beams, âSo big!â while measuring out the size of the average erect male penis with his hands (you canât tell me Wellman didnât stifle a laugh behind the camera).
The ending of
So Big!
is inconclusive. Weâre told in dialogue how beautiful and fulfilling Selinaâs life has been, but what weâve mainly seen, and sensed in between vignettes, is that this is a story about ceaseless physical work breaking a womanâs spirit. In the last scene, Selina tearfully shrugs and says that she doesnât 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 itâs details like that that always make her worth watching as closely as possible.
For their follow-up, Warner Bros. found Wellman and Stanwyck another âback to the landâ script,
The Purchase Price
(1932). It begins well, in a naughty nightclub, where Stanwyckâs 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 âTake Me Away.â Stanwyck could just barely carry a tune, and she looks like sheâs about to crack up; itâs not clear if sheâs 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 sheâs been on Broadway since she was fifteen, just like Ruby Stevens had been. âIâve heard all the questions and I know all the answers,â she says, âand Iâve kept myself
fairly
respectable through it all.â I love the way she says âfairly,â as if sheâs 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
, Wellmanâs son explained that his dad liked to shoot only one or two takes at most and didnât do a lot of coverage, so that his films were âcut in the camera,â and couldnât 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, âBye ⦠bye ⦠screw you!â And when her maid Emily (Leila Bennett) talks about getting a husband and confides sheâd like to âtry the goodsâ before she buys them, Stanwyck says, âEmily!â in a very funny, mock-shocked manner. Sheâs 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 canât 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 âa natural mud larkâ (the title of Arthur Stringerâs 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 shouldnât 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
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