The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (397 page)

Two directors stand out in her early work: Frank Capra and William Wellman. With Capra, at Columbia, she made
Ladies of Leisure
(30),
The Miracle Woman
(31),
Forbidden
(32), and
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
(32)—the latter including a vivid erotic shimmer as Stanwyck dreams of being ravished by Nils Asther. While for Wellman, she was menaced by Gable in
Night Nurse
(31), aging in
So Big
(32), and in
The Purchase Price
(32).

Her image of the hardboiled girl of easy virtue was kept up in William Keighley’s
Ladies They Talk About
(33) and in
Baby Face
(33, Alfred E. Green), in which she maneuvers her way up the length of the business ladder—by every seductive means at her command. It would be difficult to think of an actress so expressive of the early 1930s girl on the make—as intimate, shiny, and flimsy as a discarded slip, but with eyes ever sly and alert. So often with great movie actresses, we have a first thought of skin tone: with Stanwyck it is of tacky paint, too warm for glossy hardness.

Archie Mayo’s
Gambling Lady
(34) and Robert Florey’s
The Woman in Red
(35) ended her contracts with Warners and Columbia. She then came to an agreement with RKO, which allowed her to freelance, and made
Annie Oakley
(35, George Stevens),
A Message to Garcia
(36, George Marshall), and
His Brother’s Wife
(36, W. S. Van Dyke). (It was in this film that she first worked with Robert Taylor, her second husband, 1939–52.) Stanwyck now mixed comedies with two uncompromisingly serious movies: John Cromwell’s
Banjo On My Knee
(36) and John Ford’s
The Plough and the Stars
(37). Immediately, she made one of her classic movies: as the mother in
Stella Dallas
(37) for Goldwyn and King Vidor, more emotional than most of her work, and enforced by Vidor’s full-blooded indignation at social barriers to raw nature.

After
The Mad Miss Manton
(38, Leigh Jason), she was a De Mille tomboy heroine in
Union Pacific
(39); in Mamoulian’s
Golden Boy
(39); superb as a shoplifter in Mitchell Leisen’s
Remember the Night
(40); giving one of the best American comedy performances in Preston Sturges’s
The Lady Eve
(41); reunited with Capra for
Meet John Doe
(41);
You Belong to Me
(41, Wesley Ruggles); teaching criminal slang to Gary Cooper in Hawks’s
Ball of Fire
(41); two more films with Wellman:
The Great Man’s Lady
(42) and
Lady of Burlesque
(43), the latter as a wisecracking stripper.

If the unscrupulousness in her character had been under wraps for some years, it was unveiled again in Billy Wilder’s
Double Indemnity
(44). As the double-crossing, blonde wife she is marvelously sinuous and insulting, the perfect exploiter of Fred MacMurray’s lazy moral inertia. She is a presence openly inviting touching; so many handholds—ringlets, block-heeled shoes, flounced dresses, anklets, padded shoulders, and barbed remarks—that snap shut on idly philandering hands. It is part of the American dream, a comfort to weary salesmen, that such glittering Medusas are waiting behind doors in every other home.

As she grew older and with the postwar reaction to many established stars, Stanwyck found herself in several poor comedies and as a single woman, harassed by a man. This was a role that Joan Crawford made her own, but Stanwyck had three notable attempts at it:
Cry Wolf
(47, Peter Godfrey),
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
(47, Godfrey), and best of all, menaced by Burt Lancaster, in Litvak’s
Sorry, Wrong Number
(48). Stanwyck had always been a man’s woman and it was sad to see her drifting into women’s melodramas:
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
(46, Lewis Milestone);
The Other Love
(47, André de Toth); and
East Side, West Side
(49, Mervyn Le Roy). She was much better in
California
(46, John Farrow), in Anthony Mann’s
The Furies
(50), and outstanding again as the woman with a past yearning for a secure marriage in Fritz Lang’s
Clash By Night
(52); this is her most humane and touching performance.

Undeniably, her career now began to decline in terms of prestige and worthwhile parts. Nevertheless, even in weepies or as domineering women she made several excellent films: Siodmak’s
The File on Thelma Jordon
(49), in which she sighs, “Maybe I’m just a dame and didn’t know it,” when Wendell Corey first kisses her; very touching in Mitchell Leisen’s
No Man of Her Own
(50);
All I
Desire
(53, Douglas Sirk); the excellent
Blowing Wild
(53, Hugo Fregonese), which replenished her as a sexy woman; two Allan Dwan adventures,
Escape to Burma
(55) and
Cattle Queen of Montana
(54). A modern businesswoman in Robert Wise’s
Executive Suite
(54), she was happier in full-blooded adventure: loathing her crippled husband, Edward G. Robinson, in
The Violent Men
(55, Rudolph Maté);
The Maverick Queen
(56, Joseph Kane); Gerd Oswald’s
Crime of Passion
(57); and Samuel Fuller’s
Forty Guns
(57).
There’s Always Tomorrow
(56, Sirk) was an attempt to reunite her with Fred MacMurray, but she then went into reluctant retirement.

She reemerged to dominate the nonsense of
Walk on the Wild Side
(62, Edward Dmytryk), to join Elvis Presley in
Roustabout
(64, John Rich), and to play with Robert Taylor in the miserable
The Night Walker
(65, William Castle). She made no more movies, but her TV series,
The Big Valley
, was a personal success (65–69) and she played the matriarch in
The Thorn Birds
(83).

While she was alive, she did not seem one of the great stars. But at her death, it was clear how widely she was loved. She was honest, sharp, gutsy, and smart. Terrific.

Ray
(Raymond Otto)
Stark
(1914–2004), b. Chicago
Ray Stark was big in the picture business (he is a gloomy, bad-tempered cloud on the Columbia horizon throughout David McClintick’s account of the Begelman scandal,
Indecent Exposure
). But he was bigger still in his own mind. To which I would only say that a decisive punishment (if anyone in Hollywood ever errs) might be confinement on an eternal cruise ship that has only Ray Stark’s films for amusement. It’s not that the films are bad, or the worst. Rather, it is in the monotony of their success and contrivance that you will feel wretched. Above all, it was in his espousal of the self-reiterating Neil Simon that we see Stark’s very narrow notion of what worked, over and over again, and in the same ways. Yes, Simon can be funny, clever, and touching—he can be nothing else, and even if the last lifeboat is full of leaks, you may be driven to it.

Stark flunked out of Rutgers and in 1930 arrived in Hollywood, where he found work as a florist at Forest Lawn—sometimes talent is identified straightaway. He served in the Navy during the war. He did a little screenwriting; he worked in publicity; and then he became agent to such writers as Ben Hecht, Raymond Chandler, and James Gould Cozzens. From there he branched out as a talent agent, representing such people as Kirk Douglas and Ava Gardner. It was in 1939 that he married Frances Brice, the daughter of comedienne Fanny Brice.

Although no one ever found much notable or likeable in Stark, over the years he had ingratiated himself with such more illustrious and wealthy figures as Charles Feldman, Louis B. Mayer, Serge Semenenko, and both Charlie Allen and his son Herbert Allen (major figures at Columbia). He prospered by investment and with Elliot Hyman he joined in Associated Artists and then formed Seven Arts. Only then did he begin to produce, invariably through Columbia, for his company, Rastar, where his success and his friendship with the Allens made him a magical figure—something he responded to with bad manners, worse temper, and a generally snarling attitude.

His productions were often Broadway-based: he was of that filmmaking breed that relied on stage success and credentials, and he made musicals that signal the death of the true movie musical:
The World of Suzie Wong
(60, Richard Quine);
The Night of the Iguana
(64, John Huston—probably his most valuable friendship);
This Property Is Condemned
(66, Sydney Pollack);
Reflections in a Golden Eye
(67, Huston);
Funny Girl
(68, William Wyler), the Fannie Brice story with Barbra Steisand, who was his property for a while;
The Owl and the Pussycat
(70, Herbert Ross);
Fat City
(72, Huston)—his best film?;
The Way We Were
(73, Pollack);
The Black Bird
(75, David Giler);
The Sunshine Boys
(75, Ross)—from a Neil Simon play;
Robin and Marian
(76, Richard Lester);
Murder by Death
(76, Robert Moore);
The Goodbye Girl
(77, Ross);
Casey’s Shadow
(78, Martin Ritt);
The Cheap Detective
(78, Moore);
California Suite
(78, Ross);
Chapter Two
(79, Moore);
The Electric Horseman
(79, Pollack);
Seems Like Old Times
(80, Jay Sandrich);
Somewhere in Time
(80, Jeannot Szwarc);
Annie
(82, Huston);
The Toy
(82, Richard Donner);
The Slugger’s Wife
(85, Hal Ashby);
Brighton Beach Memoirs
(86, Gene Saks);
Biloxi Blues
(88, Mike Nichols);
Steel Magnolias
(89, Ross);
Barbarians at the Gate
(93, Glenn Jordan), for TV—and his next best;
Lost in Yokers
(93, Martha Coolidge).

He received the Thalberg Award in 1979. Simon had scripted eleven of his pictures.

Rod Steiger
(Rodney Stephen Steiger) (1925–2002), b. Westhampton, New York
The child of a song-and-dance team divorced when he was a baby, he acted at school. At sixteen he lied about his age and served four years in the navy as a torpedoman. After the war, he studied at the Actors Studio, and in 1951 made his Broadway debut in
Night Music
. In the same year, he appeared in Fred Zinnemann’s
Teresa
, but as yet his major work was on TV where he played Chayefsky’s
Marty
in the original production, as well as Rudolf Hess in the series
You Were There
.

His first substantial film part was as Brando’s brother in
On the Waterfront
(54, Elia Kazan). This began a sequence of heavies, some alarmingly mannered and overblown, some loathsome, but all compellingly personal:
The Big Knife
(55, Robert Aldrich) as the movie producer;
The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell
(55, Otto Preminger);
Jubal
(56, Delmer Daves);
The Harder They Fall
(56, Mark Robson); a disturbing Judd Fry in
Oklahoma!
(55, Zinnemann); and
Back from Eternity
(56, John Farrow). Although Steiger now dislikes the film, none of these performances has survived as well as his Irish-Confederate-Comanche in Fuller’s
Run of the Arrow
(57), or the tommygun-in-cheek
Al Capone
(58, Richard Wilson).

But Steiger insisted on taking himself seriously:
The Mark
(61, Guy Green);
Le Mani Sulla Citta
(63, Francesco Rosi);
A Man Named John
(64, Ermanno Olmi);
The Pawnbroker
(65, Sidney Lumet);
Dr. Zhivago
(65, David Lean);
The Sergeant
(68, John Flynn), which are generally fraught with an oppressive sincerity and a very clammy technique. He is much better in the old-fashioned setting of
Seven Thieves
(60, Henry Hathaway);
In the Heat of the Night
(67, Norman Jewison)—for which he won the Oscar; and the comedy of
No Way to Treat a Lady
(68, Jack Smight).

His marriage to Claire Bloom led to their joint Broadway appearance in 1959 in
Rashomon
, and two interesting failures:
The Illustrated Man
(69, Smight) and
Three Into Two Won’t Go
(69, Peter Hall).

Steiger was ambitious eventually of writing, directing, and acting in his own films. But he had to content himself with playing broken tyrants: a bloodshot Napoleon in
Waterloo
(70, Sergei Bondarchuk); the Hemingway figure in
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
(71, Mark Robson); as the force of brutal nature bandit in
A Fistful of Dynamite
(71, Sergio Leone); as a hillbilly patriarch in
The Lolly-Madonna War
(73, Richard C. Sarafian); in
Lucky Luciano
(73, Rosi).

He was the crumbling Duce in
Mussolini Ultimo Alto
(74, Carlo Lizzani); a vengeful IRA explosives man in
Hennessy
(75, Don Sharp); the husband in
Innocents with Dirty Hands
(75, Claude Chabrol); trying to imitate a man who was too shifty or haphazard to pin down in
W. C. Fields and Me
(76, Arthur Hiller), but never showing how that great humbug was funny; an investigating senator in
F.I.S.T
. (78, Jewison);
Love and Bullets
(78, Stuart Rosenberg); and
Breakthrough
(79, Andrew V. McLaglen).

He was in
The Amityville Horror
(79, Rosenberg);
Cattle Annie and Little Britches
(80, Lamont Johnson);
Klondike Fever
(80, Peter Carter);
The Lucky Star
(80, Max Fischer); as Mussolini again in
Lion of the Desert
(81, Moustapha Akkad);
The Chosen
(81, Jeremy Paul Kagan);
Der Zauberberg
(82, Hans W. Geissendorfer); as Peary in
Cook and Peary: The Race to the Pole
(83, Robert Day);
The Naked Face
(84, Bryan Forbes);
Feel the Heat
(86, Joel Silberg);
Sword of Gideon
(86, Michael Anderson);
The Kindred
(87, Stephen Carpenter);
American Gothic
(87, John Hough);
Desperado: Avalanche at Devil’s Ridge
(88, Richard Compton);
The January Man
(88, Pat O’Connor);
Passion and Paradise
(89, Harvey Hart);
That Summer of White Roses
(89, Rajko Grlic);
Men of Respect
(90, William Kelly);
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
(91, Simon Callow);
Time to Kill: In the Line of Duty
(91, Dick Lowry); for British TV, in
Tales of the City
(93, Alastair Reid).