Free Barbara Stanwyck by Dan Callahan Page A

of her professionalism.
    Nine years later, Stanwyck reunited with Wellman for another through-the-years saga,
The Great Man’s Lady
, which is at least as episodic as
So Big!
, but far less effective. The film was contrived by Adela Rogers St. John and Seena Owen from a Vina Delmar story, though the screenplay is credited to a man, W.L. River. The basic material is magazine-like, and Wellman does nothing to flesh out the various crises in the life of Stanwyck’s “woman behind the man.” The film opens with an obnoxioustitle card about all these little women the world over and how they’ve helped their men. And then Wellman indulges himself with a crane shot up from a rocking chair, up, up, up over a town until we dissolve to a newspaper office, where an editor bemoans the little old lady of the title, centenarian Hannah Sempler (Stanwyck), who might or might not have been married to the man who founded the town, Ethan Hoyt (Joel McCrea). There’s a wipe to a room where a reporter sits surrounded by female wax dummies, suggesting discarded wives, mistresses, daughters, and other women associated with all the world’s so-called great men.
    The press gathers around for the unveiling of a statue of Hoyt, and a pretty young Hoyt biographer (Katharine Stevens) beams as the figure is revealed; Wellman then cuts to another reporter yawning. The press all convenes on Hannah’s house to ask questions, and Stanwyck makes her first entrance in long shot, heavily made-up. “To what do I owe this peculiar honor, may I ask?” she says, making a nice “sh” sound on the word “ask”—as if Hannah were wearing dentures. So far, so good, but that first line of Hannah’s is an initial indication that there are going to be problems here: creaky lines, foggy motivations. This type of advanced old age is probably beyond the reach of any actor, even one as resourceful as Stanwyck. Her lines sound dubbed in later, and she has to deal with Stevens’s inane cheerfulness in all their scenes together (and the fact that Stevens’s name is so close to that of Ruby’s dead mother).
    â€œThe year was 1848,” reminisces Hannah, standing by a window in her bedroom, and Wellman dissolves to a young Hannah in the exact same position by the window. Stanwyck’s youthful enthusiasm as this sheltered, girlish version of Hannah is slightly overdone. She giggles at one point, an odd sight—but at least she’s willing to try new things out, even if they fail. Back at the window, looking down at her beau Ethan, Hannah asks, “Are you mad?” and he replies, “Stark, staring mad!” There’s really nothing any actor can do with lines like that, so Wellman just speeds the pair along into an elopement behind some covered wagons on an obvious soundstage prairie. There’s almost no location shooting here, which hurts the film. Wellman takes advantage of the studio setting just once. Sitting in front of a landscape, Hannah and Ethan talk about the city he wants to build, and it magically appears behind them, a charming, F.W. Murnau-like effect.
    Wellman’s movies are filled with pictorial grace notes, but sometimes these inventions seem extraneous to the film itself. When he stages a confrontation between Ethan, Hannah, and Steely (Brian Donlevy), an inexplicable third romantic wheel, he has the actors play it all inshadowed silhouettes; this just seems like a way of keeping his interest up visually because he’s not involved in the story. When Hannah loses her two babies in a flood, Wellman could be expected to give Stanwyck a proper moment to grieve, but as she drags herself out of a river, he keeps her in long shot, and Victor Young’s gloppy score kills any genuine emotion we might feel for this woman.
    If Wellman is mainly indifferent, Stanwyck is not (she believed in this movie and was disappointed when it wasn’t a success). Steely finds