Free Barbara Stanwyck by Dan Callahan Page B

Hannah again when she’s middle-aged, with white streaks in her hair, stiff-backed in a chair. “I thought you were dead,” he says. “I am,” she replies, so simply that she wakes the film out of its stupor. Her grief is so intensely centered in this scene that it stands as a prime example of the hypnotic way Stanwyck could draw us into her moods on screen. When Hannah becomes the queen of the roulette table (this story leaves few clichés untried), Stanwyck wears a doozy of a black Edith Head dress with what look like silver seahorses studded all over it (Head said in her memoir they were birds). We return to Hannah as a centenarian, and Stanwyck’s performance has deteriorated into little old lady “harrumphs” and fussy business. Although she’s a far more accomplished actress here, her portrayal of age in
So Big!
is superior.
    From this prestige production, the team then unexpectedly moved to the lower depths of show business for their last film together,
Lady of Burlesque
(1943). By this point, Stanwyck was one of the highest paid women in movies and an established, distinguished player, so it feels more than a little perverse to have her play a striptease artiste wrapped up in a murder mystery plot courtesy of real-life stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, who wrote the source novel,
The G-String Murders
. Wellman shows us the outside of The Old Opera House, which once presented famous singers but is now exhibiting “50—Fifty—50 Beautiful Girls” and promising “Laffs” by cut-rate comics. “Girls, that’s what the public wants,” says a manager outside, and inside Wellman plunges us into a world of rump-shaking tawdriness and overall 1940s tackiness (one girl looks bored with her dance routine, then glances at an energetic chorine next to her and swiftly remembers to plaster a fake smile on her face). As a finish, the burlesque girls present their rear ends to the camera, and we cut to an audience of dirty old men enjoying the rock-bottom program.
    A crooner comes on, and the girls parade a bit before Stanwyck’s Dixie Daisy makes her entrance for her solo number. A lone violin saws away in the pit. Cut to Dixie’s bored, “something stinks in here” face, as she cleans her teeth with her tongue. “Beautiful, junior,” she snaps, “but it’snot fuh me.” Then she starts her song, an inspired little ditty called “Take It Off The E-String, Play It On The G-String” (apparently, most of the public at this time didn’t know what a G-string was, which is why they changed Gypsy’s forthright original title).
    â€œIf this gives you a thrill,” Dixie sings, huskily, “it’s happening much against my will,” as succinct a line about Stanwyck’s relation to her male audience as we’re likely to get. When Dixie warns she sometimes starts “breakin’ in bumps,” the camera cuts away from her gyrations and stays on the orchestra leader’s inflamed reaction. But such censor-pleasing tactics are soon dropped: Stanwyck shakes her upper body so that her breasts jiggle in her scanty Edith Head outfit, and Dixie stops her song for a very funny spoken plea: “For listen, broth-uh, I’ve got a moth-uh, old and grey … I support her this way!” she shouts. “Just by shakin’ this way … four shows a day!”
    Dixie grabs the stage curtain and starts wielding it back and forth like a sword while the music sizzles and heats up to a horn blast, “duh duh duh duh duh,” followed by two dirty drum beats. During these beats, the camera moves in for a close-up on Dixie’s face as she twice mimes a classic stripper bump. It’s a tantalizing shot because, for a few moments, Stanwyck communes with herself and takes a kind of autoerotic pleasure in her own sexuality, just for itself, not for the men in the film audience or the audience watching this