Barbara Stanwyck Read Free Page B

perched on Fay’s shoulders on the beach at Malibu, where they had a house, a picture in which her face is ecstatically open to the warmth and air and freedom of California after the cramped heat and cold of Brooklyn and Broadway. It would take some time to get going in movies, and she would have to let go of some of her resentment and feeling of social inadequacy, but the story of Barbara Stanwyck in Hollywood is a triumphant story, not personally triumphant most of the time, but professionally so in every way.
    Her film career didn’t begin smoothly. Joe Schenck had signed her to United Artists to do one picture,
The Locked Door
(1929), an adaptation of a play by Channing Pollack called
The Sign on the Door
(Schenck’s wife Norma Talmadge had filmed it as a silent). George Fitzmaurice,the director of
The Locked Door
, reportedly screamed on the set that he couldn’t make Stanwyck beautiful. “I staggered through it,” she said. “It was all one big mystery to me.” And later, showing her skill with the telling wisecrack, she added: “They never should have unlocked the damned thing.” She just missed being cast in the film of
Burlesque
, which was renamed
The Dance of Life
(1929) and directed by John Cromwell for Paramount. Skelly reprised his role, while the female lead went to Nancy Carroll, another talented Irish girl from New York (and the niece of Billy La Hiff), whose career foundered because of the kind of temperament Stanwyck never allowed herself.
    The Locked Door
has a bad reputation, mainly deserved, but it’s fairly well filmed for such an early talkie, especially the opening scenes on a “drinking boat” filled with whoopee-making extras. Stanwyck is second-billed under Rod La Rocque, under the title, and Fitzmaurice has a pretentious “signed” title card to himself in the credits; he tries to earn that signature with some fancy camera moves, courtesy of cinematographer Ray June, including an impressive crane shot over the party and a tracking shot across a bar, as the revelers shout for gin and more gin.
    We first see Stanwyck in a two shot with mustachioed La Rocque; he asks her how she likes the party. Cut to her close-up: “It’s like being on a pirate ship!” she says, a forced smile plastered on her face, as if Fitzmaurice has just told her that she isn’t pretty enough for him. In this first scene, and some of her others in
The Locked Door
, Stanwyck has the air of someone trying hard to have the correct reaction to things. This early effort allows us some insight into her real life at the time, when her “make the best of it” attitude wasn’t invigorating, as it would later become, but instead slightly sad.
    The camera catches her in an amateurish, “we’re talking, we’re talking, and now I’ll laugh!” pantomime blunder, as the lecherous La Rocque ushers her into a private room for dinner. When he offers her caviar, she repeats this word with a British or standard American style
a
, which must have been drilled into her by Willard Mack. Stanwyck’s British-sounding
a
lasted the rest of her career, defiantly emerging from her Brooklyn purr to prove that she’s as much a lady as anybody—even more so, because she’s had to earn it.
    La Rocque reads his lines in such a sour, affectless way that he’d be right at home in an Ed Wood movie. Stanwyck is forced to draw into herself, but she’s not able to do this as deeply as she will in later films. We see her character starting to wonder if she’s made a mistake by entering the room with La Rocque. When he starts to attack her, she gets her Irishup, rather sketchily, and he cracks, “I like you in a temper!” (The whole world, of course, would eventually love Stanwyck in a temper.) The boat is raided, and there’s a cut back to the private room: Stanwyck’s hair is mussed and her dress is disarranged.