Free Barbara Stanwyck by Dan Callahan

beams, “So big!” while measuring out the size of the average erect male penis with his hands (you can’t tell me Wellman didn’t stifle a laugh behind the camera).
    The ending of
So Big!
is inconclusive. We’re told in dialogue how beautiful and fulfilling Selina’s life has been, but what we’ve mainly seen, and sensed in between vignettes, is that this is a story about ceaseless physical work breaking a woman’s spirit. In the last scene, Selina tearfully shrugs and says that she doesn’t care about never really seeing the places she wanted to see when she was a girl. But Stanwyck puts a tiny oomph of hurt in her eyes as she says it, and it’s details like that that always make her worth watching as closely as possible.
    For their follow-up, Warner Bros. found Wellman and Stanwyck another “back to the land” script,
The Purchase Price
(1932). It begins well, in a naughty nightclub, where Stanwyck’s torch singer, Joan, decked out in a dress that sits lazily around her shoulders and seems about to fall off, haltingly croons a song called “Take Me Away.” Stanwyck could just barely carry a tune, and she looks like she’s about to crack up; it’s not clear if she’s embarrassed to be singing, or if her character is just amused by the song. Joan saunters over to a ringside table where she easily seduces a chump male. Back in her dressing room, she takes off her make-up with cold cream (Stanwyck made a career out of putting on make-up and wiping it off before a mirror) and goes into a well-writtenspeech about how she’s been on Broadway since she was fifteen, just like Ruby Stevens had been. “I’ve heard all the questions and I know all the answers,” she says, “and I’ve kept myself
fairly
respectable through it all.” I love the way she says “fairly,” as if she’s gained enough distance to be good-humored about all those men and their messy advances.
    In one early scene, Stanwyck trips slightly when walking through a hotel lobby door, but she keeps on going in order to sustain the Wellman speed of this period. (After a Turner Classic Movies showing of
The Purchase Price
, Wellman’s son explained that his dad liked to shoot only one or two takes at most and didn’t do a lot of coverage, so that his films were “cut in the camera,” and couldn’t be tampered with in the editing room). Stanwyck has some amusing moments here, especially when she waves away her married lover (Lyle Talbot) so that the gesture reads as, “Bye … bye … screw you!” And when her maid Emily (Leila Bennett) talks about getting a husband and confides she’d like to “try the goods” before she buys them, Stanwyck says, “Emily!” in a very funny, mock-shocked manner. She’s lighter here in these opening scenes, playing a woman who seems well adjusted.
    When Joan becomes a mail-order bride to a farmer (George Brent) in order to get out of town, however, the film sputters and dies, and Joan herself starts to take on a masochistic tinge. Brent plays this man as a bumptious moron, so that when he goes after Joan on their wedding night and she slaps him away, we can’t blame her. Then, for the rest of the film, Joan tries to win him back, for reasons that remain mysterious. Her lover shows up on the farm toward the end, and he explains her behavior by calling Joan “a natural mud lark” (the title of Arthur Stringer’s original story was
The Mud Lark
), and that explanation will have to do. Joan chasing after this dumb lug farmer for so many reels makes about as much sense as Stanwyck staying loyal to Frank Fay. These things happen in life, alas; they shouldn’t have to happen on screen, too. For the final scenes, set during a fire, Stanwyck did her own stunts and got her legs burned as a result. She wore her burns and falls and physical blows on set like medals