Barbara Stanwyck Read Online Free PDF Page A

something as unusual for the Hollywood of that time and place. He wants her to be real. He wanted Stanwyck to show the truth about herself so that he could tell the truth about himself, and that transference takes patience, the same patience Jerry exhibits with all of Kay’s gaucheries and self-protectiveness. Without some of her make-up, Stanwyck’s face is plain, severe, and beseeching, crying out to the man behind the camera for help and love.
    As if freed by this close-up, Stanwyck lets loose with some off-the-cuff “behavior,” little jokey voices and nonsense noises. She’s charting her way, instinctively, to the best kind of naturalistic film acting. Capra let it be known that she was a spontaneous performer, a “primitive emotional.” He quickly realized that she was at her best on the first take, so he didn’t rehearse her with the other actors and used multiple cameras to capture her at her best.
    â€œThat first take with Stanwyck was sacred,” said Edward Bernds, Capra’s sound mixer. Throughout her life, Stanwyck was always best in first takes. “That’s the stage training,” she explained. “The curtain goes up at 8:30, and you’d better be good. You don’t get a retake.” It’s as if she pressed a kind of button in herself, and there it all was, controlled, pure feeling—but it was only available once. To keep this concentration, Stanwyck always memorized the entire script before shooting so that she would know where she was and keep up a kind of emotional continuity.
    â€œYou should shoot for the first time,” she said. “And if you have an emotional scene you only have so much water in you to come out! About the third or fourth take, you start drying up, not because you want to, but it’s a physical thing that happens.” There are a lot of actors who like to rehearse a scene and do a few takes for the camera, and they only get better as they go along. They get more deeply into it, more detailed, more involved. But Stanwyck’s involvement was of the instant kind. She had to believe, somehow, that the scene was really happening. Ask her to do it again right away, and that belief would be shattered.
    On the stage, presumably Stanwyck could believe in the same scenes night after night, but the movies gave her a way to be “in the moment” to the
n
th degree. When she got older and more experienced, Stanwyck could sometimes joke with the crew before scenes, but generally, if she could, she would withdraw into herself into a kind of self-hypnosis. A writer on the set of
Clash by Night
(1952) compared her preparation before a scene to that of a prizefighter waiting to enter the ring. That comparison sounds apt; she developed a gallantry that had a distinctly masculine tinge.
    In Jerry’s studio, his pal Bill stares at Kay a little too long. She snaps, “Take a good look … it’s free,” inaugurating the justly celebrated wisecracking style of the thirties Stanwyck, much more direct in its delivery and implications than the quizzical style of a Jean Arthur, the worldly jabs of a Claudette Colbert, the deadpan mistrust of a Ginger Rogers. Stanwyck’s laugh lines hint that there’s a vestige of amusement somewhere in her, but her taunts come from a much darker place than that ofthe other 1930s film heroines, a place of unspecified trauma that has to remain mysterious and well below the surface. If even a bit of her anger somehow emerges, there can be no more jokes—only murder, suicide, or revenge. As Kay holds her own against Jerry’s snooty fiancée, Capra gives her a few silent close-ups where Stanwyck registers clear thoughts on her face and even makes gracefully smooth transitions between them. “It’s nice to have very nice dialogue, if you can get it,” Stanwyck said (that “if you can get it” is classic Stanwyck, the Stanwyck tough girl