Honorary Oscars: Barbara Stanwyck

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/01/24/honorary-oscars-barbara-stanwyck/

Barbara Stanwyck continues to be one of the more unique and mysterious screen presences of classic Hollywood, having vaulted herself from a hardscrabble youth in Brooklyn to dance hall girl, to the highest paid actress on the silver screen. She was born as Ruby Stevens in 1907 to working class parents, the youngest of five. At the age of four, Barbara’s mother passed away after being pushed by a drunk from a moving streetcar and not long after her father took a job digging the Panama Canal and was never heard from again. That sounds like something out of a dime store novel, doesn’t it?

You don’t become the top earning actress in the world and a legend among your peers without a pretty strong filmography, and Stanwyck doesn’t come up short when you give her resume a look. We’re going to do just that, picking out the films the Academy nominated her for and others that made her notorious. Then we’re going to identify the one film we think she maybe should have taken home that little gold man for through pure competition. Ready? Let’s go!

Stanwyck’s first Oscar nomination was for her role as social climber Stella Dallas in the social drama of the same name. The character fit her like a glove, with her own street smart qualities informing the performance in an almost seamless fashion. The film itself, a pretty simplistic little tearjerker about motherly love, wasn’t highly nominated, but Stanwyck’s ability to swing convincingly from playing 20 to playing 40 had to factor into the admiration shown to her performance. She’s playing the mother in the following scene. Hopefully you don’t mind me ‘spoiling’ the last scene of a pretty predictable movie from more than eighty years ago.

This is the same woman who would play a conniving seductress seven years later in Double Indemnity (still to come). Unfortunately for her, this wouldn’t be enough, and Luise Rainer would win in 1937 for The Good Earth. Like every other actress with a pulse, there were rumors that Stanwyck was considered for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, but that seems like a bit of a long shot. No worries though, she would star that very same year alongside William Holden and Lee J Cobb in the prestige adaptation of Clifford Odetts’ play Golden Boy.

1941 was a big year for Stanwyck, starting with the beloved Preston Sturges romantic comedy The Lady Eve, which she starred in alongside Henry Fonda. Her Jean Harrington is a film flam gal who goes in on a scheme to bilk the naive upper class snake expert played by Fonda. Of course she falls for him, that’s no surprise, but the pleasure audiences get both out of the whip-smart Sturges script and the crackling performances of the leads have kept it near the top of its genre decades later.

The Academy has a spotty record in identifying great comedy though. If they wanted to honor Stanwyck in ’41 they were probably gong to look elsewhere. Thankfully for them, she gave them plenty to consider, with three other movies to choose from just that year, including Meet John Doe with Gary Cooper, another pairing with Fonda in You Belong to Me, and the eventual nominated role in Ball of Fire.

No, Jerry Lee Lewis would hit it big for another fifteen years, this flick was another screwball affair, this one directed by Howard Hawks and written by Billy Wilder. Stanwyck plays a nightclub performer with a gangster boyfriend who hides out with an enclave of professors, one played by Gary Cooper, who are compiling what they hope to be the most complete encyclopedia of human knowledge yet. And of course the girl with the rough edges falls for another uptight professor type.

Say, where have these girls been my whole life?

As you can see, although Ball of Fire was also pretty darned enjoyable, it wasn’t really the kind of role that was going to let Barbara beat out Joan Fontaine in Suspicion…so it didn’t. To be fair, it probably didn’t help that Stanwyck didn’t do her own singing in the picture, and her lip synching leaves a little something to be desired, at least to eyes that grew up on MTV.

That connection with Billy Wilder would work out for her though, with the most memorable role of her life in his groundbreaking crime noir Double Indemnity (1944). Stanwyck, already the highest paid actress in the business by this point (due in part to her breakneck production pace), was a little reluctant to take on what was already known to be a risky part. The Hays office had its sights set on this production and was convinced the source material couldn’t be made into a script suitable for the screen. Wilder wouldn’t take no for a answer though, and finally convinced her to take the risk alongside him.

Sort of like she does to Fred MacMurray in the flick.

“Red hot poker” indeed.