No star of Hollywood's Golden Age enjoyed a longer or wider-ranging career than Barbara Stanwyck. Her film and television work spanned seven decades, in roles and genres that defied typecasting. She grew up in Jazz Age America, and her first parts included chorus girls, working girls, women of easy virtue and grifters galore. An established star by the late 1930s, during her peak she played women who marry up in the world or heiresses who marry down, and she bumped off at least one husband along the way. Her career thrived on the paradox of her strength and vulnerability. As she told Henry Fonda in THE LADY EVE, "You don't know very much about girls. The best ones aren't as good as you think they are and the bad ones aren't as bad. Not nearly as bad." Nominated for the Best Actress Oscar four times, but never a winner, she was awarded an Honorary Oscar in 1982 and AFI's Life Achievement Award in 1987. In Stanwyck's centennial year, join AFI Silver for a closer look at her classic films.

Stanwyck Tough as Nails
by Gary Arnold
The Washington Times
Read the article by clicking here

Films include NIGHT NURSE; THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN; BABY FACE; STELLA DALLAS; THE LADY EVE; BALL OF FIRE; MEET JOHN DOE; THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS; REMEMBER THE NIGHT; THE FURIES; DOUBLE INDEMNITY; SORRY, WRONG NUMBER.

Pre-Code Double Feature! Two Films for One Admission!

NIGHT NURSE

In one of her best early roles, sassy Stanwyck and wisecracking Joan Blondell play a pair of private nurses who discover a fiendish plot afoot in their wealthy employer's home: the brutish chauffeur (a young, not yet moustachioed Clark Gable) plans to murder the children, marry their wanton mother and make off with the kids' trust funds!

DIR William Wellman; SCR Oliver H.P. Garrett, based on the novel by Grace Perkins. US, 1931, b&w, 72 min. NOT RATED

Screening with:

THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN

Banned in Britain! Director Capra's exotic adventure drops missionary Stanwyck into a chaotic and brutal China, run by dueling warlords and competing Western interests. Evacuated from Shanghai and rescued by General Yen (Swedish silent star Nils Asther is magnetic on screen), Stanwyck finds her Western preconceptions and naive idealism challenged by Yen's wit, and her defenses completely topple during one of the screen's most erotically charged dream sequences.

DIR Frank Capra; SCR Edward E. Paramore Jr.; PROD Walter Wanger. US, 1933, b&w, 88 min. NOT RATED

BABY FACE

Restored 35mm Print of the Pre-Code Classic!
Featuring a Q&A with Mike Mashon, Curator, Motion Picture Division, Library of Congress

In four fabulous years before a strict Motion Picture Code put the cap on audacity, Warner Bros. produced a gallery of rude, saucy films. No actor was as tough as Barbara Stanwyck, and no actress used womanly wiles with an intelligence so cool and cutting. In this invigorating film, Stanwyck escapes to New York from an Erie, PA, speakeasy where her father rented her out to customers. In a big-city bank, she sleeps her way to the top, leaving a heap of discarded men (and one or two corpses). Even in a version pruned for the New York state censors, BABY FACE was the definitive pre-Code statement of how the Depression created a new morality of no morality. Now the missing five minutes have been restored, and we see how the movie snarled every bit as brazenly as Stanwyck did. (Note from Richard Corliss, TIME.)

DIR Alfred E. Green; SCR Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola; PROD William LeBaron. US, 1933, b&w, 76 min. NOT RATED

STELLA DALLAS

Barbara Stanwyck earned her first of four Best Actress Oscar nominations in King Vidor's tale of a woman from the wrong side of the tracks who marries up in life, but is uncomfortable with higher society's constraints. Anne Shirley, who earned a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, plays the daughter Stanwyck heartbreakingly rejects so that the girl can enjoy the life she never could.

DIR King Vidor; SCR Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty; PROD Samuel Goldwyn. US, 1937, b&w, 106 min. NOT RATED

THE LADY EVE

"I need him like the axe needs the turkey." In Preston Sturges's masterpiece of screwball comedy, boyish herpetologist/brewery heir Henry Fonda seems like an easy mark for father-and-daughter con artists Charles Coburn and Barbara Stanwyck. But Stanwyck wasn't supposed to fall in love with Fonda after fleecing him. Spurned by the burned Fonda, Stanwyck takes on the persona of "Lady Eve Sidwich" to win his heart again.

DIR/SCR Preston Sturges; PROD Paul Jones. US, 1941, b&w, 97 min. NOT RATED

BALL OF FIRE

Sequestered in a houseful of academics, Prof. Gary Cooper offers to take in stripper Barbara Stanwyck, who's on the run from the police, if she'll teach him everything she knows about "slang" for his encyclopedia. When her gangster boyfriend Dan Duryea threatens to complicate matters, the intellectual Cooper discovers he has an animal side, too. Four Oscar nominations including Best actress for Stanwyck and Best Writing, Original Story for Billy Wilder and Thomas Monroe.

DIR Howard Hawks; SCR Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder; PROD Samuel Goldwyn. US, 1941, b&w, 111 min. NOT RATED

MEET JOHN DOE

A decidedly dark allegory from director Frank Capra. Downsized journalist Barbara Stanwyck publishes a fake letter decrying the ills of the world, signing it John Doe. When the letter causes a grassroots phenomenon, her newspaper hires her to keep the story alive, including casting former baseball player/current bum Gary Cooper to play the role of John Doe. As manipulative political forces seek to hijack the movement, Stanwyck faces the crisis of falling in love with a man she's in danger of destroying.

DIR/PROD Frank Capra; SCR Robert Riskin. US, 1941, b&w, 122 min. NOT RATED

THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS

A terrible childhood secret unites heiress Barbara Stanwyck and her drunken D.A. husband, Kirk Douglas (in his screen debut). When footloose WWII vet Van Heflin blows back into town, old passions are rekindled and new plots hatched. Stanwyck, Douglas and Heflin all shine in their roles, along with sultry Lizabeth Scott as a jailbird who may represent Heflin's salvation, or his undoing.

DIR Lewis Milestone; SCR Robert Rossen; PROD Hal B. Wallis. US, 1946, b&w, 116 min. NOT RATED

REMEMBER THE NIGHT

When shoplifter Stanwyck gets pinched for lifting a diamond bracelet during Christmastime in New York, it's assistant D.A. Fred MacMurray's job to send the third-time offender to the big house. With the case postponed until after Christmas, MacMurray floats Stanwyck bail money so she can go home for the holidays--with him, it turns out. Misadventure, mirth and a little holiday magic bring the two together, but there's still that day in court.

DIR/PROD Mitchell Leisen; SCR Preston Sturges. US, 1940, b&w,94 min. NOT RATED

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

Seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress, Best Picture and Best Director (Billy Wilder). Film noir at its best, as jaded insurance man Fred MacMurray and bored housewife Barbara Stanwyck team up to murder her husband and collect on the policy. They fool ace insurance inspector Edward G. Robinson, but getting away with murder turns out to be a full-time job. Wilder co-authored the Oscar-nominated script with detective fiction great Raymond Chandler.

DIR/SCR Billy Wilder; SCR Raymond Chandler, based on the novel by James M. Cain. US, 1944, b&w, 107 min. NOT RATED

THE FURIES

By the 1950s, Stanwyck had turned to Westerns and away from tamer women's roles. Anthony Mann's THE FURIES is one of her best performances. Stanwyck plays the fiercely loyal daughter of rich rancher Walter Huston, a cruel egotist. When society dame Judith Anderson horns in on Huston and the two announce their marriage, a father/daughter war ensues. Huston gives one of his best performances in his final role.

DIR Anthony Mann; SCR Charles Schnee, based on the novel by Niven Busch; PROD Hal Wallis. US, 1950, b&w, 109 min. NOT RATED

SORRY, WRONG NUMBER

Confined to a bed in her Manhattan penthouse, invalid heiress Barbara Stanwyck busies herself calling around town keeping tabs on wandering husband Burt Lancaster. When a crossed wire results in her overhearing someone else's conversation--the plotting of a murder--the already tightly wound Stanwyck goes hysterical, calling frantically in search of someone who will believe her. Adapted from a radio play, the twist-ridden finale will please film noir fans. Stanwyck's fourth Oscar nomination.

DIR/PROD Anatole Litvak; SCR Lucille Fletcher; PROD Hal Wallis. US, 1948, b&w, 89 min. NOT RATED