'The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck' by Catherine Russell
Barbara Stanwyck starred in 83 movies and as big screen jobs diminished, she continued working in television into her 70s. Husky voiced, thin and almost birdlike but without a hint of fragility, she fell outside the usual Hollywood conventions for actresses of her era while able to work within them. Perhaps work is the key word. She gained a reputation as one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood.
Stanwyck’s career is too bulky to be encompassed in any one book. Attempting to examine her from various perspectives, Concordia University Montreal film studies professor Catherine Russell made an apt choice. Her The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck is organized in 26 topical chapters, alphabetically arranged, from “A, All I Desire: Pastiche and Performance” through “Z, Zeppo Marx: Comedy and Agency.” (She cheats a bit, filling X with “Exotica and Bitter Tears.”) Ranging over many themes in the course of her compact account, Russell tries to evoke an image of Stanwyck as the auteur of her own persona. Stanwyck had “agency,” as academic cultural academics like to say, as a woman within an industry dominated by men and permeated by misogyny. “What happens when we see the woman not as an object but as an actor?” Russell asks in “N, No Man of Her Own.”
That’s one of many challenges Stanwyck negotiated through a career that climaxed in her role as matriarch in “The Big Country” (1965-1969), a most unusual TV western. Her Hollywood career began early in the talking era, in “pre-Code” films with such titles as Illicit (1931) and Forbidden (1932) that signaled depictions of life beyond the prevailing norms. According to Russell, Stanwyck’s “characters ‘have theories,’ which does not mean they are educated, but they do have intelligence.” In the end those characters conform by marrying upper class gentlemen, yet “Before she gets there … she has a lot to say.”
As for Zeppo Marx, he was Stanwyck’s agent from 1935-1937, negotiating deals for 12 films in that short period. Despite his reputation as the fifth wheel in the early Marx Brothers comedies, Zeppo was no fool and became one of the most astute agents in the business. With her own sharp sense for business as well as comedy and drama, Stanwyck signed in 1937 with Jules Stein, the founder of MCA.
The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star, is published by University of Illinois Press.
