Today would have marked the 100th birthday of Barbara Stanwyck. Perhaps the greatest tough-cookie of an era in which tough-cookies were in no short supply, Stanwyck worked steadily from the 30s through the 60s. She had a rare gift for adopting the expected conventions of any given genre, while maintaining her signature blend of wise-cracking sensuality and drowsy hostility.
Some of Ms. Stanwyck's must-see performances are screening on Turner Classic Movies today and tonight; though I'd prefer to watch Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire, the gem of the program is probably Baby Face, which airs tonight at 8pm EST. Baby Face was the ultimate pre-Code picture, and one of the least morally defensible products of Warner Brother's early-30s stab at social relevancy. Stanwyck plays Lily, a saloon maid who, perhaps too-loosely interpreting the advice of her Nietzschean mentor, "accidentally" kills her father and, with her handservant/only friend in tow, hightails it to the big city to commence sleeping her way to the top.
The film was so racy in its original incarnation that when it was initially released in the relatively-wild pre-Code era, significant cuts had to be made to appease the censors. The original cut was found and screened at Film Forum in New York last year; as the New York Times' Dave Kehr put it at the time, "with its five full minutes of sleaze restored, it has to be seen to be not quite believed."
For more on our girl Babs, check out these tributes from around the web:
"[I'd] rank Stanwycks abilities above that entire Picturegoer list, even above Garbo, who was an instinctual actress and not the superb technician that Stanwyck was." -- Self-Styled Siren
"She was a great star, and also happened to be a rock-ribbed right-winger and anti-communist
dames were like that back then." -- Libertas
"It was a face that launched a thousand inquisitions: the mouth too tight to be rosy, and a voice pitched for slang, all bite and huskiness. When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck." -- Anthony Lane
Above: a clip from Ball of Fire (one of several films in which Stanwyck played an, um, lady of the night). Via The Shamus, who writes: "She was lip synching, but who cares? Watch those fingernails on the curtain."
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