Note: This is a detailed recap and review of a film now nearly 60 years old: I’m not going to be coy about spoilers (including stills from the film). If you don’t want to know what happens, I encourage you to stop reading right now. Every blogger loves getting readers, but only a bad — or deeply ignorant — blogger wants to anger them. Be sure to visit Aubyn Eli’s Girl with the White Parasol blog for much more about Barbara Stanwyck this week.
Much though I love Bette Davis, say, I can’t quite imagine her in a role in which she’s unaware of her — Bette Davis’s, not the character’s — own greatness, her superiority (on almost every scale) to everyone within a half-mile. She might dismiss it, she might crack wise about it, but in doing so she couldn’t help acknowledging and drawing your attention to it. Katherine Hepburn I’ll watch in anything, and I’ll laugh at or be heartwrenched by almost everything that issues forth from that Philadelphia Mainline throat. But Hepburn herself, although apparently modest in real life and dismissive of flattery, always radiated unapproachability by mere mortals. The planes of her face weren’t the only things those famous cheekbones cleft into separate regions of life.
But even when playing a character utterly out of the league of everyone around her, Stanwyck’s manner just said: Here I am. Take it or leave it. You’ve got your life, I’ve got mine, maybe they’ll intersect and maybe they won’t, and while I’m happy and maybe even delighted to meet you, I’ll survive if I never do.
In 1956’s Crime of Passion, she brings this manner to a role out of sync with the time.
