–Akira Lippit, “The Death of an Animal”
*
Akira Lippit continues this thought by reference to the prolific representation of violence against men and women in fiction films and suggests that the “human counterpoint to this disclaimer” is “all resemblances to persons living or deceased is purely coincidental.” And yet much violence is often meted out against actors on sets—and not simply psychological violence.
Barbara Stanwyck was frequently injured in film shoots, and she wore it more as a badge of honor than a grudge, as evidence of her hardiness and professionalism. Her body was arguably a site of struggle, as she repeatedly put it on the line as a mark of sincerity and action. Aligning her body with nature, she gained some distance from the glamour of Hollywood culture while challenging gendered conventions of movement and stasis.
Looking at some of Stanwyck’s many horseback-riding scenes, it is clear that the strong, dynamic imagery of riding enabled her to rise above the entrenched misogyny of the industry. Certainly, those images have outlasted the culture in which they were produced, offering another image of a woman on the 20th-century screen. At the same time, the transcendent, enabling, independent image of horseback riding was produced within an industry of illusion and deception.
When the spectacle is conjoined with anecdotes and trivia pulled from biographies and industry files, the scene of gendered labor and sexist critical discourse is not so pretty. The pleasures attached to genres like the western need to be unpacked so as to understand that, as Lauren Berlant puts it, “freedom is not freedom, pleasure not disavowal not disavowal, but ways we have learned to identify knowledge and sensation.”
In an early scene in Forbidden, Stanwyck is briefly seen riding a horse on a beach in a dazzle of sunlight. In profile her hair flies behind her as the camera tracks beside her fast-moving silhouette. It’s a remarkable image of freedom and transcendence, unique in her career in its speed and cinematic energy. The scene is quickly inserted into a long and rambling story about a fallen woman, and it seems to carry the full weight of the height from which she falls.
The scene is supposed to be Havana in the moonlight, where her librarian character, Lulu, has gone to find romance and excitement. She finds only Bob (Adolphe Menjou), who turns out to be married. In this, one of her first films, the novelty of the sparkling image might be seen as symbolic of the promise of Stanwyck’s stardom. If so, her career as a rider is studded with falls, which she came to incorporate into her star persona as a wannabe stunt performer. Horseback riding in westerns frequently took Stanwyck out of Los Angeles to shoot on locations and landscapes that she came to love. After her death, her ashes were given to the wind at Lone Pine Desert in the High Sierra mountains—a long way from the streets of Brooklyn.
In fact, the beach scene in Forbidden was shot in Laguna Beach in Southern California at sunrise, and a double took Stanwyck’s place for the long shots. Shooting the close-up, Stanwyck was thrown by the horse and badly injured, although she stoically completed the picture despite spending each night in traction in a hospital. She had already seriously injured her back when the set collapsed shooting Ten Cents a Dance and continued to work with excruciating pain, setting a pattern that would continue throughout her career.
Stanwyck was said to be “scared of horses” in her early career, although Victoria Wilson’s biography has her romping about Central Park in the 1920s with her girlfriends and hanging out in cafés wearing riding breeches. She is seen on horses in The Woman in Red (1935), Annie Oakley (1935), and A Message to Garcia (1936), but in 1938 she had a clause added to her RKO contract protecting her from riding on camera after her good friend Marion Marx had a bad fall from a horse.
Stanwyck built and co-owned a ranch named Marwyck near Van Nuys just outside Los Angeles with Zeppo Marx and his wife, Marion, from 1935 to 1940, where they raised thoroughbred horses. She and Robert Taylor were frequently photographed at the racetrack during this period, and they did many photo shoots at Marwyck with and without Stanwyck’s son, Dion. In this way horses became integral to the “happy family” imagery that Stanwyck managed to orchestrate for a brief period of time. It was probably during the years when she lived at Marwyck that she improved her riding skills and overcame any fears she may have had.
By the 1940s she had gained a reputation as an expert horsewoman. When screenwriter Nivel Busch visited the set of The Furies, he complained, “They put Stanwyck on a miserable fat-assed palomino that could hardly waddle.” She was a good horsewoman, according to Busch, but they thought she would fall off a more energetic horse and endanger the production. Nevertheless, her rejection of stunt doubles inspired John Houston to do the same, not to be outplayed by a woman.
Stanwyck’s repeated claim in the latter part of her career that she wished she had been a stuntwoman is in keeping with her early career desire to emulate Pearl White, an action heroine of the teens. Her horsiness undoubtedly abetted Stanwyck’s “tough” image and made her an icon of a so-called powerful woman in the postwar years. A horse makes a small woman appear large, her mastery of the animal is symbolic of control and dominance, the aura of nature cuts through the artifice of glamorous stardom, and the lone horsewoman is iconic of the “independence” label that the actor earned by other means in the 1930s.
Horses eventually became an essential element of Stanwyck’s star image, and yet viewing footage of her on horseback, we can’t always be sure if it is Stanwyck, as doubles were frequently cast. (For example, cutting from long shot to medium shot, is that really her galloping into center stage of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Annie Oakley, the only time she is seen on a horse in that film?) She insisted on doing her own stunts because she felt that it contributed to the consistency of characterization, as if she distrusted the wizardry of Hollywood effects.
As Nivel Busch noted about The Furies, doing her own stunts meant that Stanwyck jeopardized production schedules, as an injured lead actress can do great damage to a tight schedule. While there is little evidence of that happening, it is true that she endured many bruises with fortitude in order to respect shooting schedules, contributing to her great reputation as a consummate professional. She never fully recovered from the back injury of 1931 on the Laguna Beach and frequently wore a back brace, which accounts for her distinctive ramrod posture. Still, I wonder how often we are not watching Stanwyck at all but a double, whose injuries would not postpone a shoot.
Perhaps her most dramatic and emotional horse riding occurs in Blowing Wild, a film in which her character is something of an outsider in a male community of oil speculators. After being rejected by Jeff Dawson (Gary Cooper) yet again, Stanwyck as Marina Conway rides through the Mexican landscape across streams and under ancient bridges, pounding out her distress until she finally dismounts and collapses in tears on the ground.
Process shots are used for close-ups while she is riding and crying, and the animal is a valuable partner in the scene as her anger shifts to despair. In the same film, she races Jeff and her husband, Paco Conway (Anthony Quinn), with the two men driving in a 1940 Packard Custom Super Eight while she gallops through the countryside, beating them within seconds. The horse gives her a wild edge on the two men and, like many of Stanwyck’s riding scenes, creates a spectacle that briefly disrupts the narrative like a song-and-dance number, only with horses and scenery.
After 1940 the American Humane Society monitored studio productions in order to ensure animal safety. One thing that changed in the industry around the same time was the increased availability of horses trained to do stunts, some of whom became well known. For example, Stanwyck’s most famous stunt, being dragged by a horse through a tornado in Forty Guns, was accomplished with a horse named Oakie, ridden by a stuntman named Ken Lee. You don’t need to know a great deal about horseback riding to see that she has the wrong foot in the stirrup. Fuller took three takes before he got it right, gauging the best camera placement—not to authenticate Stanwyck’s riding technique but to capture the fear registering on her face.
In 1962 and 1973 Stanwyck was honored with awards for her riding, which were in recognition of her contribution to the art of western performance. One of the conventional mantras about women and horses is that they become sentimentally attached, as played out in films such as National Velvet (1944) and The Misfits (1961). Stanwyck, however, rarely plays this role and tends to treat her horses simply as transport out in the wilds. In The Moonlighter, for example, when her horse is shot and falls (hopefully it is a stunt horse), she simply grabs her rifle from the saddle and leaves the horse without a backward glance.
The ensuing shoot-out is one of her best action scenes, although the gendered conventions of the western genre were difficult to overcome. Ella Smith quotes a critic from the New York Herald Tribune describing this particular scene: “You might fidget a bit as Barbara Stanwyck, stylishly thin and looking mighty small beside a horse, fights it out with rifles with Ward Bond and wins. This, as anyone who has ever seen a Western knows, is practically impossible. Bond may lose a screen battle here and there but never to a wisp of a woman with rifles at 50 yards.”
In the climactic scene of The Moonlighter, Stanwyck’s character, Rela, who has been deputized as a sheriff, is walking her horse over a rocky ledge, leading Fred MacMurray to justice, when she slips and falls down a waterfall, slipping through rock crevices and bouncing to the river below. Stanwyck performed this stunt herself, apparently because the stuntwoman was not available that day or at that time. It’s a great scene, except that after MacMurray saves her, she forgives him for his crimes. The film ends with a repeat of the treacherous crossing, but this time MacMurray is in the lead, and they make it safely to the other side and romp away together into the hills.
The most spectacular stunts tend to involve the act of falling, so there is a kind of inner tension between Stanwyck’s affinity for dangerous riding and the tendency for her characters to fall off their horses, just to be saved by men. We know how often her power and independence are curtailed by the requisite happy endings of heterosexual romance, and the act of falling is often the price to be paid for riding high.
In The Maverick Queen she has a spectacular fall (probably performed by a stunt person) when Sundance (Scott Brady) “bulldogs” her off of her horse. They both roll down a cliff, but she stops just short of a precipice and sends down a log to knock the man off to the depths below. The film ends with her dying in her lover’s arms, a heroic death for a woman on the wrong side of the law.
As the New York Herald critic of The Moonlighter indicates, the appeal to male critics of Stanwyck on a horse in what were primarily B westerns, was her figure. The idealized western hero, male or female, is slim and trim, becoming an extension of the animal in silhouette, exuding the lightness of a jockey despite the heavy leather paraphernalia of saddle and guns.
Stanwyck’s outfits are often commented on by critics, and she arguably helped make pants sexy on older women as a Parade magazine cover from 1955 indicated with her sporting black jeans, cowboy boots, and a black blouse. In 1935, for A Message to Garcia, she went on an all-celery diet to maintain a figure suitable to the riding breeches that she wears throughout the film. Nevertheless, in films such as All I Desire and The Lady Eve, Stanwyck rides sidesaddle—a Victorian style of riding that protects a lady’s chastity.
If women riding bicycles in Victorian times were considered transgressive, women straddling horses in mid-20th-century America were likewise titillating. To Stanwyck’s credit, she consistently rose above such gender nonsense with her posture and her strong characters. An exceptionally weak character, such as Cora in Trooper Hook, never rides horses but sticks to carriages.
_________________________
Excerpted from The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star by Catherine Russell. University of Illinois Press, 2023. .
How Horseback Riding Helped Barbara Stanwyck Rise Above Hollywood Misogyny. By Catherine Russell. LitHub, May 4, 2023.
The archive is accessed in this video as a site of struggle, weaving fragments of biography, the voices of critics, and Stanwyck’s own distinctive voice into and over excerpts from her films and TV shows. Sometimes the fragments don’t add up to a coherent narrative, as we expect the star discourse to unfold. Hollywood magic tended to erase and bury contradiction, and it is the historian’s mission to “find the fissures within.” In this sense the video essay follows from my book Archiveology, in which I argue that the archive is a construction site, so that new histories can be imagined. Following Walter Benjamin’s sensory historiography, excavated images from the past are considered “treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights.” In that book I also argue that archiveology enables us to rescue women from their narrative traps, but seeing Stanwyck riding, we find that her body is a site of struggle. Her dedication to her craft led her into multiple situations where she was injured on sets, and continued to work despite debilitating pain. She was well known to be a consummate professional who was committed to timely production schedules and studied her scripts and characters diligently. This essay foregrounds the invisible labour behind Stanwyck’s star-image, as well as that of the many stunt people who helped her create the magnificent images of a woman on a horse.
The compilation of film clips from six decades of film and television enables a review of patterns of behavior in the diversity of Stanwyck’s movies, and helps to articulate the contours of her star-image as a horseback-riding star. Audio clips of Stanwyck herself talking about riding is a way of bringing in her own off-screen voice. Remixing the sounds and images of her performances enables an affective reading of her performance with horses, while the textual counter-discourse challenges the significance of that affect. Stanwyck was very much part of the industry, and put her body on the line to support an industry of illusion. The viewer of this video essay is invited to look more carefully at the women on horses to try and distinguish the body of the star from those of her doubles.
Against Barbara Stanwyck’s triumphant, powerful image of a woman pounding against the fantastic landscapes of the American West, we need to listen to the words of the songs that are often putting her characters down. Moreover, the most spectacular stunts tend to involve the act of falling, and there is a kind of inner tension between Stanwyck’s affinity for dangerous riding and the tendency for her characters to fall off their horses, just to be saved by men. We know how often her power and independence is curtailed by the requisite happy endings of heterosexual romance; and the act of falling is often the price to be paid for riding high. From a feminist standpoint, this approach can also be aligned with Sara Ahmed’s conception of the feminist killjoy, which is a strategy of critical vigilance even at the expense of “happiness” or as Sara Ahmed puts it, “a feminist killjoy is an affect alien.”
Stanwyck’s affinity for horses was closely linked to her career as a versatile performer, for whom the Western genre was a crucial vehicle for her survival as an older woman in the 1950s. This videographic analysis is what Kevin Esch describes as a “distanced” reading of film performance in which the “mythistory” of the star’s aura is conjoined with an understanding of the cultural labor that interacts with social and industrial forces.[5] Stanwyck’s archival presence in dozens of movies and TV shows enables us to watch her incorporate animals into her performance, and also, through her discourse on stunts, understand her use of frontier culture in the creation of her own legend as a tough woman.
In an interview taped during the shooting of The Big Valley in 1968, Stanwyck was asked if she had ever thought about directing. She dismisses the idea abruptly: “No. I could help, but I don’t know enough.” In fact, by some reports, she “ruled everything and everyone,” during the four years the show aired, with final approval of scripts, guest cast and directors. The fact that Stanwyck was always ready to put her body on the line, by radical dieting practices and doing stunts, but unable to imagine becoming a director, is emblematic of the precarity of women’s agency within the film industry during her lifetime. Like her riding scenes, this inequity highlights the affective claim of fantasy as a deep-seated ambivalence within women’s cultural history and Stanwyck’s role within the dreamscape of Hollywood. In Lauren Berlant’s words, it can be thought of producing “a sense of thriving in the consumer’s body and sometimes in the mise-en-scene itself.”
Berlant urges us to identify the utopian within the everyday, through sentimental genres, so that the present is “thickened” and adapted to a scene of bargaining not with fulfillment but with sensually lived potentiality. The archival fragmentation and reconstruction of Stanwyck on horseback provides insight into our own pleasure in watching this dynamic woman, and how such pleasure harbors a secret struggle hidden between frames and offscreen. As yet another site of struggle, the archive provides a critical counter-discourse to the sensuous images of the star and her unnamed human and animal co-stars. Her ability to incorporate horses into her performance is not only a question of acting and technique, but an ability to navigate the industry as an independent, original, and indefatigable player. Over the course of her career, as she became more and more comfortable with horses, she contributed to a dynamic new image of women in movement, riding with purpose across iconic landscapes. Her final riding scene is in The Thornbirds (1983) at the age of 76. Sitting tall in the saddle, she rules her sprawling frontier ranch with dignity, authority and elegance. Taken out of narrative context, in the remixed archive of her performances, Stanwyck’s tenacity increases her appeal as a complex feminist icon. Contrary to the deeply misogynist theme song of Forty Guns, no one actually took her whip away, precisely because she is a woman after all.
Review By Jacob
Smith, Northwestern University
Barbara
Stanwyck Rides Again (hereafter, BSRA) is a thought-provoking project that
delivers on the video essay’s potential to “frame a new audiovisual encounter”
through a process of selection and juxtaposition in order to “engender new material
thinking and feeling.” The selection
function involves a montage of clips featuring Stanwyck on horseback. The
juxtaposition works through the addition of voiceover commentary and carefully
chosen musical clips. The result of this combination is to produce a feminist
critique of the Hollywood star system, while simultaneously creating a shimmer
of insights about film performance, labor, and genre.
In terms of
performance, the pairing of horseback-riding and film acting is instructive and
might be compared to the iconic cinematic image of an actor driving a car, or
two actors talking in the front seat of a car. These are all shots that frame
dialogue such that actors have something to do while delivering their lines and
that feature compelling movement in the background (even if it is supplied by a
rear projection screen). BSRA shows us that horseback riding does something
similar. We should notice however, that even when Stanwyck is alone she is not
the only actor on the screen: there is of course, the horse. These clips
function as a miniature archive of a human and animal “double act” that was a
prominent feature of Hollywood cinema. In some shots the horse’s body is mostly
offscreen and functions primarily as a prop or element of the setting. At other
times a closeup on the animal’s face becomes legible as received acting (2:53),
and when we see the horse engaged in an act that clearly requires training
(9:17) we have moved into the realm of performance as restored behavior. With
regard to the latter, BSRA makes me want to know more about Stanwyck’s ranch
and the training that took place there, both of herself and her animal
collaborators.
Speaking of
labor, BSRA brings the often-invisible labor of stunt performance into the
frame. In my analysis of Hollywood stunt performance, I described the
conventional discourse of the “star who does their own stunts.” That discourse
can be heard in the interview clips presented in BSRA. Notice how Stanwyck is
careful to strike a balance between, on the one hand, asserting her performance
of some of her own stunts, and on the other, acknowledging the labor of other
performers who are usually uncredited and frequently injured. The montage of
clips we see in BSRA provides a great illustration of how film language had to
similarly balance the imperatives of foregrounding the star actor while also
displaying the bodily acts of the stunt performer in long shots that hide the
face, as at 0:24 and 7:33. Did the protocols of this stunt labor dynamic play
any role in the costume choices mentioned at 11:19?
In addition
to screen acting and labor, BSRA makes an argument about the affordances of
different film genres for female stars of the Classical Hollywood era. For me,
one of the revelations of this video essay is to reorient my association of
Stanwyck away from genres such as film noir (Double Indemnity), the “fallen
women” cycle (Baby Face), and screwball comedy (The Lady Eve). I’m curious to
know more details about the trajectory in her career towards the Western. Did
other female stars of the era make a similar generic drift? Are there
performative analogs to Stanwyck’s horseback riding in other “indoor” genres?
Many of the
clips in BSRA are shot on location, and prominently feature the landscape. Such
moments are often framed in a pastoral register, as vividly shown in the
sequence at 5:06. Given work on the racial and colonial dynamics of landscapes
such as these, I am struck by the fleeting moment at 4:09 when a Black actor helps
Stanwyck off her horse. Here, the fact that the white movie star on horseback
“ruled everything and everyone” takes on a very different meaning. Finally, the
use of movie theme songs here underscores the ambivalent and contested
circulation of Stanwyck’s intermedial star persona, but it also reminds us that
the Western was an important genre in the birth of the transmedia marketing of
blockbuster films (see: High Noon), helping to usher an era of the compilation
score soundtrack and the cross-marketing of film themes as popular records.
Barbara Stanwyck Rides Again considers the career of a Hollywood star through her signature iconography, a sensuous and often dangerous association with the Western genre and with horse riding more specifically. Drawing upon an archive of film performance and interviews spanning Stanwyck’s 57-year long career, Catherine Russell discovers a trail marked by contradictions. The sensuous and imaginative pleasures afforded Stanwyck’s fans as she develops her skills as an actor and horsewoman become inextricable from physical pain, primarily the star’s, produced by her many horse related injuries.
In this well-researched essay’s central argument, the gender rebellion we often credit Stanwyck with becomes synonymous with her image as a masterful horsewoman, a “woman with a whip.” And yet, as Russell discovers, the creation of that image reveals a duplicitous tale, one that relies on an archive that is also the site of struggle and, potentially, deception. Some of the dangerous labor in Stanwyck’s films was undertaken by stunt doubles, but the archive, and Stanwyck herself, remain divided. Why does Stanwyck insist she never used doubles (although she did, including the often-uncredited Polly Burson)? Equally important, why did the star perform so many perilous stunts herself, well into her 70s? These practices, like the extreme diets (coffee and steak; celery), attest to the brutal discipline of stardom’s embodiment, a violence that underlies, and potentially belies, the beauty of the images.
Barbara Stanwyck Rides Again. By Catherine Russell, Concordia University, Montreal , Shannon Harris. Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, August 3, 2021
Catherine
Russell, author of The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a
Working Star, answers questions on her new book.
Q: Why did
you decide to write this book?
I wanted to
write about Hollywood cinema of the classical period from the perspective of a
woman whose career extended through many years and genres of the American
studio system. Most histories of Hollywood are centered around great directors,
or the studios, or different genres in which women are sidelined as stars or
divas, or romantic weepers. Barbara Stanwyck, like many women working in
Hollywood, was a hard-working member of the industry whose screen presence and
personality as a tough, versatile, and talented woman constituted a valuable
contribution to what we call Hollywood cinema. Moreover, as a star, her brand
continues to “sell” Hollywood films in the form of DVDs and retrospectives in
theatres and streaming services.
Q: What is
the most interesting discovery you made while researching and writing your
book?
I found
that writing women’s history has challenges and opportunities that I had not
expected. This is an emergent field of film studies, as scholars are developing
new methods of research and writing with which to account for women and
racialized people who have been sidelined by archival practices. It can be
extremely rewarding to work with the fragments of trivia, gossip, popular
biography, and marginalia that come to the surface of the archive once you
scratch it. I found that my project was in good company, and that the materials
that I found, in conjunction with Stanwyck’s hundreds of screen appearances,
could produce a unique portrait a cultural worker.
Q: What
myths do you hope your book will dispel or what do you hope your book will help
readers unlearn?
One myth of
the studio system is that stars were owned and managed by the studios, with
little agency of their own. Stanwyck’s story is that of a freelance worker who
managed to make her way through all the major studios, and to work with many of
the top directors of the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, Stanwyck’s
agency was limited and she took many roles that are demeaning, or in which her
characters are undercut. I found that writing from a feminist perspective, it
is possible to call out the misogyny of the industry, and at the same time,
recognize the talent, perseverance, and integrity of one of its biggest stars.
The fact that Stanwyck was a conservative, homophobic republican does not make
her any less of an icon for feminist history and practice. Women’s heroes will
not always live up to our expectations of feminist values, but they can be
critically significant to women’s history nevertheless.
I really
enjoyed working on the illustrations which I made from frame enlargements from
the films that Stanwyck performed in. The ability to use images taken directly
from films is a great tool for film studies scholarship, as it enables the
author to pull out critical moments, captured in the form of gestures frozen in
time. They can really help to illustrate a critical point, help the reader to
grasp the sensory qualities of performance, and isolate certain moments that
may be typically overlooked while watching a film. Film stills found in
archives are usually what the producers want us to take away from a film; they
are designed to sell films. Thus, it is important for critics to cut across
that discourse by making our own images that foreground what interests us. I
worked with a photographer to get the best quality reproductions and I am
pleased that I could include so many in this book.
Q: What is
your advice to scholars/authors who want to take on a similar project?
The
research for this book spanned over ten years, and it took a long time for the
project to take shape. My advice would be not to let the lack of a plan prevent
you from exploring and digging in every direction possible. The abecedary
structure turned out to be a wonderful device as it enabled me to open 26
different doors to Stanwyck’s career, and at the same time, it imposes its own
limits on the scope of each thematic inquiry. Writing 26 short essays rather
than 4 or 5 long chapters was actually fun and it also provided a way of doing
history outside the conventions of historical storytelling. I would recommend
it to anyone who enjoys writing in experimental ways, using arbitrary
parameters to help shape material that is retrieved in fragments.
Q: What do
you like to read/watch/or listen to for fun?
I watch a
lot of movies, including classics of the American cinema, which are being
restored and made available on streaming services at an exciting rate. Many
films that I have heard about for years are finally coming to me in my own
home! I also watch recently released movies at local theatres, and at film
festivals. And I read novels constantly. I recently discovered the work of Eve
Babitz, a Los Angeles-based writer and party girl from the 70s and 80s. Great
writing!
This structure provides a timeless shape to the collection. Eschewing the rising/falling arc a chronological view of her career might provide, our scope is widened so we can see career-wide patterns, particularly patterns of contradiction. Even at the height of her glamour, Stanwyck was deeply associated with the working class, due to her humble origins as well as the characters she embodied. But Stanwyck was also a standard-bearer for a virulent anti-red conservatism. Similarly, due to the number of characters rebelling against gender norms that Stanwyck played, she’s a figure that modern viewers try to imagine into a Western-themed queer icon, but Russell cites counterexamples of heterosexuality and homophobia. And while Russell also demonstrates Stanwyck’s uncharacteristic power in shaping her career, being a freelancer during the era of exclusivity contracts, a common refrain is the “persistent tension or paradox between the achievements of the star and entrenched misogyny of the industry”.
Nowhere is the tension more pronounced than in Russell’s essay about the critically beloved “the Lady Eve,” a screwball comedy about a con woman taking an alias to swindle the man who broke her heart. While Russell doesn’t argue against its stature in the film canon, she finds a melancholy in its swerve toward a happy ending. In an extended simile, Russell conjures Sophocles’ Antigone, buried alive for her vocal rebellion, and argues that Jean/Eve’s chosen fate, marriage to a man too dull to ever see the real her, as its own entombment. Throughout the collection, Russell has no shortage of similar examples, including fiercely independent gunslingers, journalists, executives and doctors, who by the time the credits roll have sacrificed autonomy for marriage to a bland dude, often played by someone beneath Stanwyck’s billing. In roles big and small, escaping heteronormativity’s enforcement seems impossible.
Website Catharine Russell with Cineaste review
