Lady of Burlesque (1943)

Lady of Burlesque is a 1943 comedy/mystery directed by William A. Wellman and starring Barbara Stanwyck. It’s a murder mystery set in a burlesque theatre.

Dixie Daisy (Barbara Stanwyck) is the headliner at S.B. Foss’s burlesque theatre. There are the usual backstage dramas. There are romantic entanglements between the girls and the male comics. One of the girls is involved with Louie Grindero (Gerald Mohr), a slightly shady ex-racketeer. The stage manager doesn’t like burlesque artistes. The haughty Princess Nirvena (Stephanie Bachelor) is no princess but she has plenty of attitude and doesn’t get along with anyone. Dixie and Lolita La Verne (Victoria Faust) don’t get along at all. Comic Biff Brannigan (Michael O’Shea) is crazy about Dixie but she doesn’t share his feelings.

But these are all just the usual dramas you expect in any theatre. They’re not likely to lead to anything serious. They’re certainly not likely to lead to murder.

But something does lead to murder.

Almost everybody in the theatre is a suspect. There are performers and stage hands constantly wandering about all over the place so anyone could have entered the dressing room at the time of murder.

With so many romantic dramas and jealousies almost anyone could conceivably have had a motive. And there are plenty of suspects without rock-solid alibis.

The murder weapon was a G-string. A G-string that has now mysteriously disappeared.

This is nothing startling in the plotting department but it’s a perfectly decent murder mystery.

As you might expect the movie’s biggest asset is Barbara Stanwyck. This is a semi-comic movie and Stanwyck can handle that sort of thing with ease. She also gets to be sexy. She has no problem with that either. She can certainly be a sassy wise-cracking dame. And she does some remarkably energetic dancing.

The movie’s biggest problem was of course the Production Code. An inherently sexy story had to be made squeaky clean. Burlesque was all about pretty girls taking most of their clothes off. In this movie we have pretty girls who don’t take off any of their clothing at all.These are the most over-dressed strippers you’ll ever see.

Burlesque was also about risqué comedy (it was often lame but it was always risqué). In this movie the onstage comedy routines are both lame and tame.

On the other hand once the performers are offstage we do get some hardboiled dialogue and some very amusing bitchy exchanges.

One thing I really love about this movie is that every single scene takes place in the theatre. It gives it an atmosphere that is claustrophobic but also emphasises that this is an entire separate world with its own rules.

The movie was based on the novel The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee. For some years there was controversy about the authorship of the novel, with claims that it was ghost-written by Craig Rice. It’s now generally accepted that Gypsy Rose Lee did indeed write the novel, with Rice perhaps doing a little bit of polishing. The novel’s great strength is that it was written by one of the great burlesque queens and she was writing about a world she knew intimately, and a world she loved. It vividly captures the seedy-glamorous world of burlesque.

It is sad that the story had to be toned down so much. One of the cool things about the burlesque of the golden age of strip-tease (which was over by the mid-1950s) is that we know exactly what these burlesque shows were really like. We know because of the existence of large numbers of burlesque movies which were actual filmed burlesque shows. We know that burlesque in its heyday was a whole lot sexier than anything in this movie. These burlesque movies are easy to find, they’re worth seeing and I’ve reviewed a bunch of them including Midnight Frolics (1949), 'B' Girl Rhapsody (1952) and Everybody’s Girl (1950).

Despite being toned down it’s an enjoyable lesser murder mystery and Barbara Stanwyck is in sparkling form. Recommended.

The good news is that Lady of Burlesque is very very easy to get to see. The bad news is that it’s public domain and the prints are not great. It really needs a restoration and a Blu-Ray release.

The Furies (1950)

The Furies (1950) is the first western directed by Anthony Mann (although it was released after Winchester ’73).

T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) owns an enormous ranch called the Furies, a cattle empire that he built up in a determined but unscrupulous manner. He has a vast empire in land and cattle but is chronically short of cash. That will be important later.

He has a son named Clay, for whom he has little respect. T.C.’s daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck) is another matter. She’s the apple of his eye and she’s as tough and strong-willed as her father. T.C. enjoyed building up his empire but he’s not so fond of the tedium of the day-to-day running of his business. He has promised Vance that she will take over the running of The Furies.

T.C. made a few enemies along the way. He has an uneasy relationship with Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland). The Herreras are squatters on The Furies but they believe they have an ancestral claim on the land. To make things more awkward Juan is in love with Vance. She regards him as just a friend.

It would make life easier for T.C. if the Herreras could be driven off The Furies. That will also be important later.

Another of the old man’s enemies has just appeared on the scene. Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey) is a gambler who owns the Legal Tender Saloon. The Darrows believe that T.C. cheated them out of a parcel of land known as the Darrow Strip. And T.C. shot Rip’s father. As you might expect things are pretty tense between T.C. and Rip. Rip still believes that the Darrow Strip is his by right. Yet another factor that will prove to be important.

The situation is about to get a lot more tense. Vance has fallen for the smooth-talking gambler. It’s a courtship that will lead to unexpected results.

The spark that will eventually lead to an explosion is provided by the arrival of Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson). Flo is a middle-aged adventuress and she’s got her hooks into T.C. and that is a threat to Vance. Vance means to have The Furies and it’s obvious that Flo also intends to have everything that T.C. has including The Furies. There’s going to be an epic battle between these two women.

When it happens the explosion takes a surprising and shocking form and it has momentous consequences. Vance discovers that hate can be more satisfying than love, or at least that’s what she thinks.

This is not a conventional western. It’s a western melodrama, in the sense that movies like Duel in the Sun (1946) and Forty Guns (1957) and the bizarre Johnny Guitar (1954) are western melodramas. You could also describe these movies as women’s westerns. The plots are not driven by conventional western themes like revenge but by emotional dramas.

There’s one major gunfight scene but it doesn’t play out in a straightforward western way.

There’s a very strong emphasis on psychological and emotional drama. Revenge plays a role, but again not in typical western style. And the resolution does not come in the form of a showdown with six-guns. It’s a psychological and emotional showdown.

Anthony Mann’s westerns are often described as noir westerns. I’ve always been a bit sceptical about this. The Furies does have noirish qualities and a slightly noirish look. Unusually for a major studio western in 1950 it was shot in black-and-white and there are plenty of noir shadows and night scenes, with characters silhouetted against the night sky in a very moody brooding noir way. It’s closest in spirit to noirish female-centric melodramas like Mildred Pierce and Leave Her To Heaven. And there's a touch of Greek tragedy and even Shakespearian tragedy (both of which appealed to Mann).

Nobody but Barbara Stanwyck could have played Vance Jeffords. Nobody else could have made such a character so convincing and so fascinating. Vance is not a straightforward heroine. She adores her father but she intends to have The Furies no matter what she has to do to get it and even if it sets her against him. She’s not an entirely sympathetic character but we have to admire her tenaciousness. She’s a bit like Scarlett O’Hara. She’ll do what she has to do to get what she wants.

Walter Huston, in his final film rôle, is just as good. They’re a father and a daughter who are not so much people as forces of nature. T.C. starts out as a larger-than-life heroic figure but we soon begin to suspect that he’s a hero with feet of clay. He makes foolish financial decisions. His infatuation with the scheming Flo shows his poor judgment. He is indecisive and impulsive and he has a brutal streak (which his daughter has inherited). Vance and T.C. are complicated and conflicted.

Wendell Corey is a bit overshadowed by Stanwyck and Huston but he’s OK as well. Gilbert Roland and Judith Anderson round off a strong cast.

There are some slightly disturbing vaguely incestuous undertones to the relationship between Vance and her father. It’s subtle but remember that 1950 was the high tide of Freudianism.

The Criterion DVD release of The Furies includes an unusual and very welcome extra - the source novel by Niven Busch! Not in some silly ebook format but an actual physical book, a proper paperback. I think that this is a superb idea. And there are lots of other extras as well including an audio commentary (which unfortunately reveals spoilers for all of Mann’s other westerns and should therefore be avoided). There’s an excellent and enlightening 1967 interview with Anthony Mann and a whimsical 1930s interview with Walter Huston. The transfer is gorgeous.

The Furies isn’t a perfect movie. The ending is perhaps not entirely satisfactory. It is however an absorbing psycho-sexual-emotional melodrama and it’s nicely overheated and it’s highly recommended.

Baby Face (1933)

Baby Face, released in 1933, is one of the most notorious of all pre-code movies. Barbara Stanwyck stars as a girl who sleeps her way to the top. A girl who becomes known as Baby Face.

Lily Powers (Stanwyck) grows up in a small hick town. Her father runs a bar and he distils bootleg liquor. He also pimps out his daughter. He does this once too often and she decides to leave. When the still blows up he doesn’t have much choice.

There’s an old guy in the town who had befriended her. He’s into German philosophy and he sees potential in this girl. She could be a success if only she could learn to be a bit more focused, and learn to crush every trace of sentiment in her makeup.

Becoming focused and stamping out sentiment is something that Lily learns very quickly.

She arrives in New York with four dollars in her purse. What she needs is a job. The biggest building she can see is the Gotham Bank building. There should be lots of opportunities there for a smart girl.

Landing a job is easy. When there’s a man in charge of handing out jobs Lily will never lack for work. She’s asked if she has any experience. She replies that she has plenty.

The first job isn’t much but Lily knows how to move on to better positions. If you want a better job, find a more powerful man who can get it for you. Lily goes through lots of jobs at the bank, and lots of men. Eventually the bank president, Mr Carter, gets her the kind of job she likes, one where she doesn’t actually have to show up at the office. She can just laze around in her luxury apartment, admiring her furs and jewellery, while waiting for Mr Carter to find some time when he can get away from his wife.

Lily has reached one of her goals but there are complications. Some men just don’t understand when they’re not needed any more and keep turning up on the doorstep like lost puppies. Men like Mr Stevens. Men like that tend to do silly tiresome things that make life difficult for a girl.

Lily’s life gets very complicated. Now she has to deal with Courtland Trenholm George Brent). He runs the bank. Lily has never had any trouble managing men but Mr Trenholm is quite a challenge. He’s as smart as she is. In other ways he seems to be just like all the other men she’s known. That pleases her, since she knows how to handle such men. But it also vaguely disappoints her.

And her life is about to get complicated again.

The version of this movie that I saw was the prerelease print which is the movie as it was originally made. The 1933 theatrical release was censored. After 1934 the movie was of course banned. The prerelease version makes it crystal clear that Lily offers sex in exchange for advancement and presents. She’s not leading the men to believe that maybe she’ll sleep with them. It’s very obvious that she does sleep with them.

Society’s self-appointed moral guardians were outraged by this movie. They saw Lily as being essentially a high-class whore. Which is pretty much what she is. Of course if she’d stayed in her home town she would still have been a whore, but she’d have been a cheap whore. Moving to New York allows her to become a very expensive whore. Those are the only two options that life has to offer her.

Even more outrage was caused by Lily’s lack of shame or remorse. She’s a realist. And the men know the score. She’s offering them sex in exchange for advancement and money and they’re offering her advancement and money in exchange for sex. As far as Lily is aware that’s just how the world works. She’s unsentimental and ruthless but she doesn’t treat men any worse than they’ve always treated her. The moral watchdogs were not happy about seeing such a brutally realistic view of life being portrayed and they certainly weren’t happy about the suggestion that rich, powerful respectable men participate in such transactions.

A further level of outrage was added by the fact that several of the men with whom Lily gets involved are married men.

Barbara Stanwyck is extraordinarily good. And very sexy. While we might not entirely approve of Lily we can’t help liking her. George Brent is also very good.

This movie is one of three pre-code gems included in the TCM Archives Forbidden Hollywood two-disc DVD set which I bought recently. Both discs were faulty and Baby Face is the only one of the three movies I managed to get to play, and even then only with difficulty. Of course I may have been unlucky to get a faulty set. Baby Face gets a very nice transfer and the fact that it’s the uncut version is a major bonus.

Baby Face is a must-see for pre-code fans and for Barbara Stanwyck fans. In fact it’s a must-see movie for any classic movie fan. This is pre-code Hollywood at it’s most brutally honest. Very highly recommended.

The Man with a Cloak (1951)

The Man with a Cloak is an interesting idea that doesn’t quite come off but this 1951 MGM period crime melodrama is worth watching for some glorious acting.

Madeleine Minot (Leslie Caron) is a young French girl who arrives in New York in 1848 in search of the ageing and very disreputable Charles Thevenet (Louis Calhern). Thevenet had been one of Napoleon’s generals and remains an enthusiastic Bonapartist. His loyalty to Bonaparte has been equalled only by his devotion to women and dissipation. Madeleine on the other hand is a Republican but for some reason she has convinced herself that she can persuade the old man to leave his fortune to his grandson in Paris. She is in love with the grandson. Once they get the old boy’s money they will use it for the cause of Republicanism (or at least they’ve convinced themselves that they only want Thevenet’s money for that idealistic purpose). 1848 was of course the year that saw the establishment of the short-lived Second Republic in France, which was soon swept away by Napoleon III.

Madeleine and her lover are not the only ones after Thevenet’s money. His mistress Lorna Bounty (Barbara Stanwyck) and his butler Martin (Joe de Santis) have spent years waiting for Thevenet to die so they can get his fortune. It has even crossed their minds that it might be possible to hasten the old man’s demise.

Lorna and Martin are clever and ruthless and the naïve Madeleine might seem to be completely outclassed by such seasoned conspirators but she has acquired an unlikely (although possibly not entirely reliable) ally in the person of a drunken poet named Dupin (Joseph Cotten). Dupin is perpetually penniless and drunk but he’s no fool and Lorna immediately recognises him as a dangerous enemy. Being the sort of woman she is she sets out to neutralise the threat by enticing Dupin with the prospect of either a share of the loot or a chance to enjoy her physical charms.

What follows is a battle of wits and wills between Dupin and Lorna.

The plot (based on a story by John Dickson Carr) is absurdly melodramatic and overwrought but it has its moments. There are times however when it threatens to collapse under the weight of its own self-conscious cleverness.

Dupin is supposed to be a mystery man with his true identity only revealed as a surprise twist at the end although in fact his identity is blindingly obvious right from the start. Fortunately it doesn’t really matter since it’s only a literary in-joke and actually the movie might have worked better had that whole idea been ditched.

It’s the acting that carries this movie. Stanwyck is in full-on spider woman mode and she’s magnificent. There’s some subtlety here too. Lorna Bounty is scheming, unscrupulous and very deadly but she’s oddly sympathetic at times. She’s villainous but only up to a point. She’s prepared to do what she has to do to get that money but in a perverse way she’s honest and open about her scheming. Old Thevenet has always known what the score was. And her ruthlessness has limits - she has no interest in cruelty for its own sake.

Joseph Cotten is pretty good too. He has no pride but he has charm. He’s a likeable rogue.

Louis Calhern is excellent, making Thevenet a thorough reprobate but a rather good-natured one. He’s selfish and self-indulgent but he’s never pretended to be a saint.

Leslie Caron is the problem. We’re meant to regard Madeleine as the idealistic heroine but oddly enough she comes across as being more of a hypocrite than the supposed villains. She also comes across as insipid and irritating.

Jim Backus as the good-hearted Irish innkeeper who allows Dupin to remain permanently drunk on permanent credit is the best of the supporting players.

The period details are impressive. This is an MGM movie so it looks like it’s had a lot of money spent on it, and well spent too.

The Man with a Cloak has some neat little ideas in it. There’s plenty of scheming but what’s going on is not always as obvious as it seems and there are some nice ironic touches. At times it gets a bit too clever for its own good but it’s always entertaining. The performances, especially those by Stanwyck and Calhern, are more than sufficient reason to see it. This is an absolute must-see movie for Barbara Stanwyck fans.

The Man with a Cloak has been released in the made-on-demand Warner Archive series. I can’t comment on the quality of that disc since I caught this movie on TCM.

Very melodramatic but despite a few flaws it’s thoroughly enjoyable and definitely recommended.

Stella Dallas (1937)

Stella Dallas is sentimental melodrama, and as far as the plot is concerned it’s fairly conventional melodrama. But then the essence of melodrama is that it is formulaic to some extent - the genre has certain conventions and if you can’t accept those conventions then you had best avoid Stella Dallas. What really matters is how sincerely and how skillfully such conventional themes are treated and in that respect this film scores highly.

The first thing that needs to be understood is that the movie was made in 1937. They were different times. Criticising the movie because the characters don’t behave the way people today would behave (as some online reviewers have done) is to miss the point. The movie deals with the world as it was in 1937, not the way it is today.



This Samuel Goldwyn production was directed by King Vidor and gave Barbara Stanwyck her most demanding role up to that point in her career. It’s a powerhouse performance and it shows that Stanwyck was not afraid to be unglamorous and even at times to appear ridiculous and even pathetic. Despite this she always maintains a certain dignity and we never lose sympathy for her, but at the same time we can never despise her enough to pity her.

Stanwyck is Stella Martin, a mill-hand’s daughter who dreams of a better life. Rather ambitiously she sets her sights on Stephen Dallas. Stephen is the scion of a wealthy and distinguished family. His millionaire father managed to lose his fortune and now Stephen has to work for a living. He is the advertising manager for the factory in which Stella’s father and brother work. He might not be wealthy but Stella knows class when she sees it, and Stephen has class.



They marry but they are always at cross-purposes. Stella wanted to escape from her working-class life and family while Stephen was charmed by her simplicity and her naïvete. Stella’s attempts to fit in with the high society crowd embarrass Stephen. Stella tries hard but her working-class background always betrays her. She always ends up making herself look foolish.

The situation is complicated by the birth of their daughter Laurel. Stella devotes herself to her daughter while she and Stephen drift apart. They end up living separate lives in separate cities. Stella wants Laurel to have all the advantages she never had and she works hard to give her those things. Unfortunately her unconventional behaviour and her obvious lower-class background cause continual problems and also cause Laurel more and more embarrassment as she grows older. Finally Stella finds she has to make a choice between her own happiness and Laurel’s future.



Stella is caught between two worlds. She cannot go back to being a simple working-class girl but she cannot adapt to the rich society world in which Stephen moves so effortlessly. She has done a fine job in raising Laurel but her daughter is now about to move into that world of high society and Stella is now a hindrance to her.

Stanwyck was 30 when she made this movie but in the later stages of the movie she manages to look like a blowsy and faded 45. The makeup effects are subtle - mostly it’s Stanwyck’s sheer acting skill that conveys the sense of a woman ageing none too gracefully.



Stella is a tragic figure but she never gives in to self-pity. She is too concerned for her daughter’s future to have the luxury of feeling sorry for herself. Her self-sacrificing behaviour might be annoying to some modern viewers but there was a time when parents really did unhesitatingly sacrifice themselves for their children. And such behaviour was not despised.

John Boles as Stephen is a little colourless, or perhaps he just seems that way since his performance is so low-key while everyone around him is giving bravura performances. Alan Hale is amusing as always as Ed Munn, Stella’s indefatigable admirer who can never win her because Stella always puts Laurel first. Anne Shirley as Laurel is over-the-top at times but avoids making her character annoying and she is generally effective. The emotional bond between mother and daughter is convincingly and movingly portrayed.



King Vidor never allows the inherent sentimentality of the story to overwhelm the film. This is a three-hankie weepie but he’s never overly obvious.

There are many people who believe that women got better roles in the pre-code era than they did post-Code. I don’t agree and Stella Dallas is a good example of the much more emotionally challenging roles that actresses got in the late 30s and in the 40s.

The Spanish DVD from Regia Films is a little grainy at times but generally it’s a very good transfer. It includes the original English-language version as well as the dubbed Spanish version and it seems to be the easiest DVD edition of this film to get hold of. I recommend both the movie and the DVD.

There’s Always Tomorrow (1956)

There’s Always Tomorrow is one of Douglas Sirk’s lesser-known melodramas but it’s still typical of the 1950s Sirk style.

It was made at Universal in 1956, with Ross Hunter as producer. As such you’d expect it to be in Technicolor but on occasions Sirk reverted to black-and-white and did so very effectively.

Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray) has everything he ever wanted. He wanted to marry Marion (Joan Bennett) and he married her. He lover her and she loves him. He has a comfortable home and three healthy kids. He runs a successful toy-making business which is clearly something of a labour of love. That’s what he wanted - stability, prosperity, a job he loves, marriage and children.

So why isn’t he happier? It’s not that he’s aware of being overtly unhappy. There just seems to be something missing. He has a feeling of disappointment, of emptiness.

The fact is that Clifford Groves feels under-appreciated. He has devoted his life to being a good husband and a good father but sometimes it’s nice to be told you’re appreciated. It’s not that Clifford’s wife and children don’t love him but he’s become just part of the furniture. He doesn’t feel that he’s central in their lives. He fees that he is being taken for granted.



He plans a special night out for his wife’s birthday but she cancels out on him. So then he plans a romantic weekend getaway for just the two of them and she cancels out again. He’s trying his best and he feels hurt. He’s a nice guy and he’s a very decent man but this is all too typical of his life. No matter how hard he tries he seems to just fade into the background. Which is one reason the decision to shoot the movie in black-and-white was the correct one. Clifford Groves’ life isn’t black; it’s a sort of dull grey.

And then he meets Norma again. Norma (Barbara Stanwyck) helped him to set up his toy business twenty years earlier and they dated for a while. Nothing serious ever came of it but they were fond of each other. Norma has been in New York for the last twenty years and now has a successful fashion designing business. She just happens to be in LA and she looks him up. And suddenly Clifford’s world isn’t so grey any more.



Norma is vibrant and fun. They enjoy being together. They meet up again at a desert resort and they have a wonderful time, doing all the things that Clifford used to enjoy doing but has given up because he has no-one to do these things with. It’s all quite innocent - just two lonely middle-aged people enjoying one another’s company. It’s so innocent that Clifford makes no secret of it. He tell his wife all about Norma. Marion isn’t jealous at all. She even invites Norma over for dinner. And that perhaps is a symptom of where their marriage has gone wrong - Norma is glamorous and exciting and Marion should be jealous but she takes Clifford so much for granted that the idea that he might have an affair doesn’t even occur to her.

Not that he and Norma have any intention of having an affair. He’s not the sort of man who chases other women. But Norma makes him feel alive again and it’s a dangerous situation. If Marion had actually become jealous everything would probably have worked out harmlessly - at least if she’d become jealous Clifford would have known that she was still interested in him and that would probably have been enough to make him realise he wasn’t interested in an affair. Now things are really starting to get dangerous.



Norma’s motivations are a little obscure, which is not a fault with the movie but rather it’s one of its strengths. Norma herself possibly was not aware of the reasons she suddenly decided to look Clifford up after all these years. Or was she? Did she have some vague notion about starting up their relationship again? It’s obvious that twenty years earlier she was a lot more serious about it than Clifford was, and although she was later briefly married it appears that she never quite got Clifford out of her system. It’s not that she had any conscious intention of having an affair with him but again it contributes to the dangerousness of the situation. Her old love for Clifford could very easily be rekindled into a blazing fire. And given the way Clifford feels about being under-appreciated he could easily find himself falling for Norma in a big way.

To complicate matters his son Vinnie spotted them at the resort and has convinced himself that they’re already having a tempestuous love affair. Now Vinnie is making life very difficult.



This is the sort of material that Sirk always handled well. While critics like to talk about Sirk’s irony his sensitivity towards characters who are vulnerable or lonely is sometimes not noticed as much as it should be. Sirk’s 1950s movies were often dismissed at the time as soap operas and while they are unashamed melodramas they’re melodrama approached seriously. His characters might seem like soap opera characters but they feel real pain. Their dramas are real to them.

Sirk is helped considerably in this one by the faultless casting and the extremely fine performances. Fred MacMurray, a very underrated actor, makes Clifford into a very sympathetic character. He’s a character who could easily be made to look merely pathetic but MacMurray gives him dignity which helps to soften the edges of Sirk’s irony (which is certainly present in this movie). Stanwyck plays Norma with intelligent ambiguity. Marion could easily have become a mere unsympathetic uncaring wife stereotype as well but Joan Bennett doesn’t allow that to happen. Just as Stanwyck resists the temptation to make Norma conniving Bennett resists the temptation to make Marion shrewish. Marion has hurt Clifford but she has done so without realising it and without malice. So we’re never quite sure which way Clifford will jump, and we’re never quite sure which way we want him to jump.



This is another Sirk tale of the perfect American life gone wrong, the American dream that has not turned out to be the fairy tale it appears to be on the surface, but the irony is less savage than usual this time around.

This is melodrama but it’s very superior melodrama and the performances anchor it in reality so that we never forget that these are real people who can experience real suffering, even in a perfect suburban home. Highly recommended.

Eureka’s Region 2 DVD is a superb widescreen presentation and the movie looks as stunning as a Sirk movie should look.

The Lady Eve (1941)

The Lady Eve is a 1941 comedy from writer-director Preston Sturges. I have mixed feelings about his work although I am slowly warming to him. While I don’t think this movie is quite as good as Palm Beach Story it’s still pretty entertaining.

Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) is the heir to a brewing fortune, but his real passion is snakes. He’s just been on an expedition to the Amazon in search of reptilian marvels and now he’s on his way home on an ocean liner. Unfortunately every female on the liner knows he’s fabulously wealthy and unmarried, and they’re all determined to make a play for him. But none of them stand a chance with Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) on board.

It’s not just that Jean has beauty and style. She also has focus. And what she’s focused on is money. And she knows how to translate her considerable sex appeal into cash.



She’s traveling with her father, the Colonel. Not that he’s a real colonel. In fact the Colonel and his daughter are crooks. If there’s a dishonest way to make a living, they’ve done it. Their specialty is card sharping, but they’re not looking for just one quick swindle. With mark as rich and as innocent as Charles Pike they want to establish a real relationship with him, so they can fleece him thoroughly.

And Charles is very innocent indeed when it comes to cards and women. Especially women. This looks like it’s going to be easy work for Jean, but a complication develops. Charles is so helpless that she can’t help liking him. And he’s kind of cute. And he’s a nice guy. And he really likes her. Pretty soon Jean has suffered the ultimate catastrophe - she’s fallen in love with a mark. And despite her cynical exterior Jean is the kind of girl who, when she falls in love, falls in love in a big way.



Jean intends to come clean about her criminal past. It would of course be very awkward indeed if Charles were to find out the truth before she has a chance to tell him, and of course that’s exactly what happens. That unfortunate circumstance seems to put an end to their wedding plans but there are more plot twists to come. Jean can’t bring herself to write this whole affair off to experience and hatches an unlikely plan to pose as an English noblewoman to get her revenge for being jilted.

The first half of the film is dazzling screwball comedy; the second half is not quite so strong. There’s also a tendency at times for the comedy to veer a bit too close to slapstick for my liking. Of course if you don’t share my aversion for slapstick you will find this to be less of a problem.



The support cast is generally good with Charles Coburn as the phony colonel being a standout. More problematic is the casting of Henry Fonda as the male lead. He’s an actor I’ve always disliked although he’s more successful in this role than I’d have expected, and even at times almost likeable. His performance still doesn’t erase my doubts about his suitability for screwball comedy.

There are no such problems with Barbara Stanwyck’s performance. She’s terrific although perhaps more convincing in the first half of the movie as the delightfully immoral confidence trickster than as the bogus noblewoman. There’s some remarkably risque dialogue in this movie which she delivers with a good deal of relish.



Despite some minor weaknesses this is mostly enormous fun. Umbrella Entertainment have done a reasonable job with the region 4 DVD release.

Forty Guns (1957)

Sam Fuller’s 1957 offering Forty Guns may not be the oddest western ever made but it must come close. It’s an outrageous triumph of stye over substance and I loved every minute of it.

The outrageousness is established right from the opening scene. Famed gunslinger-turned-lawman Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) and his brother Wes (Gene Barry) are riding into town on a buckboard when they encounter Jessica Drummond and her dragoons in a spectacular sequence that demonstrates Fuller’s mastery of the Cinemascope screen. Jessica (Barbara Stawnwyck) is the boss of Cochise County and her forty dragoons are her forty hired guns. Given that this movie is awash with sexual innuendo we’re bound to speculate that the dragoons might also form Jessica’s private harem. Yes, this movie is that outrageous.

Griff has come to serve a warrant on one of Jessica’s men, but before he has a chance to do so he encounters Jessica’s no-good brother Brock terrorising the town’s blind city marshall. When Griff gets around to calling on Jessica it’s clear there is an attraction between them, but the issue of Brock and his increasingly violent and out-of-control behaviour seems destined to keep them apart.

Jessica Drummond owns just about everyone who matters in the territory - judges, politicians, the governor, the county’s sheriff. The sheriff, Logan (Dean Jagger), is a weak man who nurses a hopeless passion for the formidable matriarch of Cochise County.

The plot is mostly a collection of familiar western themes but it’s not the plot that matters, it’s Fuller’s over-the-top treatment of the material and his stylistic excesses. Fuller uses the Cinemascope framing in spectacular fashion, and there re more fancy camera angles than you’ve ever seen in one movie. That sort of thing can be cheap and gimmicky but Fuller does it with enough visual wit to get away with it.

There’s a memorable scene in which Wes Bonnell admires his lady love (who happens to be a gunsmith) through a gun barrel. It’s typical of the risque humour that permeates the film. The scene in Jessica’s house with all forty of her dragoons seated at the immensely long dining table and all accommodated within the shot is a fine example of Fuller using what might have been dismissed as visual gimmickry to tell us all we need to know about the power dynamics between Jessica and her minions.

And Fuller tells us all e need to know about the feelings between Jessica and Griff by putting them in the middle of a tornado. It’s over-the-top but it works.

Even stranger are the musical interludes! Including the song about the high-ridin’ woman with a whip. They add an an almost surreal element to an already wildly eccentric movie. When it comes to the important scenes such as the climactic gunfight though Fuller is in complete control. It’s one of the best scenes of its type you’ll ever see, visually brilliant and full of black humour.

Stanwyck is superb. She was clearly enjoying herself and did all her own stunts including a frighteningly dangerous scene where she’s dragged behind a horse in the middle of a tornado. The supporting cast is generally good. Barry Sullivan has the right kind of masculine presence to perfectly complement Stanwyck’s matriarchal dominatrix. Gene Barry mixes charm and likeability and serves to lighten things up a little. John Ericson does everything but foam at the mouth as Brock but in a movie like this it’s a perfectly valid acting approach.

Forty Guns makes the supposedly revolutionary revisionist westerns of the 70s seem boringly conventional and staid. Fuller gives us an extravagant idiosyncratic but highly entertaining view of the wild west. This is a must-see western.

The region 4 DVD is bereft of extras but at least it preserves the correct Cinemascope framing and it looks pretty good.

Illicit (1931)

Illicit, in 1931, gave Barbara Stanwyck her first starring role. She plays a young woman, Anne Vincent, who doesn’t want to marry her boyfriend. She wants to keep living in sin, because that’s what they’ve been doing and she’s been thoroughly enjoying it, and because she believes marriage kills romance, and also because she doesn’t want to become a man’s property.

As events unfold, and she finds herself pressured into marriage, it becomes obvious that most of her fears were justified. This is very much the kind of movie that the tightening up of the Hollywood Production Code in 1934 was intended to stop, with its guilt-free attitude towards sex and its very independent heroine.

Stanwyck is delightful – funny and feisty and sweet and likeable an sexy at the same time. James Rennie is OK as her boyfriend, who turns out to be rather conventional. Ricardo Cortez is suave and slightly sinister as one of Anne’s ex-boyfriends who is still intermittently pursuing her.

Joan Blondell, as so often, plays the heroine’s best friends and, as always, she lights up the screen. Charles Butterworth plays an amusing perpetually drunken friend, the kind of role that is often annoying in these early sound pictures but Butterworth is quite wonderful, with a superb very dry wit and an air of dazed benevolence.

Illicit is always entertaining and provides a nice mix of humour and romance. It’s also nice to see a movie which doesn’t make judgments on any of its characters. Even the “other woman” isn’t demonised. Recommended. And if you’re a fan of Barbara Stanwyck (and what right-thinking person isn’t) I recommend it even more highly.

It was released on VHS in the celebrated Forbidden Hollywood series but sadly does not appear to have ever received a DVD release.

No Man of Her Own (1950)

The 1950 Paramount production No Man of Her Own is yet another film noir based on a Cornell Woolrich story, in this case his novel I Married a Dead Man (which he originally published under the pseudonym William Irish). Barbara Stanwyck plays a pregnant unmarried woman who finds herself mistaken for someone else after a train crash. She finds the temptation to continue playing along with the deception too much to resist, but naturally complications ensue.

Eventually her past catches her up to her and she finds herself in a nightmare situation with nowhere to turn for help.

The story is told using flashbacks, which is more or less the way the story unfolds in the book. Mitchell Leisen’s direction is solid. The film noir aspect of the movie come mainly from the twisted plot and the use of flashbacks - visually it isn’t really in the noir style at all.

Stanwyck is terrific, and there’s a strong supporting cast. It follows the novel very closely until the ending. It’s a pity they felt the need to change the ending, but perhaps it was too ambiguous to satisfy the Production Code. While the film’s ending is ingenious and reasonably satisfactory, it lacks the brilliance and breath-taking horror of Woolrich’s ending and weakens the movie considerably.

It’s still a very fine movie, and it’s definitely a must for Stanwyck fans.