Laura Hunt dans Laura (1944) (5 %)  

•    Jane Greer - Kathie Moffat dans Le griffe du passé (1947) (4 %)  

•    Autre (40.6 %)  

Barbara Stanwyck- l'image de la Femme Fatale Froide et Cruelle...

Laure se rêve en femme fatale (ce qu’elle est déjà certes mais à un degré moindre...) car elle s’est, dès le premier plan du film, identifiée au personnage de Barbara Stanwyck dans le film de Billy Wilder Assurances sur la mort (1944) qu’elle voit à la télévision. Le cinéma de De Palma présente un monde qui se référencie à l’image. Les personnages n’ont aucune existence propre, ils évoluent en tant qu’image se rapportant à d’autres images. Le premier plan nous montre le visage de Laure se reflétant à travers l’écran de télévision. A l’instar de la première apparition d’Elsa (Rita Hayworth) la femme fatale de La dame de Shanghaï d’Orson Welles (1948), Laure est une image avant d’être une femme. Dans les grands films noirs américains des années 40, la femme est fatale par le regard que les hommes portent sur elle. En se rêvant femme fatale, Laure se met en scène et va se conduire de la manière dont les hommes (les spectateurs) l’imaginent: elle se présente comme un objet de fascination, une image sur laquelle les fantasmes masculins vont pouvoir se projeter. Outre les traîtrises, les manipulations de son mari et du photographe, la séquence du strip-tease dans le bar constitue l’aboutissement outrancier de ce concept de femme fatale. Renforcée par la chanson du groupe Saez aux paroles explicites (« mets ta langue où tu sais... »), De Palma use des clichés pour conférer à cette séquence un climat d’irréalité (manière de souligner que tout cela est un rêve...un autre détail le prouve mais il faut être attentif: lorsque Laure prend son bain avant de rêver, l’horloge indique 3h33. Dans le rêve, à chaque fois qu’une horloge sera dans le plan, elle indiquera toujours cette heure là...). Un bar rempli de gros virils habillés de cuir, un strip-tease qui vire presque au viol, deux hommes qui se battent en ombre chinoise devant une femme qui se régale de ce spectacle dont elle est l’initiatrice... Probabilmente un approccio razionale non e' il modo migliore per gustarsi il raffinato e cinefilo viaggio di De Palma, ma il regista non riesce a creare quell'empatia onirica che il fluire delle immagini dovrebbe suggerire e si perde in un freddo gioco di citazioni e scherzi del destino. Forse e' proprio la gratuita' il maggior difetto del film, un succedersi di belle sequenze il cui ribaltamento pare piu' un pretesto formale che una necessita' narrativa. Il ricordo di Barbara Stanwyck, con cui si apre il film, stimola paragoni imbarazzanti: il suggerito, le frasi allusive e soprattutto la crudelta', l'avidita' e il carisma di una delle dark-lady piu' famose del cinema, perdono, nella versione aggiornata ai tempi, gran parte della loro efficacia. Anche se lo strip-tease della bella Rebecca Romijn-Stamos resta uno dei momenti piu' caldi e coinvolgenti del film.