The Best of Barbara Stanwyck

the ultimate biller wilder film noir classic with the smashingly riveting barabra stanwyck in her glorious best. the plotline is widely known already: insurance man walter hooked up with a glamourous but vile married woman, phyllis, scheming to knock out her elder husband to gain the enormous profits of double indemnity, then two are set against each other to the last stop of murder, gravestone.

firstly about walter's motivation to consent to phyllis' suggestive provocation into murder...out of his love for phyllis? perhaps not. it's more like long-lurked subconciously formed brooding gained from observing people's conning contrivances daily...the occurance of phyllis is only the catalysizing bait....walter is the slave of his own darkly shadowed thought and phyllis is the one who pushes him into the abyss of it. as he claims in the narration, after the murder, he cannot feel his footsteps and it's like the walk from a dead man that symbolizes his official pledge to the devil in his mind at the cost of his soul. he's not a romantic steer as lancaster in "the killers" or john dall in "gun crazy"....he's rotten as well, and it's more of a matter of degrees.

of course, you can not pretermit the kick-ass performance from edward g. robinson as the cynical but righteous insurance investigator keys who utters the best quib lines in this movie with all those sharp-to-the-bone dialogues...he's the re-incarnation of furies who serves justice even only rewarded with piles of cheap cigars without matchstikes...a biggest, kindest heart ironically trapped in an obnoxiously scolding face with a runty-trunked body who is the most likable character in this movie.

as for dynamic barbara stanwyck as the rotten phyllis, she dominates the screen with all the accessory gadgets of sex appeal for a bad girl: her sleazy blonde hair, big square emerald ring, inscrided anklet who catches walter's attention and acid icy tea which stirs his gustation....etc....unknown to the most, this femme fatale image is attributed to the wardrobe of edith head who also designs the wardrobe of lots of hitchcokian icy blondes in the blooming 50s and 60s....

the stanwyckesque femme fatale archetype had been aforementioned in my "baby face" review: gutsily takes what she wants as a man would at any expense of mercilessness, tough and shrewd like a man, especially the scene the camera centers on her pupils when walter's killing her husband in the backseat of the car, she shows no blinks but only blistening twinkles in her eyes that manifests the bliss of her manipulative acquisitions.

one big enigma about stanwyck in DI would be her demise: she could have disposed of walter by firing the shot but she chooses not to then askes him to embrace her tight... "i have never cared for anyone, i was rotten to the heart until i can't fire that second shot, i don't know what's wrong with me?".....why she reveals her frailty in a winning crucial moment as this? it's never ceased to puzzle me for years. maybe it's like an awakening from a persistantly haunted spell of nightmare, then she suddenly obtains a heart? strangely, stanwyck's sleazy blonde image sorta reminds me of david lynch's "lost highway"...patrica arquette's sleazy blonde also resembles stanwyck in DI.

prestigiously, the seamless tour de farce script is written by billy wilder and two noir masters: james m. cain and raymond chandler. how could you resist a flick like that? huh?

"baby face" was an mighty milestone to set up the stanwyckesque femme fatale image before the fatally classic "double indemnity"...generally..the vital charm of most femme fatales is their gluttonish sensuality and sex apeal...but the allure of stanwyck's femme fatale is based upon her ruthless toughnes and also her un-willing-ness to comprise..sorta refreshing...it's just like a man who takes what he wants without hesitation...basically BF is an heavily melodrama-driven story even it's worthy being praised for its audacious outrage in a conservative decade. to apply nietzscheistic superman into the "bad girl survives and rules" pattern is indeed feministically offbeat that could be considered a defying moral dynamite at that time. babyface's hostility against man is motivated by her experience of being exploited by men, especially her father. her remarks about her father philandering her was incredically explicit in the concern of the censor in the 30's. the quick wit and dare-devil adventurousness of stanwyck's material girl sorta savor the audience's appreciation over babyface's resourcefulness. but the devilsih brazen fun of the movie is somehow hindered by the moralistic closure. (bad girl is suddenly stricken with the meaning of love.) if interpretating it from a different perspect, perhaps it could be a touching story of an astray female discovering the warmth of bona-fide human affection. only stanwyck's swiftly polished acting talent could carry it off without diverged distortion.

fritz lang's "clash by night" is a psychological drama about the paradoxical mentality of female perplexity about life and its harboring cease. babara stanwyck would be the individualistic rebel lady who drifts everywhere to seek her dreams even eventually she winds up with "big dreams, small results"

stanwyck plays mae doyle, a woman who wanders from home for 10 years, a prodigal daughter retreats back to her homeland with one bitter remark "home is the place to go when you run out of places", a woman who wants her man to "fight off the blizzards the floods" just to make her feel "confident"....a egoist who abides nothing but motivated by her anguishes to live and explore the world with novelty. a woman who claims that she would never be satisfied enough to give any man happiness since her character is webbed with too much ambivalent affirmations to be genuinely tamed by any man, and mae shrewdly sneers at the world with her sass and sharply sardonic wits until she meets her fellow rebel earl (robert ryan) who is a cynical grudgy man embittered with spousal tumults, uttering quibs like "wouldn't you wanna cut a beautiful dame up?" "i like the woman who stays on ceiling when i throw all of them above"...a volcanic man with enough individuality to rival mae....and this resistant ambiguity also arouses mae's animosity.....thus she chooses to marry her another suitor jerry with the clumsy looks of ape but has a generous heart of gold despite his simple-mindedness cannot provide the thrilling kicks of life mae's always craving for.

it might appear somehow melodramatic but the script offers plenty of wisecracking wisdom between the lines to depict each character with enough distinctive contour of humanity. and the episode of marilyn monroe who plays the girlfriend of mae's brother is also quite pleasantly juxtaposed with her talks of feminism and refusal of being trapped as cannary in marriage....

inevitably mae's being lured away by charismatic earl who whispers love with more refined skills than stupified jerry....ultimately mae succumbs to her sense of feminine duty instead of her intense drive of egoism....accurately speaking, she lifts up the veil of her selfism to ripe into mature womanhood since the world is not always "her disappointment, her unhappiness"...

only brilliantly talented stanwyck could incarnate into such fickle role with multiple outbursts of complexity conviningly....only stanwyck has enough charisma to redeem this character with comprehensible pathos...a well-performed stagy flick upon the theme of woman and her choices over the crossroad of life.

"night nurse" is another piece of work made in the pre-code period of the 30s, and barbara stanwyck glitters with her inner strength as the heroine who practices the justice among immoral debauchies of a disorientated world under probation. then you might also be amused to glimpse the young clark gable without his trademarked mustache.

stanwyck plays lora hart (which means a pun for heart to suggest her characteristics), who is a compassionate young woman who aspires to nuture others as pleasure. so she enlists in the hospital with the help of surgeon dr. bell as a registered nurse. and joan bondell is her wisecracking confidante who provides mostly the comic relief in the script, such as their habit to imitate the throat-cleaning sound, bondell's chewing-gum vivacity and stanwyck's frequent remark "says me in a big way, sister." and also stanwyck's merciful generosity leads to the friendship or potential love interest of a decent-hearted bootleger, played by ben lyon, who would be the savior later in the flick.

so both bondell and stanwyck pass their tests of ordeals to be the night nurses, then they encounter a job concerned with their professional ethics. they're dispatched with a cse of two sick young girls who have been starved deliberantly to death so their mother and her paramour chauffer(clark gable) could obtain their father's trust fund inheritage. the flick is related to the forbidden subjects of prosmiscuity, illict affairs, alcoholism and child abuse then.

clark gable makes a riveting entrance as the bully man in dragon-embroidered robe, impressing the audience with a certain degree of menace as the brutal villain who smacks stanwycks, and the issue of violence on women is not a pleasant theme for the censor as well. gable shows his darker side of cad convincingly for sure.

"night nurse" is certainly a relish to look at, and you see stanwyck ballistically slaps the rotten mother who disregards the children, that would be a kick for sure.