Barbara Stanwyck Read Online Free PDF Page B

ass shot we got in
Mexicali Rose
, but rather the kind of outright sexual idolatry that Josef Von Sternberg brought to his seven Paramount films made in worship of Marlene Dietrich. Capra had fallen in love with Stanwyck, and a love like this includes a love of her body.
    Jerry tells Kay that she should spend the night, and we see on her hardening face that she thinks he only wants her sexually, like all the rest of them. The suspense of this sequence becomes almost unbearable as we watch Kay undress against a rain-spattered window (in his autobiography, Capra wrote that he always found rain erotic). Walker shines adoring light on Stanwyck’s face as Kay waits for the man she loves to come to her and turn her into just one more meaningless lay. We see Jerry’s feet entering the room, and we assume along with Kay that he’s going to force himself on her. (It’s hard to read Jerry a lot of the time. Ralph Graves is stiff in the role, but this quality of his sometimes works to the film’s advantage because he starts to seem like a solid object for Stanwyck to work against, a monolith for her to project on.)
    When Jerry simply pulls a blanket over Kay, the camera holds on Stanwyck’s face as it’s transformed by a look of unadulterated joy. Kay’s joy is compounded because it feels like Stanwyck herself has found a kind of artistic happiness for the first time—a heartening sight for anyone who loves her, or her work, which are really the same thing in her case. There’s something almost pornographic in Capra’s focus on Stanwyck’s newborn, newly virgin whore—if we can take pornography to mean steadily looking at the foundation of all life. Capra’s Italian soul flips out over Stanwyck’s “look to the stars” Irish poeticism, so zealously hidden behind a toffee-like front.
    When Kay looks at Jerry over the breakfast table the next morning, her face is full of love that’s almost indistinguishable from pain. Capra and Stanwyck both understand that when a put-upon, abused woman lowers her defenses and loves someone, this surrender leaves her vulnerable and wide open to attack. Old defenses kick up a fight for dominance and a maelstrom of reasons
not
to feel love. Old, cruel memories that have been buried come back to haunt Kay and Stanwyck, but both actress and character valiantly struggle to keep them at bay.
    The sound is a bit muffled in
Ladies of Leisure
(it could certainly use some restoration), and some of its accouterments are unavoidably redolent of 1930 at Columbia, but Stanwyck’s work here will always be modern because it will always be “true to life.” Stanwyck is emotionally raw here, totally exposed, and this raw exposure is disturbing because real emotion is always a disturbance, a call for change. She makes you realize how often the movies and the people in them try to distance us from life, so that we luxuriate in the cradling, annihilating falseness of “it’s only another movie.” Stanwyck at her best—and especially when working with Capra—never just acted in another movie. Her films are a matter of life and death to her, nothing less.
    In the stock scene where Jerry’s mother confronts Kay, asking her to leave him for his own sake, Stanwyck interestingly chooses to play the first part of this encounter coolly and reasonably, as if Kay really doesn’t understand what was happening. When she realizes what is being asked of her, Stanwyck gives us our first glimpse of her force-of-nature, hysterical sorrow, the most impressive of all her modes on screen. Understandably, she doesn’t quite have full control of this mode here; it makes her head tilt back wildly, and there are moments when she’s slightly dried up, as if she needs to try to locate the feeling again.
    What makes this scene more than stock is the way Stanwyck establishes a deep rapport with the mother (kudos to O’Neil for