Rassegna stampa di Barbara Stanwyck

Ruby Stevens (questo il suo vero nome) era nata a New York nel 1907. Orfana di entrambi i genitori, verrà allevata dalla sorella maggiore. Ancora giovanissima comincia a lavorare in un grande magazzino mentre contemporaneamente inizia a studiare danza, arrivando a entrare nelle Zigfield Follies. Dopo l'esordìo in teatro a Broadway nel 1926, il suo debutto cinematografico si concretizza con una particina nel film Notti di Broadway. Affermatasi in una serie di film di Frank Capra, come "Femmine di lusso" (1930), "La donna del miracolo" (1931), Proibito (1932) e con Amore sublime di King Vidor, negli anni '40 finisce con l'imporsi anche nella commedia sofisticata con Lady Eva (1941) di P. Sturges e Colpo di fulmine (1942) di Howard Hawks, ma una svolta decisiva nella sua carriera avviene nel 1944 con La fiamma del peccato di Billy Wilder, che fa di lei la 'dark lady' per antonomasia del cinema noir americano, come confermato dai successivi Lo strano amore di Martha Ivers (1946) e La sete del potere (1954). Negli anni '50 la Stanwyck inizia il suo declino, dapprima interpretando western di serie B e poi dedicandosi alla televisione con serie di grande successo popolare. Nel 1982, dopo 4 nomination, ottiene finalmente un Oscar alla carriera. La Stanwyck è morta a Santa Monica, in California, nel 1990.

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HERE are only a few ways to be a movie star, and Barbara Stanwyck, Brooklyn-born 100 years ago, took the hardest and probably the best one: she kept the audience guessing. She wasn’t jaw-droppingly beautiful (though her eyes were lovely and her legs were famously good). She didn’t have an outsize, force-of-nature personality. And she wasn’t an instantly recognizable type — a vamp or girl next door or “career woman” or high-society madcap, to name a few of the popular personae available to actresses of her era. She played versions of all those roles at one time or another, without getting stuck in any of them. You couldn’t tell who Barbara Stanwyck was just by booking at her; it took a little trouble to get to know her, and she had the ability — a star’s ability — to make millions of viewers believe she was worth the trouble.
In honor of her centennial, the BAM cinématek at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is offering a modest retrospective — it starts Wednesday and runs through May 6 — and what’s striking about the series is that every one of the dozen movies in it depends at least to some degree on the ambiguity of the heroine’s character.
The program opens with a double bill of early Stanwyck: Alfred E. Green’s Baby Face and Howard Bretherton and William Keighley’s Ladies They Talk About, both released in 1933, before Hollywood adopted the strict production code that protected audiences from precisely the sort of moral ambiguity she specialized in. The movies aren’t masterpieces, but they’re fun to watch because in both of them Ms. Stanwyck plays a woman men just can’t seem to get a fix on: is she a good girl or a bad girl, or what? They’re trying so hard to figure her out you can practically see their heads spinning; they look dazed, off-balance, stupid with indecision. That’s the Stanwyck effect at its purest.

The other precode film in the retrospective, Frank Capra’s “Bitter Tea of General Yen” (also 1933), isn’t quite so junkily entertaining. “Yen” is a prestige picture, a big-budget historical melodrama abouts the Chinese civil war~ it was in fact the first movie shown at Radio City Music Hall, where it flopped. Its tonier context doesn’t faze Ms. Stanwyck at all. If anything, the velvety swellness of the production appears to stimulate her. The incongruities in her character stand out even more; she seems less knowable than ever. Here she plays a proper, idealistic young American who comes to China to marry a missionary but winds up being kidnapped by a powerful warlord with impeccable manners, a streak of cruelty and a considerable crush on her. And she falls for him — slowly, reluctantly, but, in the end, fully. What makes her surrender so startling is that the movie is constructed largely as a running debate between the Stanwyck character’s Christian .humanism and the general’s “Oriental” fatalism, the philosophy with which he justifies his rather cavalier, attitude toward the taking of lives~ when she gives in to her desire for him, she’s also giving in to a philosophy she’d thought unconscionable, and giving up an important part of her idea of herself. There’s a good deal of mysterious-East mumbo-jumbo in this strange picture, but nothing in “The Bitter Tea of General Yen” is more mysterious than its heroine’s heart.
This is dark stuff, and it’s difficult to imagine another actress handling this outré, fragrantly perverse erotic/philosophical conversion as gracefully, or as fearlessly, as ‘Ms. Stanwyck does. She doesn’t make heavy weather of it. Her effects are small-scale, plain: a downturn at the corners of her mouth a sudden softening in the tone of her voice, a flicker of self-doubt in her eyes. Such nearly imperceptible but always perfectly lucid shifts of emphasis were her basic arsenal of technical firepower throughout her Career, and she brandished her weapons forthrightly.
The tantalizing thing about Ms. Stanwyck is that she so rarely seems deliberately tantalizing, and yet you still can’t quite account for her, can’t say for sure who she is, or even predict with any confidence what she’ll do next. On those infrequent occasions when she does set out to, be seductive — as, for example, in Billy Wilder’s great film noir “Double Indemnity” (1944) — she makes her intentions blazingly obvious. Her Phyllis Dietrichson, sporting a m!ghty unconvincing platinum blond wig, is almost a cartoon of a femme fatale: when the insurance man (Fred MacMurray) comes knocking, she answers the door wearing only a towel, throws on a sexy wrap that reveals a fair expanse of shapely leg and makes sure her visitor gets a clear, long look at the flattering anklet she happens to have on — the poor chump stares at it like a hypnotist’s subject at a swaying watch.
Blatant as Phyllis is, though, Ms. Stanwyck somehow manages to work up a bit of suspense about how bad this particular bad girl is going to be: whether she’ll go “to the end of the line” with the guy who helped her kill her husband, or betray him, too. She looks just sincere enough in her love scenes with Mr. MacMurray to create a trace of doubt in what would otherwise be a laughably easy call. The production code made her job tougher, because the studios were more, or less compelled to label every character as inherently virtuous or inherently vicious, which didn’t leave much breathing space to an actress who was allergic to self-labeling.
You can see the code’s requirements constraining her, too, in Mitchell Leisen’s “Rememher the Night” (1940) and Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (1941), in which she plays a character with a strong resemblance to the naughty, opportunistic, somewhat “loose” young women she portrayed so vividly in the early ‘30s. But these new-model, code-approved shady ladies — a thief in Remember the Night and a nightclub singer and gangster’s moll named Sugarpuss O’Shea in Ball of Fire — now come equipped with hearts of gold. Ms. Stanwyck at least has the integrity not to wear them on her sleeve.
In the year of Double Indempity she was the most highly paid actress. in Hollywood. By the late ‘40s her physical allure was fading; she became a woman who would be best described as handsome. And her slightly desexualized toughness made her seem a more natural fit for westerns than for erotically charged urban dramas. One of the liveliest of her westerns, Samuel Fuller’s brisk, berserk Forty Guns (1957), is in the Academy of Music series. (On television, she had a successful run in the late ‘60s as the ranch matriarch of The Big Valley.) The retrospective also includes her last movie, William Castle’s Night Walker (1964), an exceptionally cheesy thriller that goes a long way toward explaining why she said the hell with it and worked only on the small screen for the rest of her life. (She died in 1990.)
What Ms. Stanwyck achieved in her prime, though, was remarkable. She made her Brooklyn-bred, regular-gal resilience seem as enigmatic, as infinitely various, as the calculated elusiveness of a Garbo; she gave the ordinary American woman an air of mystery.
The movie that captures her best isn’t in this retrospective. That’s The Lady Eve (1941), Preston Sturges’s sublime romantic comedy in which she cons helpless Henry Fonda twice — first as a down-to-earth American whom he meets on a ship, and then, on dry land, as the very upper-crust Lady Eve Sidwick — and manages to fall in love with him, too. Mr. Fonda is bedazzled and bamboozled; even his closest friend can’t persuade him that the two women are in fact “the same dame.” All her life, Barbara Stanwyck made it her business to show us that a woman like her could be many things — good, bad and ambiguous — and still be the same dame.
Da The New York Times, 22 aprile 2007