Barbara Stanwyck (34 page)

“And the way she acted between takes was very different,” Sirk remembered. “Most people, as soon as the camera stops, you know, go straight to the mirror to check. But every time, she would go to a corner of the set, hardly talking to anyone—until we were ready to shoot again, and she was always ready and always perfect.” (Maureen O'Sullivan, a supporting player in Sirk's first film with Stanwyck,
All I Desire
[1953], found her “a cold person,” because of the way she isolated herself on set. Stanwyck needed to do this to get into character, for Sirk had stimulated her most creative impulses). “She impressed me all the time as someone who—what can I say?—someone who had really been touched deeply by life in some way,” Sirk concluded. “Because she had depth as a person ….”

Sirk favored the title of Carol Brink's source novel
Stopover
, and considered it far stronger than the final title of his initial collaboration with Stanwyck,
All I Desire
. Concession to popular taste was something he always had to work against; even so, these concessions to Ross Hunter stimulated Sirk's creativity. After the credits, we see a placard with, “Naomi Murdoch, Direct From Broadway,” billed fourth on a theater bill. “Naomi Murdoch, that's me,” Stanwyck says, in voiceover, “Not quite at the bottom of the bill yet and not quite at the end of my rope.”

Her voice sounds beyond exhausted, like an empty cornhusk, as she tells us about the stale air in theaters during the summer months and how she's never really impressed an audience. She has dyed blond hair and is dressed like a showgirl. We later learn that Naomi used to do Shakespeare and the classics, but, like Sirk, she's been boxed into giving the public what it supposedly wants. She was probably not a very good actress, Naomi says, but maybe she just tells herself that because she's tired of feeling badly about the downward trajectory of her career. “Brother, there's not much to look forward to,” she says, continuing the voiceover in her pleasantly weary voice. “Well, I guess some people might say maybe I asked for it.” Stanwyck stresses the “I guess” and the “might” and the “maybe.” She's drawn to such escape-hatch words in all of her interviews, and they add to that “in-between” feeling that Sirk is focused on.

In an overhead shot, Sirk frames a large wooden beam running across Naomi's head as she enters her shared dressing room, the first of the
prison bar shots he so favors in his interiors. Her dressing room crony tells Naomi that she should “go back to legit,” where you don't have to worry so much about getting old. Sirk frames Naomi in a mirror as she opens a letter and reads it, then moves to her actual body and then back to her image in the mirror when she gives the letter to her fellow vaudevillian (a mirror shot in a film, an image of an image).

“It's a laugh, that's all,” Naomi says, in an agitated, slightly panicked voice. “Dearest mother,” the vaudevillian reads, and Naomi says, “I told you it was a laugh,” in Stanwyck's fastest, most scaldingly self-loathing delivery. She's in a mirror again, narrating her character's life for a director who will leave her with no illusions whatever. Naomi thinks about visiting the husband and three children she left behind years ago in a small town; her daughter Lily (Lori Nelson) is in a school play and is asking to see her. When the vaudevillian encourages her, Naomi murmurs, “I've done it on the stage,” as if she thinks she can just act the part of the glamorous absentee mother.

Naomi narrates for us again, talking about her hometown, Riverdale, Wisconsin, and about “the lawns the husbands were so proud of.” River-dale is a place you leave, and Riverdale is a place to come back to when you're close to the end of your rope. Her older daughter, Joyce (Marcia Henderson), is a prim, hypocritical type who is always scolding Lily, who takes after her mother. Naomi's husband, Henry (Richard Carlson), is a school principal; when we first see Henry, he's being told by a school supervisor not to go teaching any “progressive ideas.” Henry doesn't flinch one bit at this. The way he keeps O'Sullivan's spinster schoolteacher character on tenterhooks about their relationship feels mean; he practices the type of well-intentioned meanness that can't be called out for what it is. This is a town where all anybody ever really cares about is how things look. “A woman comes back with all her dreams, with her love,” Sirk said, “and she finds nothing but this rotten, decrepit middle-class American family.” (This is a far better and more integrated movie than Lang's
Clash by Night
, which had a similar theme.)

As Naomi approaches her old house, Sirk shows us her shadow on the pavement; there are some discreet violins playing on the soundtrack. When he cuts to a close-up of Naomi moving forward and looking all around the outside of the house, Stanwyck is so deeply involved in this woman's nostalgia and regret that the scene almost feels pornographic, as in her best Capra work. This is acting at so high a level that it doesn't even seem like acting; it seems like we are watching a real woman on a real street. Stanwyck is able to achieve this level of exposure partly because Sirk is so stylized and chilly and distant.

Never before or after does Stanwyck's face look so much like an open wound, an open battlefield. Her mask is dropped in this close-up, and we seem to be seeing the engine room of her talent, the bottom of her being. What she was always able to do with her voice to get an orchestral effect she is now skilled and daring enough to do with her face. And the Sirkian irony is particularly brutal here, for Naomi is looking with such longing at a house that all but broadcasts a sense of complacent, prison-like security. Sirk uses low angles inside the house to give us a sense of entrapment as this prodigal mother enters. After she's greeted her children and they've gone upstairs, Sirk cuts to an overhead shot and divides the frame between Henry and Naomi with an ornate banister.

When the German housekeeper asks Naomi if she can still do a high kick onto a box that holds cigarette butts, Naomi cheerfully does her chorus girl kick and the butts explode all over her disapproving daughter Joyce as she enters from the landing (this image says more about their relationship—and even Naomi's relationship to this small town—than any dialogue could have). The usually gentle Carlson is surprisingly forceful when he gets into an old argument with Naomi, which spurs Stanwyck to turn on a dime into resentment. “That's all you care about, isn't it? Appearances and what other people will think?” she asks, spitting out the words as fast and contemptuously as possible.

She says that she won't laugh too loud anymore and embarrass him or “speak to the riff-raff I knew before I married you,” which lets us know that Naomi used to be a bit of a Stella Dallas. She had been too loud, uneducated, from the wrong side of the tracks, but anxious to improve herself with this beautiful young man, this schoolteacher who taught her the classics that didn't go over so well when she escaped to the commercial theater. It's an open question whether Naomi's lack of talent is at the root of her problem. She can be seen, however, as a stand-in for Sirk, an artist, a director of the classics of German theater, forced to flee the Nazis and give up his cultural heritage and to struggle to express his creativity through the medium of Hollywood melodrama.

In the early scenes of
All I Desire
, Stanwyck is so sensitive that she almost vibrates with barely controlled feelings. She's especially touching when she watches Lily in the school play, a bit of trash called
The Baroness Barclay's Secret
. Naomi's voice comes on the soundtrack again as she describes her delight in seeing how promising her daughter is; it's as if she's being confronted with her own youthful self, before bad luck and the realities of the theatrical marketplace tore apart her dreams.

Gradually, Naomi begins to get control of herself, and Stanwyck lowers the carapace of her own “tough/smart” performing style onto Naomi's
festering disappointments and tiny hopes. “Don't wait too long, Henry,” she says, knowingly, about his delayed relations with O'Sullivan's teacher. But Naomi can't help returning to all the mixed emotions this confrontation with her hometown and her youth keep digging up in her. The love between mother and daughter here (created partially by the distance afforded by a theatrical setting) is finally more real and convincing—more mature, more coherent, more deeply felt and imagined—than the entirety of
Stella Dallas
.

At the after-party for the play, Naomi dances the bunny-hug with Joyce's fiancée. It looks grotesque at first, but then Sirk cuts to an overhead shot and Stanwyck starts to transform the novelty steps by doing variations on them until the dance begins to look beautiful. Naomi is out of breath when she finishes (the film always reminds us of her age and of time running out), but she catches it long enough to read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to the guests. “And if God chooses, I shall but love thee better after death,” Naomi recites, staring straight at Henry. Stanwyck opens her mouth and lets her tongue flutter near her teeth on the “th” sound in “death,” so that it sounds almost lascivious, a hint that a big part of Naomi's problem is her sexual drive, which couldn't be satisfied by Henry and had to be condemned by small town mores.

Sirk has his actors constantly move in and out of confined spaces that keep them from really reaching each other. The Murdoch house is a trap, and so is the small town of Riverdale, but Sirk has shown us that what lies outside of middle-class strictures is no better. In fact, the rootlessness of city life might even be worse for a single person. Naomi needs to find her happiness where she can, and it rests, finally, in this jail of a home. “You don't know how unimportant success is until you've had it,” Naomi says. Stanwyck doesn't shrink from this line, even if it's the one line here that might have caused her some personal pain. Disillusioning Lily, Naomi says that there has been no glory and no glamour in her life. She then recites a litany of soul-destroying show business work and winds up with, “And I know a pawnshop in every town on the circuit.” Stanwyck makes Naomi sound almost proud as she goes over this laundry list of failure. It's the pride of sheer survival.

Sirk sometimes loses the thread of his argument in some of the later scenes. He's stymied by journeyman players and errant script choices, and he's forced to tack on a Hunter “happy ending,” so that Naomi stays in town (she leaves in Brink's novel). Still, it isn't really a happy end for anyone; Henry will never satisfy her, and the town gossips are obviously out for blood after Naomi accidentally shoots her old lover Dutch (Lyle
Bettger). But there is one thing that Naomi has found that might sustain her, a love for her children. Stanwyck never played a more poignant scene than the one she enacts here with her young son Ted (Billy Gray), trying to explain to him how people aren't perfect and warning him, in an archetypally maternal way, about the pain he's about to experience in adolescence and all the rest of his life. Stanwyck arrived at this purely motherly place for this scene in a major Sirk film, but she couldn't get there for her own son. There are some people who can only express their feelings through the work they do. I would hope that if Dion ever saw this movie, he could feel the “imitation of life” truth in his mother's words.

Stanwyck was top billed in her second movie for Sirk,
There's Always Tomorrow
(1956), but this incandescently angry film belongs to Fred Mac-Murray and to Joan Bennett, who excels in her role of housewife as monster. MacMurray plays Cliff, a successful toy manufacturer in California, and we first see him in his large workroom filled with toys in various stages of development. Sirk foregrounds various toys in his frames so that they look a bit menacing, as if they're rebuking their maker. Cliff's new product is Rex, the walkie-talkie robot, a small talking toy that sits on a long table waiting to be animated. When Cliff goes home, Sirk creates an even more stark-looking prison, a house filled with pools of dark shadows, puritan-style wooden furnishings, and three bratty, selfish children Cliff's wife Marion (Bennett) dotes on. It's Marion's birthday tonight, and Cliff has planned a date with her, but she's not having it. At her age, she says, birthdays are a time to turn the mirrors to the wall. Marion is the “I want to see nothing” opposite of nearly every Stanwyck character.

Completely rejected, even by his own cook (Jane Darwell), Cliff sulks in the kitchen until he hears the doorbell ring. He opens the door and there in the dark is Norma (Stanwyck), an old flame, walking toward him into the light. Gratefully, he asks Norma if she'd like to accompany him to the theater, and she seems delighted to go. Stanwyck makes it look as if Norma doesn't have anything definite in mind when she goes to see Cliff and is just following her instincts blindly. She and Cliff used to work together, but she went away and started her own dress business in New York. “Blue Moon” was their song; she's so glad that he remembers that. Back at his workroom, Cliff shows her how he's incorporated their old song into one of his toys. Norma tells Cliff that she married once, out of loneliness, but then shrugs it off as having happened a long time ago. Time is now Stanwyck's ally against pain, for she can say about anything, “that doesn't matter now.”

One of Cliff's daughters hurts her foot (she cries like a much younger child), so Marion refuses to accompany Cliff on a little vacation he's planned for them. The novel (and perilous) theme here is that of a father who dislikes his own children. Cliff seems right to dislike them, but he never quite sees just how complacent and destructive his wife Marion is, and she's the real problem here, not the kids, who just need some discipline. Cliff goes by himself on the vacation, and what do you know? Norma is there, too. Did she plan it, or did they really just bump into each other accidentally? Most likely, Norma planned on running into Cliff in such a way that she didn't even know herself what she was doing. All the people in this movie tell lies to themselves and refuse to see what's in front of them. Appearance is all in this rotten society that Sirk dissects like a surgeon. “I've never been one for casual acquaintances,” says Norma at dinner, and that was true of Stanwyck, too; she had only a few close friends and didn't let anybody else get near her. Love? Cliff asks. Norma replies, “I guess I just kept myself too busy.” And that, too, could be something Stanwyck might have said about herself.