The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star (Preview)
by Catherine Russell. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Paperback: 368 pp., illus. $29.95.

Reviewed by Olympia Kiriakou

Barbara Stanwyck once said, “Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don’t care what happened before. I don’t even care if I was in the rest of the damned thing—I’ll take it in those fifteen minutes.” That transformative screen time speaks to the undefinable allure of the movie star, a quality that Stanwyck had in spades.

She was born Ruby Stevens and grew up as an orphan in Brooklyn. She dropped out of school at the age of fourteen and by sixteen she was on the stage, working as a chorus girl in seedy Manhattan speakeasies. Stanwyck’s impoverished childhood was formative to her professionalism, which was lauded among her directors, crews, and fellow actors. It also adds verisimilitude to her independent star persona. In many ways Stanwyck was the ultimate movie star, an ordinary person who came from nothing to become an extraordinary actress and icon of the studio system. Her success represents the myth that Hollywood likes to perpetuate about itself.

But as Catherine Russell points out in her new book, Stanwyck had more than luck and a strict work ethic on her side. She was also practical and understood that Hollywood actresses had shorter shelf lives than their male peers. To thrive in such a fickle industry, she needed to continuously reinvent herself—and she did. Stanwyck’s performative range lent itself to her ongoing metamorphosis; her piercing eyes and velvety voice that got deeper with age (and cigarettes) were the keys to her expressive style. She made acting look easy, but a close study of any of her over one hundred film and television performances reveals that she was methodical about her craft. Stanwyck’s versatility enabled her to triumph over the structural misogyny in the film industry, and her sixty-year career is a snapshot of intertwined Hollywood and American cultural histories. In the pre-Code era, when relaxed industry regulations afforded female stars the space to embrace their sexual desires, Stanwyck played bad girls and gold-diggers in such films as Ladies They Talk About (1931) and Baby Face (1933). In the 1940s, when post-WWII cynicism melted into Cold War paranoia, she played femmes fatales and troubled housewives in Double Indemnity (1944), The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). Stanwyck’s most strategic triumph was her midcareer transformation into a Western horsewoman-turned-matriarch in films such The Furies (1950), The Maverick Queen (1956), Forty Guns (1957) and, later, on television in The Big Valley (1965–69). Russell explains that Stanwyck’s longevity was an exception to the rule of women in Hollywood.

At least a half-dozen Barbara Stanwyck biographies of various length and scope were published during her lifetime or posthumously. Russell uses the abecedary methodology—a collection of short essays organized alphabetically by key words—to distinguish her scholarship from the crowded field and unpack Stanwyck’s shifting cultural meaning. Diehard Stanwyck fans and newcomers alike will benefit from Russell’s unique method because, unlike a biography, Russell does not claim to “know” the private Stanwyck, a fact that’s made clear in her smart discussion of Stanwyck’s often-speculated lesbianism. Russell offers biographical details when they intersect with Stanwyck’s stardom and performances, such as her “D” chapter about the actress’s tumultuous relationship with her son, Dion, and how it informed the image of “bad” motherhood represented in Stella Dallas (1937). Russell weaves together the public’s perception of Stanwyck with her screen identity, reminding us of the ongoing ideological and cultural negotiations involved engaging with a movie star’s image…

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Olympia Kiriakou is a film historian specializing in stardom, gender, and genre in classical Hollywood, author of Becoming Carole Lombard: Stardom, Comedy, and Legacy, and contributor to Sight and Sound and MUBI Notebook.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 3