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Barbara Stanwyck: Career
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Barbara Stanwyck was an American actress of stage, film and screen, reaching the height of popularity in the mid-twentieth century. In her long career, she won three Emmy Awards, one Golden Globe Award and received four Academy Award nominations. In 1982 she was given the Academy Honorary Award “for superlative creativity and unique contribution to the art of screen acting”
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Stanwyck appeared in the film Broadway Nights in 1927, but headed back to Broadway with the hit show Burlesque (1927-1928). There she met vaudeville headliner Frank Fay, 10 years her senior and at the peak of his career. Within a short time their Star is Born-like relationship crumbled, but not before Stanwyck followed Fay to Hollywood. It was Fay who pushed Frank Capra to give Stanwyck a second look after a disappointing initial audition, and it was Capra who helped catapult Stanwyck to fame in the films The Miracle Woman (1931) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). Although Stanwyck was never tied to one particular studio, it was her initial affiliation with Capra/Columbia and with Warner Bros. (both studios with looser controls on their stars’ personas than glorious MGM) that allowed her to display her incredible versatility.
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While Crawford and Stanwyck both occasionally played opportunistic women (Crawford in Possessed and Stanwyck in Baby Face), Crawford’s opportunism was undercut by naivete. Stanwyck, on the other hand, rarely played naïve characters. Her characters had been around and they knew the score. In Baby Face, she eagerly gives herself to a chubby personnel clerk to get her foot in the door of a Wall Street company, and she then proceeds to sleep with everyone who can advance her career. Crawford’s characters wouldn’t start at the bottom. They’d find the men in charge rightaway and woo them.
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Stanwyck first worked with German émigré director Sirk, famous for his critiques of small-town American life, in this family melodrama set in early twentieth century Wisconsin. Ten years after abandoning her family for a career on the stage, Naomi Murdoch (Stanwyck) returns to see her daughter’s high school play. Naomi’s reappearance ignites a town scandal, and old conflicts return to the fore. While Sirk wanted to retain the book’s darker ending, in which the town forces Naomi to leave Wisconsin yet again, producer Hunter substituted a happy ending that reunites the family.
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Stanwyck meets Capra and it would change the course of Barbara's career. The source material for the original script was Milton Herbert Gropper's "Lady of the Evening" but Capra hated it. This was to be his fifth "talkie"but his first "woman's picture". He summoned a panel of scriptwriters for a brainstorming session and in 3 days Jo Swerling came up with a screenplay.
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The final disc of the set is a double feature combining Stanwyck's To Please a Lady and Jeopardy. In To Please a Lady, Clark Gable joins the fun as a renegade racecar driver whose questionable tactics result in the death of another driver. Stanwyck is the no-nonsense reporter out to end his career - except that the two fall in love, expectedly complicating matters. Shot at the site of the Indianapolis 500, this largely forgettable film has more lasting power for auto racing enthusiasts. Jeopardy features director John Sturges keeping viewers on the edge of their seats as Stanwyck and Barry Sullivan search for their missing son on the Mexican coast. With plenty of twists and turns, this Hitchcockian thriller features the original theatrical trailer and Stanwyck's 1954 Lux Radio theater broadcast.
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