In Mildred Pierce we contemplate another incarnation of the eternal Joan Crawford watching Stanwyck as the vulgar, self-sacrificing mother in Stella Dallas, we can barely connect her with the cardsharp surprised by love in The Lady Eve, the fatal seductress of Double Indemnity, or the domineering rancher of Forty Guns. Yet unlike those movie stars whose naturalness flourished in variations on a well-established persona, she created utterly distinct characters who could not possibly be confused with one another. She made even the best of the competition look histrionic. Stanwyck had many gifts, but none was more central to her career than her capacity to communicate feeling in a way that seemed artless and unmediated, by mere presence, or bare utterance.
The New York Sun reported that she “played it well enough to make first nighters wipe tears from their eyes.” It isn’t hard to imagine the effect the films she would be making within a few years for Columbia and Warner Brothers are full of such speeches-no Stanwyck film was complete without at least one passionate outburst-and she can still make the tears well up. That’s what I came for, ain’t no reason why I can’t have it-is there-if nobody wants it. You see he ain’t got no relatives, ain’t even got a father and mother, he told me-so nobody wants it but us.
if we could have his body because we’d like to give it a real funeral.
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