“Your thoughts are just like your kitchen … DIRTY”

A very young Barbara Stanwyck, shines in Shopworn, a dreary little drama that doesn’t have a great deal to recommend it. The film begins rather abruptly with an accident that claims the life of Kitty Lane’s (Barbara Stanwyck) father. The death scene is atrociously acted, and that is unfortunate as it basically opens the film.

Kitty Lane, now orphaned, and penniless, goes to her Aunt who works in a café in a university town. Kitty quickly becomes the attraction at the café, but class places an almost insurmountable obstacle between her and the young men who come in to flirt. One day she meets the serious minded David Livingston (Regis Toomey), and a romance blossoms briefly before his mother sabotages it.

The plot of Shopworn–a romance ruined by class–is not new. Here, Livingston’s mother (Clara Bandick) is selfish, malicious and hysterical, and while she’s convinced that Kitty will ruin her son’s career, she basically wants to keep him all to herself. She uses her money and influence to ensure that her son doesn’t marry Kitty.

Years pass, Kitty becomes a famous and notorious actress, and so ironically she becomes even a worse match for David in his mother’s possessive and snobby view. But this time, Kitty has power and money to fight back.

Stanwyck fans will treasure seeing her in this role, but the rest of the cast just seem left in the dust. There was no chemistry between Kitty and her leading man, little or no character development, and the film’s conclusion is abrupt and simplistic. Keep an eye open for Zazu Pitts as Kitty’s Aunt Dot.

From director Nick Grinde.

 “People have funny things swimming around inside them.”

In the film Clash By Night Mae Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck) returns home after a ten-year absence to a small coastal fishing town in California. Her brother, Joe, doesn’t ask too many questions–he can tell that she’s down on her luck. Mae arrives with just a single suitcase and a large chip on her shoulder about life and men.

Joe’s boss, Jerry D’Amato, shows interest in Mae. Jerry is a very solid character. He owns a fishing boat, and he takes care of his demented father and irresponsible Uncle Vince. Mae marries Jerry–making it clear that she does not love him–but that the relationship offers her security. After a year of marriage and a baby, Mae, who has long been attracted to Jerry’s sleazy friend, Earl Pfeiffer (Robert Ryan), breaks out of her housewife routine and begins an affair with Earl.

Clash by Night is film noir, but it has soap opera tones too. The thing that prevents one from reaching for the nearest hankie is the performance of Barbara Stanwyck as hard-as-nails Mae Doyle D’Amato. Although her dilemma is clear–security vs. excitement, Stanwyck’s hard-edged speeches eliminate the need for tears. It’s difficult to feel sorry for her husband, Jerry. He’s a good, decent man, and obviously out-of-his depth with Mae, and he goes into the marriage knowing she doesn’t love him. Jerry is the sort of man other men like to make fun of–probably because they can never be as solid and reliable as he is. Jerry seems emasculated and this is largely due to Uncle Vince–an opportunist who blatantly uses Jerry.

Mae’s attraction to Earl–even though he’s exactly the sort of man she’s trying to avoid–adds interest to the plot. Also, Marilyn Monroe stars as Peggy, the tomboy sweetheart of Joe Doyle. She works in the cannery, and the cannery represents the sum total of the career opportunities in town. Peg sympathizes with Mae, and it’s curious to see a very young Monroe in the role of a tomboy and without that carefully developed blonde bombshell role.

Clash by Night is directed by Fritz Lang. It was filmed in Monterey, and fans of Barbara Stanwyck will find the film well worth watching for its strong characters and excellent acting.

“Don’t look back, baby. Don’t ever look back.”

Young Martha Ivers shares a terrible secret with her two childhood friends, Sam Masterson and Walter O’Neil concerning the death of her Aunt. Years pass, and Martha (Barbara Stanwyck) is now married to District Attorney O’Neil (Kirk Douglas). They still live in Iverstown (named for Martha’s wealthy family). Their marriage is not a happy one, but it’s sealed by shared guilt. Martha is now the wealthiest woman in Iverstown, and she and her husband either own or control everything in this corrupt small town.

One night, a car accident strands Sam (Van Heflin) in Iverstown. It’s mere coincidence that he’s back after an absence of almost twenty years, but Walter and Martha assume he’s there to blackmail them. Their guilt alerts Masterson to the possibilities of the situation, and so he sets out to exploit it.

From director Lewis Milestone, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a classic entry in the genre of film noir. Kirk Douglas, in his first screen role, stars as Walter O’Neil. Obviously the studios did not yet have Douglas type-cast in the strong hero roles he later assumed. In this film, he plays mealy-mouthed O’Neil–a spineless man who’s pushed around by his wife. O’Neil’s love for his wife is sick and corrupted. He knows she despises him, but he’s going to hang onto her no matter what it takes. Lizabeth Scott stars as Toni–the girl Sam meets on his first night in town. Scott enjoyed a brief career–which was extinguished by an expose in Confidential magazine. Scott reminds me very much of Lauren Bacall, and this may sound like heresy, but I prefer Scott. She’s rough around the edges and seems to be the genuine article. If Bacall hangs out with low-lifes, she is just slumming, but Lizabeth Scott seems to belong with the dregs of society–just waiting for some man to rescue her and take her home. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to envision her as Toni–the hard luck girl who’s just released from jail.

Barbara Stanwyck is, of course, one of film noirs great leading ladies. She’s ice cold and cruel in this role. But there’s more to Martha than meets the eye. In Martha’s first hysterical scene with her aunt, we get a glimpse of the hard, heartless woman she’ll become. And yet Martha claims to love Sam–but her love is twisted and sick too. She’s not capable of loving anyone in any normal sense of the word. Van Heflin as Sam–is a cipher. He’s a WWII veteran with a checkered past. As a child, he dominated Walter, and when Sam blows back into town, he picks up where he left off. Yet ultimately, Walter and Sam seem to recognize each other’s position. The relationship between Martha, Sam, and Walter dominates this fascinating film. The DVD is excellent quality. For film noir fans, I wholeheartedly recommend The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. It’s a fantastic film

 “I hope all your socks have holes in them.”

In the film Crime of Passion, tough, successful career woman Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck) abandons her newspaper column and a prestigious new job to marry LA police detective Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden). She imagines a life of domestic bliss, and soon she’s living in suburbia–along with all the other detectives’ wives. Doyle is happy plodding along in his career, but Kathy really can’t stand the life she finds herself in. The Doyle’s social life is composed of dreary evenings with Doyle’s co-workers. The men play card games, and the women chatter on about inane subjects. While no unpleasant words exit from the mouths of the detectives’ wives, it’s quite clear that a strict social hierarchy exists. In particular, one wife, Sara Alidos, is all too happy to carry on at length about her intimate friendship with the Police Commissioner Pope (Raymond Burr) and his wife. Kathy really doesn’t belong with these other wives. Try as she might, she just doesn’t fit in, and her own lack of conformity drives Kathy to the brink of a breakdown.

But then Kathy has an idea. In Kathy’s mind, her husband is superior to the other detectives, and she is cleverer than the rest of the wives. And so Kathy sets out to use her brain to promote her dullard of a husband through whatever means are necessary.

Barbara Stanwyck is excellent in the role of Kathy–a woman who gives up her career and lives to regret it. Kathy is hard and tough, but when she meets Bill, she gives into romance, and in her case, this is a big mistake. Bill Doyle is a good, hard-working man, but Kathy doesn’t respect him. Raymond Burr as Pope is the man who sees past Kathy’s persona and sees the conniving woman underneath.

From director Gert Oswald, Crime of Passion contains some extremely interesting comments especially about the roles of women in the 50s. For film noir/Stanwyck fans, this is a film well worth watching.

“Makes me want to leave the wife.”

Dixie Daisy (Barbara Stanwyck) is the hot new number in a burlesque show. As Dixie, Barbara Stanwyck wears a see through sarong and performs the song Take it off the E string, put it on the G string to a packed house with an audience of middle-aged men who go crazy every time she wiggles her hips. Dixie’s big problems are an amorous comic, Biff Brannigan (Michael O’Shea), battling burlesque dancers, and a rival with a fake Russian accent. But Dixie’s problems become suddenly more serious when following a police raid, a showgirl shows up dead strangled by her very own lacy g-string. The murder investigation points to Dixie as a main suspect.

Based on the novel The G-String Murders written by Gypsy Rose Lee, The Lady Of Burlesque is an amusing glimpse at life both on and off the stage of a ‘risque’ burlesque show. The murders take place amidst the chaotic lives of the performers, and some of the very best scenes are in the dancers’ changing rooms as the women reveal their ambitions, jealousies and viciousness. This is a very different sort of role for Stanwyck, and the film really is great fun to watch. Most of the burlesque employees see this stint on the burlesque stage as the prelude to making it to the big-time, so an air of amateurish hope reigns amongst the employees. This mood adds to the film’s lighthearted approach, and some of the dancers wave to their boyfriends in the audience while others try to hog the stage. My Alpha DVD is passable quality. The black and white film is a bit grainy, but nothing that seriously interferes with enjoyment.

“Decent women don’t wreck us.”

In this 1936 film, Robert Taylor stars as Chris Claybourne (Robert Taylor), the black sheep of a highly respectable, New York based family. His brother Tom (John Eldredge) is a successful physician, and his father (Samuel S. Hinds) is a researcher. Chris, a ne’er-do-well with a gambling habit, is a doctor too, and he’s about to ship out to the jungle to conduct research on a mysterious tick-borne disease. Chris doesn’t take this too seriously, but then life is just one big joke as far as he’s concerned. He’s down to just a few days before he leaves when he loses $5,000 in a New York Casino owned by Fish-Eye (Joseph Calleia). Chris blithely writes a bad check to Fish-Eye expecting that he’ll be able to make it “good” some time in the future.

That night in the casino Chris meets mannequin, Rita Wilson (Barbara Stanwcyk). Instant chemistry, combined with his imminent departure lead to a devil-may-care romance for Chris’s last few days in New York, and the relationship seems to suit both Chris and Rita. It’s all just a load of laughs until it comes to the eve of Chris’s departure, and then the couple realize they’re in love….

His Brother’s Wife examines notions of duty vs. personal desire. Chris and Rita are similar; in the beginning of the film, neither one of them tends to take life too seriously, and they both have a gambling habit. But when their casual relationship turns serious, they enter into a deadly game involving dangerous stakes of revenge and self-destructive one-up-man-ship. This is a great role for Stanwyck. In His Brother’s Wife, she talks tough, and when she has no power and no control, she maneuvers the situation until she’s completely in control. This film is sheer delight for fans of the marvelous Barbara Stanwyck.

“Yeah, I’m a tramp, and who’s to blame?”

The marvelous Barbara Stanwyck stars as gold-digger Lily Powers in the pre-Hayes code film, Baby Face. Lily is raised in a depressingly poor and grimy mill town. Her father runs an unofficial speakeasy and makes his own moonshine in the outdoor shed. Lily serves drinks–and a lot more–to the male customers. When Lily becomes tired of her father’s ‘arrangement’ with some of the male customers, she escapes to New York. Here she begins her long, hard climb to wealth–man by man. Along the way, she ruins careers, wrecks lives and even causes a suicide.

Lily Powers is a great character–very focused, avaricious, hard-edged and driven. Thanks to the early scenes that depict the harsh realities of her life, her ambitious and self-protective need to accumulate wealth is clearly understood. When she first arrives in New York, she identifies a building she wants to work in, and then rapidly rises to the top of the food chain using her looks and various male supervisors along the way. The film doesn’t try to hide Lily’s harpy-like materialistic tendencies, and she’s seen beginning work at literally the bottom floor of an office building. Then scenes depict Lily’s plying her tactics (this includes letting men look down her blouse). Honky tonk music plays as the camera sweeps the front of the office building and Lily moves up to another department (and figuratively improves her place in society). With each new department, she brings herself to the attention of increasingly wealthier men–until she manages to reach the top floor–leaving a trail of broken men in her destructive climb.

As Lily’s jobs become more important, so do the men she seduces. At first, the men have little to lose–she discards a very young John Wayne with little more than a broken heart, but as she crushes more powerful men, the stakes become greater. And this inevitably leads to a front-page scandal.

Stanwyck fans will love watching her unleashed in this role–at one point she acknowledges: “I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed.” There’s little pretense regarding her single-minded ambitious drive, and from the beginning of the film until the last scene, this is clearly Stanwyck’s film.

“My life is just one long round of whoopee.”

In Remember the Night, shoplifter Lee Leander (Barbara Stanwyck) is caught trying to pawn a diamond bracelet she stole from a jeweler. She gets her day in court defended by an overly dramatic lawyer who claims she was hypnotized. Prosecuting attorney John Sargent (Fred MacMurray) requests a delay in the trial until after Christmas–he knows full well that he stands a better chance of gaining a conviction once the holidays are over. Consequently, Lee is supposed to spend Christmas in jail. Sargent begins to feel sorry for her and arranges for bail. Lee ends up on at Sargent’s home on Christmas Eve, and after discovering they’re both from Indiana, he agrees to drive her home for the holidays.

Lee gets a cold response at her family’s old homestead, so Sargent takes her home to his family farm for Christmas. Sargent’s home is idyllic–complete with an adoring mother (Beulah Bondi), loving Aunt Emma (Elizabeth Patterson), and Willie (Sterling Holloway), the harmless simpleton of a handyman.

When the film begins, Lee is as tough as nails, but once in the Sargent home, she begins to melt. The script (by Preston Sturges) is extremely well done, and while this film could have been incredibly corny, it isn’t. Once out of their environment and their roles, both Sargent and Lee take a good hard look at each other, and gain insight into their vastly different backgrounds. As a child, he was wanted and loved, and she was despised and rejected. While on the farm, her past becomes trivial. The film, fortunately, doesn’t try to turn her ‘conversion’ and his acceptance into a fairy-tale, but continues to confront the problems inherent in their relationship. Remember the Night is a great film for the Christmas season as it explores that bittersweet theme of going home for the holidays.

“Don’t worry about my conscience, sweetheart.”

The pre-Hays Code film Ladies They Talk About stars Barbara Stanwyck as Nan Taylor–a gun moll who helps knock off a bank. When the robbery goes sour, Nan is caught. Anti-crime crusader, Dave Slade (Preston Foster) rages against Nan from his pulpit, but when he meets her in person, he recognizes her as a childhood friend. She was the daughter of the town deacon, and he was the son of the town drunk. A romance is kindled, and Slade is prepared to pull strings to save Nan, but when she comes clean about the robbery, Slade is horrified. Nan goes off to jail, but their paths are destined to cross again.

This is a splendid role for Stanwyck. She switches her behaviour back and forth–depending on the audience she’s playing to. In one scene, she’s ushered in the district attorney’s office, where she coyly displays her legs while playing the innocent victim of circumstance. When the district attorney tells her she’s “wasting that panorama” Nan immediately drops the coy act and slides back into her tough gang girl demeanor.

A great deal of the film is spent inside San Quentin. While the men’s prison is shown as militaristic, the women’s prison is depicted as a social club with cliques. There are all types in here–including one prisoner who’s besotted with Slade, and also the motherly Aunt Maggie who insists her only crime was she ran a beauty salon. There’s even a pet Cockatoo brought in to make the female prisoners behave, and some scenes focus on the female prisoners adjusting their undies. Class politics exist within the jail–an upper-class woman totes her Pekingese around while expecting to get her laundry done free by the ‘maid’ Mustard. Nan soon finds her footing in jail and declares, “I never let anything lick me yet, and I never will.” Unfortunately, the lead male role just can’t get the backbone to hold his own against Stanwyck, but it matters little since this is her film anyway. Directed by Howard Bretherton and William Keighley, Ladies They Talk About is a delightful film for Stanwyck fans.

“You can’t tear up my marriage license-that’s adultery.”

The Bride Walks Out is a delightful comedy film that explores the financial struggles of a young married couple. When the film begins, Carolyn (Barbara Stanwyck) is a floor model earning $50 a week. Martin (Gene Raymond), an engineer, makes $25 a week, but after getting a new job, his pay increases to $35 a week. He decides that on his new salary, they can afford to get married. He insists, however, that Carolyn should give up her job. After outlining a budget, he thinks they will have 50 cents left after paying all the bills. Martin’s insistence that Carolyn give up her job almost ends the relationship, but in spite of Carolyn’s misgivings, she agrees, and then immediately regrets it.

Carolyn wants a proper (expensive) wedding and an extended honeymoon, but all they can manage is a hasty few minutes at the courthouse. This immediately causes trouble between the newlyweds, and after an argument, Martin ends in front of a judge on a variety of charges. The marriage begins problematically, and the newlyweds are soon consumed with debt. Martin fills their home with furniture, and Carolyn launches out on shopping expeditions. Soon, she’s hiding bills demanding payment and letters threatening repossession.

Directed by Leigh Jason, The Bride Walks Out is representative of those zippy comedies the 30s is so famous for. Witty dialogue and a fast moving plot never allow this film to fall into sentimentality while splendid supporting roles add to the fun. There’s the inebriated millionaire playboy Hugh Mackenzie (Robert Young) who meets Carolyn and Martin in the courthouse and then follows them back home. But some of the funniest scenes involve Martin’s workmate–the cynical Paul Dodson (Ned Sparks) and his long-suffering wife Mattie (Helen Broderick). The Dodsons’ marriage is also fraught with financial hardships, but it’s been going on so long, it’s now become a joking matter with an edge of bitter truth. In one scene, Mattie tells Paul, “I haven’t had a fur coat since our police dog was shedding.” Barbara Stanwyck fans–and those who love 30s comedies–should really enjoy this entertaining film.