Barbara Stanwyck Read Online Free PDF

“note”). “But great movie acting … watch the eyes,” she continued, a skill she said Capra had taught her.
    Sweetly, the little girl emerges from the party girl as Kay takes a bath, staring up at the ceiling and trying to see the stars but still just seeing a ceiling. The camera dollies back, and with some backward camera movement Walker dissolves to Kay getting dressed—a lovely effect, but one as extraneous to Capra’s vision as Swerling’s often sophisticated and impressive dialogue. Without Capra’s overriding and somewhat inchoate need to get to “the truth” about Stanwyck, about himself and about life,
Ladies of Leisure
would just be a fine early talkie with a star-making performance from its lead actress. With his ambition, it’s much more than that: It’s an elating and even exhausting experience. Capra has the nerve and the talent and the actress to make exhortations to feel more and feel deeper seem like a call to arms. The film has the air of having been created in total freedom (Columbia head Harry Cohn left his boy genius alone, for the most part) and with full artistic inspiration.
    Like Stella Dallas, Kay is low-class in looks and manner but high-class inside, a rich dichotomy that Stanwyck mined throughout her career. Kay tells Dot that she went to the opera, and it transported her. She compares listening to the music to being in the middle of the ocean. In 1930, opera was still the music of the Italian people, not the closed-off specialty act it has become, and it proves the perfect bridge for hardened Kay to cross over into the arena of high art. High art here equates with heightened feeling, a heightening that Stanwyck herself expresses in her own acting style, merging the best kind of theatricality (“this is happening
right now
, in front of you, only once”) with a miraculous kind of freshness. This freshness made for a vivid contrast to the kind of artificial and outdated theatricality running rampant through all the film studios during the period Capra and Stanwyck made their first masterpiece together.
    Capra loved Stanwyck and he identified with her totally, the key combo when it comes to director-actress artistic collaborations. McBrideseems to think that they had an affair. “We were very close,” Capra told him. “I wish I could tell you about it, but I can’t, I shouldn’t and I won’t. But she was delightful.” This quote is not typical Capra; he usually outright lied or was too frankly honest, but rarely was he really coy like this. Capra wants to insinuate that they had some kind of affair without actually outright saying so, which strikes me as the gambit of a man who did indeed fall madly in love with his leading lady, but who might not have gotten as far with her as he would have liked.
    Stanwyck, still married to a not-yet-faltering Frank Fay, surely recognized right away what Capra could do for her as an actress. His films made her a star. She was probably fond of him, and she might have encouraged his romantic attentions to a point so that his creativity would be similarly encouraged. Whatever happened between them, for Stanwyck, the wish to be “the best of all” blended any true affection she might have felt for Capra with careful calculation that kept his interest burning through three more films.
    Kay literally finds herself as an artist’s model, and
Ladies of Leisure
is itself a metaphor for the partnership between Capra and Stanwyck. It’s an intense, almost grueling film, lingering over set pieces as if Capra doesn’t want them to end, as if these set pieces are a kind of lovemaking that he wants to prolong. Take the long scene set late at night in Jerry’s studio. Done painting her for the day, Jerry looks at Kay warming herself by the fire. Walker frames Stanwyck against the light so that it outlines the curve of her behind. This isn’t the crude and unfeeling