Loni Anderson could use some Anacin for her neuralgia and neuritis in Sorry, Wrong Number.
Was Barbara Stanwyck’s death in January of 1990 perhaps hastened by the premiere of Loni Anderson’s made-for-television remake of Sorry, Wrong Number in October of 1989? The coroner’s report contains nothing to support that irresponsible theory, but it’s difficult not to wonder how Stanwyck, arguably the greatest American film actress in the history of the medium, felt about this silly project, one of many ’80s TV remakes of classic films. What must she have made of Anderson’s performance in particular, beginning with the stilted delivery that’s reminiscent of Brenda Dickson welcoming you to her home? (The video will inevitably be scrubbed from YouTube, but the legend lives on in print.)
Dressed alternately as a stewardess and a Sea Org member, her strikingly unnatural wig brilliantly capturing the sunlight in flashbacks, Anderson—who we last enjoyed as a robotic and impeccably attired escort in My Mother’s Secret Life—plays Madeleine Coltrane, middle-aged heiress to the country’s fourth-largest pharmaceutical empire. Screenwriter Ann Louise Bardach and director Tony Wharmby don’t probe too deeply, but we understand that her tycoon father Jim (Hal Holbrook) has kept her in an overprotective bubble. However, her guilelessness is so pronounced that during the interminable scenes that Madeleine spends hanging on the telephone, my thoughts turned to how she’d react if Beverly Sutphin called.
It’s not every day that you dust off a 1931 pre-code Barbara Stanwyck film because of a ’90s-era Cheryl Ladd TV movie, but I wouldn’t mind if it happened more often. While toiling on an upcoming post about Ladd’s Dancing with Danger (1994), in which she played a taxi dancer, I was reminded of Stanwyck’s turn as a woman in the same profession in Ten Cents a Dance.
Stanwyck is my favorite American actress. This is a play on the possibly apocryphal Clifton Webb quote about her (“My favorite American lesbian,” discussed more below), but it’s also the truth. Behind my desk is a framed original insert poster for There’s Always Tomorrow, and I own nearly all of her films that have been released on DVD. When, years ago, I cheekily volunteered to die for assorted femme fatales, Stanwyck didn’t make the list. That’s because I would’ve been a comically dazed Henry Fonda in her presence, not a Fred MacMurray.
Barbara Stanwyck with Ricardo Cortez in Ten Cents a Dance.
Ten Cents a Dance is one of her least scandalous pre-code films, and has strange origins. It is, as the credits note, “based upon the popular song by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers.” Stanwyck plays Barbara O’Neill, a young woman with dim prospects employed at the Palais de Dance. When a crude, tobacco-chewing sailor asks “What’s a guy gotta do to dance with you gals?” Barbara replies with half a sneer, “All you need is a ticket and some courage.” Her irritation is palpable as he drags her across the floor.
Reunited: The stars of Double Indemnity, minus Edward G. Robinson
Criterion will release a 2-disc edition of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession tomorrow, which is all well and good (it’s been years since Criterion released All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind), but when is somebody — anybody — going to release There’s Always Tomorrow on DVD? It’s a Sirk film I’ve read wonderful things about but have never been able to see, and some of its posters (not the one pictured above, obviously) bore the tagline: “The dangerous years are those married years…When love is taken for granted!” How can you not release a movie with a tagline like that on DVD? Especially when it stars Barbara Stanwyck! That’s just criminal.
BTW, for anyone who finds this while searching the internet for information about a There’s Always Tomorrow DVD release, the film is currently available as part of Sirk collections that can be purchased from stores in France or Germany. But before you go looking either of them up on Amazon.fr or Amazon.de, make sure the discs are compatible with your viewing equipment. And note that neither comes with attractive artwork, which is just a slap in the face when you consider the cost of each set in U.S. dollars.
If you’ve always wanted to see Barbara Stanwyck face off against Judith Anderson (it was the child actress playing Stanwyck’s character who sent Anderson tumbling down the staircase in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers), the Criterion Collection is now giving you the chance to do just that: today it releases Anthony Mann’s The Furies on DVD.
Made in 1950, it was only Mann’s second western (he’d go on to direct many more), and his background in film noir is wonderfully apparent throughout: This is one of the most shadowy westerns ever made. It’s also one of the most melodramatic, which is why the casting is pitch-perfect.
Stanwyck plays Vance, the rather passionate daughter of cattle baron T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston, in what would be his final film), and given the bond the two of them share, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to call this Electra: The Western. When Vance acquires a love interest in the form of Wendell Corey, T.C. can’t help but meddle. What Vance does when her father brings Judith Anderson home goes far past meddling.
To describe The Furies as psychosexual is a bit like calling Cries & Whispers depressing — it doesn’t really tell you the half of it. Think of it as a kind of precursor to Johnny Guitar, the most gleefully perverse of all westerns, but with incest instead of lesbianism. (And before I get my wrist slapped for using the words lesbian and perverse in the same sentence, let me point out that I’m not the one who wrote the fucking movies. I could never write a western unless horses were suddenly equipped with air conditioning.) And with high-quality acting from Huston, Stanwyck and Anderson, none of whom lumber in front of the camera with a dazed “WTF?” look in their eyes à la Sterling Hayden.
Cyd Charisse, as everyone who regularly goes anywhere on the Internet already knows, died today at the age of 86. I have nothing insightful to say about her career. All things considered, I have nothing insightful to say about anything. But I did happen to catch her in East Side, West Side, a Mervyn LeRoy melodrama, a few months ago when it came out on DVD, and I have an observation to share with you bunch of homosexuals.
First, the set-up. The movie is a pretty typical Barbara Stanwyck vehicle: Stanwyck’s husband, played by James Mason, is cheating on her with Ava Gardner. That doesn’t make Stanwyck happy. Then Van Heflin comes to town, and that does make her happy. (You’ve got to hand it to Heflin: All he ever really did was wear a suit and act like a smart-ass, but in every other movie released in the 1940s attractive women were dying to fuck him.) Problem is, he’s dating Charisse, which leads to some brief tension between her character and Stanwyck’s.
Big deal, I know: Stanwyck had tension with everyone in her movies. Her characters were nothing if not tense. What’s different about her big scene with Charisse in East Side, West Side is that she doesn’t seem to be impatiently waiting to snap her next line; she seems to be considering, with some appreciation, the hotness of her younger costar. There was, for the record, a lot of hotness to consider.
Isn’t that a heartwarming remembrance? Yeah, well, I don’t have a lot to say about her — but I think Barbara Stanwyck would’ve hit it. I feel very classy right now.
Does Lizabeth Scott have Perez Hilton bookmarked? We know she glances at tabloid covers, if this blurb at Contact Music is any indication. The website quotes the 85-year-old actress, who has spent decades denying interview requests, as saying, “I saw Kate Moss and her new beau all over the cover on the news-stand and thought they looked like vagrants; so scruffy and grubby—just awful. I’d like to see Miss Moss smarten up her act. Doesn’t she know young women look up to her? She would have lasted 10 seconds under the Hollywood studio system.”
Scott goes on to praise Paris Hilton, Victoria Beckham and Dita Von Teese as celebrities with genuine senses of style, saying, “Two of the three might not be the sharpest tools in the box, but they are glamorous and always impeccably turned out.”
Could it be that Scott, the gorgeous starlet whose career was all but over by the time she was outed by Confidential in the mid-1950s (she sued them for libel, and contrary to what has been reported on several websites, didn’t win the case, which was dismissed on a technicality), is one of those anonymous posters who always replies to Hilton items about Dita Von Teese by typing “FIRST!!!!!!!!”? Or maybe she’s more the Dlisted type, preferring bitchy remarks about Victoria Beckham’s skeletal frame to crude, hastily drawn MS Paint penises pointing at the Spice Girl’s face.
I’ve yet to figure out where Contact Music got their Scott quotes from, so if anyone can help, drop me a line. And if you’ve never seen the luminous Lizabeth in a movie, you must rent The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, pronto. (The Paramount release, which has a nice transfer, not the $4.99 rush jobs by no-name companies.) Seeing Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott and Dame Judith Anderson all in the same movie is a bit like watching Jodie Foster act opposite Alexis Smith in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, if you catch my drift, and Martha Ivers is indeed quite strange, one of the oddest noirs you’ll ever come across. Scott is superb in it as a mysterious young woman just released from prison.
It was only the second film she appeared in (Scott started her career in the theater, working as Tallulah Bankhead’s understudy in The Skin of Our Teeth, and years later there were rumors that parts of All About Eve might have been modeled on their relationship), but she wastes little time in illustrating why Paramount’s publicity department called her “The Threat.”
Though she was given little in the way of quality material during her all-too-brief career, Scott had the kind of sultry looks and prickly presence that were tailor-made for film noir, and was briefly seen as the studio’s answer to the Warner Brothers upstart siren Lauren Bacall. And, on a personal note, if I had to be shot by or because of a ’40s femme fatale, she would certainly make the short list of dames worth dying for, right alongside Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Jane Greer and Yvonne De Carlo. (Geez, who knew I was so easy?)
UPDATE: The Scott quotes have been credited elsewhere to the Daily Express.
RECOMMENDED READING: There are Scott fans who’ve sent me defensive emails over the years about her sexuality, even though I never labeled it in this post. More than once I was told “She was a Republican!”, as if that means anything. (So was Rock Hudson.)
The man-crazy take on Scott is more of a recent phenomenon. It’s reflected on fan sites and in iterations of her Wikipedia page linking her to basically every man she was ever photographed with (even names that don’t help the cause, like Van Johnson), a curiosity that wasn’t as common prior to her 2015 death. Historically, the man she was most consistently linked with was producer Hal Wallis, and it was often insinuated that it was a transactional relationship on Scott’s end.
For the more traditional gay Hollywood take on both Scott and her Confidential woes, you might consider consulting books like William J. Mann’s Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 and Diana McLellan’s The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood. The public and private travails of Scott only take up a few pages in each of those volumes, but the details will be of interest to certain readers.
Her name pops up unexpectedly in some memoirs as well. In Curtis Harrington’sNice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, the filmmaker (Killer Bees; The Cat Creature) recounts an early gig as a messenger boy for Paramount studios. He recalls lesbian rumors, including those linking her to Bankhead, following her from New York to Hollywood, despite common knowledge of her situation with Wallis. However, he adds nothing new to what’s been previously written.
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