Film history is like a treasure chest full of hidden gems. Yet, unlike literature, art or music, one lacks immediate access to it. These treasures are not so readily available. Furthermore, ‘old’ films need to be restored so that they do not crumble to dust. Film stock is delicate; copies are incomplete and worn from use. Without systematic restoration, the history of cinema – now referred to as ‘film heritage’ – will be eroded by the ravages of time and ultimately risks disappearing altogether.
Churches, buildings and paintings are, of course, restored, but the restoration of films is always a struggle for increasingly scarce funds. To experience film history authentically, one must see the films in their original versions on a big screen. Yet there are few opportunities to do so.
Given this situation, the Cineteca di Bologna is something of an oasis in the desert, or the ‘paradise for historical films’, as Anthony Lane wrote in *The New Yorker*. The Cineteca is an internationally renowned institution specialising in the restoration of film heritage. To make the films accessible to a wider audience, the festival ‘Il Cinema Ritrovato’ , which celebrated its 40th anniversary this year (June 20-28). In the early years, it was mainly archivists, restorers and film buffs from all over the world who came to Bologna at the end of June. Nowadays, the audience is a diverse mix, including many students and a significant number of film lovers from all over Italy.
Following last year’s tribute to Katherine Hepburn, this year’s spotlight was on Barbara Stanwyck, who also featured on the festival poster. Between 1927 and 1985, she appeared in more than 80 films, as well as in TV films and series. She was famous as a femme fatale who seduced men and then cast them aside as soon as she had achieved her goal. That goal was usually social advancement from humble beginnings – a journey that Stanwyck, born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn in 1907, had experienced herself. When she was five, her mother died in an accident; her father left the family, and the children were raised in separate households. At the age of 16, she got a job as a dancer with the Ziegfeld Follies. In 1928, she moved to Hollywood with her husband, the actor Frank Fay, where she began a successful film career that he was unable to match.
In 1930, Frank Capra cast her in *Ladies of Leisure* as Kay, a party girl hired as a model by an artist from a wealthy family. When the two fall in love, the family is horrified by the relationship, which they consider beneath their station. The mother intervenes, and Kay promises to leave her son in peace. She accepts an invitation from another suitor to travel to Havana. Deeply unhappy, she jumps overboard. When she regains consciousness in hospital, she finds the painter at her bedside. A dramatic happy ending under the most adverse of circumstances.
In *Baby Face* (1933), directed by Alfred E. Green, the theme of social advancement is explored even more thoroughly. Lily works in the speakeasy run by her brutal father, who also forces her to have sex with his customers. A friend of her father’s advises her to leave town and, following Nietzsche’s philosophy, recommends that she make men submit to her. She follows his advice to the letter when she lands a clerical job at a bank in New York. She steadily sleeps her way to the top until she ends up with the married chairman of the board. “The easiest way to luxury is horizontally!!”, as Lily aptly remarks.
*Baby Face* is regarded as a classic of the so-called pre-Code cinema of the early 1930s. The Hays Code, named after Will H. Hays, a Presbyterian and former Postmaster General who was responsible for ensuring compliance with production rules, dictated what was permitted to be shown on screen. It covered the depiction of crime, drugs and sex, as well as obscene and blasphemous language. From 1934 onwards, the Hays Code, in the form of voluntary self-censorship, regulated what was morally acceptable in Hollywood.
Mick LaSalle, the critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, writes of Barbara Stanwyck in her early films: ‘Anyone who has never seen Stanwyck in a pre-Hays Code film has never really seen her. Never in her later career, not even in *Double Indemnity*, was she as hard-boiled as she was in the early 1930s. She possessed this marvellous quality of being both incredibly cool and yet burning with passion. Her cynicism knew no bounds, and then, without warning, she would explode, screaming and sobbing with pain and rage.”
In *Stella Dallas* (directed by King Vidor, 1937), she plays Stella, who grows up in a working-class family and manages to marry a factory manager. Stephen Dallas comes from a more affluent background, but his father has squandered the family fortune. It becomes clear, at the very latest when Stephen admonishes his working-class wife not to smoke so much, that two social milieus are colliding here that are simply incompatible.
Their daughter, who is brought up by Stella, is sent to a posh college. Eventually, her father brings her back to his new, socially appropriate family. The poignant final scene shows Stella standing outside in the rain, watching her daughter’s wedding, to which she was not invited. Even hardened film buffs were seen leaving the cinema with tears in their eyes. *Stella Dallas* marked Barbara Stanwyck’s breakthrough to stardom. The role of the self-sacrificing mother perfectly matched the moral requirements of the new Production Code.
This was followed by three films that had a lasting impact on her image as a femme fatale. *The Lady Eve* (1941) is regarded as a high point in the oeuvre of the legendary, now largely forgotten comedy director Preston Sturges. The critic Pauline Kael described it as “a frivolous masterpiece, (…) a mixture of visual and verbal slapstick, as well as clever tricks and pitfalls. (…) It represents the dizzying high point of Sturges’ comic oeuvre.” Barbara Stanwyck plays the attractive con artist Jean, who is on the prowl for men aboard an ocean liner. She has her sights set on Charles Pike, the naive heir to a brewery fortune. Henry Fonda plays him as a clumsy nerd who has just spent a year as a snake researcher in Arizona. "Barbara Stanwyck is constantly stretching out her sensational legs, and Henry Fonda is constantly tripping over them,", as Pauline Kael wrote. At first he falls in love with her and then dumps her when his valet opens his eyes to her schemes. With an English accent, Jean transform herself into Lady Eve Sandwich and plots her revenge on Charles: “I’ve got a score to settle with him – I need him as much as an axe needs a turkey.”
In *Ball of Fire* (1941), she turns the heads of no fewer than seven professors. The gentlemen are working with ascetic dedication on an encyclopaedia of world knowledge. Gary Cooper, alias Professor Potts, the youngest and most attractive of them all, is a linguist. In the course of his field research, he ends up in a nightclub where Barbara Stanwyck, scantily clad, is performing as Sugarpuss O’Shea, and is immediately captivated by her verbal expressiveness. But Sugarpuss’s gangster friends are in trouble with the police; she, too, has to go into hiding and seeks refuge in the professors’ guest house. Here, after a brief moment of confusion, she is welcomed with just as much enthusiasm as Snow White once was by the Seven Dwarfs. “That’s the sort of woman who brings down entire civilisations,” said her fellow actress Kathleen Howard of Stanwyck’s character in *Ball of Fire*. The film was directed by Howard Hawks, with a screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder.
In *Ball of Fire*, Barbara Stanwyck is still domesticated through marriage. In *Double Indemnity* (1944), however, marriage is no longer an option. Wearing a blonde wig, she plays Phyllis Dietrichson, a femme fatale par excellence who seduces and ruins the insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). The plan is to kill Phyllis’s husband and make it look like an accident, in order to collect the double indemnity.
*Double Indemnity* is regarded as a classic example of the film noir genre. The film is based on the novel of the same name by James M. Cain, who was so enthusiastic about the film adaptation that he wrote to Barbara Stanwyck: “It’s quite an eerie feeling when a character you’ve invented yourself appears before you exactly as you imagined them.” Billy Wilder who also co-wrote the screenplay with Raymond Chandler received his first Oscar nomination for Best Director. As early as 1950, a German version was released under the title “Frau ohne Gewissen” (Woman Without a Conscience), which Billy Wilder commented on with amusement: “Woman without a conscience? That applies to almost every woman.”
In Fritz Lang’s *Clash by Night* (1952), Barbara Stanwyck plays 40-year-old Mae, a woman who broke away from her small town years ago and now returns, disillusioned. Mae is a classic Stanwyck character: a woman who has experienced and seen it all and now has to move back in with her brother because her attempt to escape provincial constraints has failed. The film is set in Monterrey, at that time still a small industrial town that relied on fishing for its livelihood. Marilyn Monroe, in jeans and a men’s shirt in one of her first roles, plays Mae’s brother’s girlfriend and works in a fish canning factory. In search of security and stability, Mae marries the good-natured but simple fisherman Jerry (Paul Douglas). However, when she succumbs to the erotic, macho charm of the cinema projectionist Earl (Robert Ryan), the situation comes to a dramatic climax.
Without Barbara Stanwyck’s powerful presence, *Clash by Night* would not be nearly as remarkable. In her scenes with Robert Ryan, she brings a dynamism to the story that signals the imminent end of the era of demure housewives in Hollywood. It is her unique combination of self-assurance and man-magnetising allure that makes Barbara Stanwyck an icon of female emancipation, without any need for feminist self-stylisation. She is clearly less sophisticated than Katherine Hepburn, but also less artificial than Marlene Dietrich. Ironically, Barbara Stanwyck was politically rather conservative; she opposed Roosevelt and the New Deal because she believed that everyone, like herself, could make it on their own.