Arabella's Notes

Night Nurse 1931

Directed by
William Wellman
Warner Bros. B&W

The Bitter Tea of General Yen
Directed by Frank Capra

Columbia B&W

Barbara and Marjorie Main

Stanwyck and Holden!

Clifford Odets’ Play was one with a social agenda. Frank Capra wanted it but Rouben Mamoulian owned it. Finally after great amounts of money had been bid for the rights between Capra and Mamoulian, Harry Cohn stepped into the fray. Cohn, with his strange persuasive powers, convinced Mamoulian to do it for onlythe price he paid for it and direct it as well. However, the screenwriters had to do several revisions to adhere to Production Code rules .
Barbara played Lorna Moon, the mistress of a fight promoter, who uses her to seduce a sensitive young violinist into the lucrative boxing game. Cohn wanted either Luther Adler (who played the part on Broadway) or Tyrone Power for the part of the violinist but agreed to go with an unknown.
While watching a test being run on an actress for another part, he was struck by the actor feeding her lines. And so William Holden became Barbara Stanwyck’s ‘golden boy’. She coached him when Cohn wanted to replace him, reading the next day’s lines with him in her dressing room every night.
She also worried about Holden's habit of nipping alcohol for courage to do the scenes. She never realized at the time it would eventually lead to his death. But every April 1st, the anniversary of the movie’s starting date, Holden sent her two dozen roses and a white gardenia. The week “Golden Boy” was launched in New York, the war started in Europe.

Stanwyck & Fonda!

Preston Sturges wrote it and Preston Sturges directed it. He promised Barbara to write something for her that would fit her like a glove and he delivered. Sturges also borrowed Fonda from Fox to play “Hopsie” and discovered to everyone’s surprise that the actor, for all his Lincolnesque roles to date, had a flair for light comedy. The story was an Adam and Eve re-creation with all of the symbolism thrown in. It even opens with Barbara (as Jean) dropping a half-eaten apple on Hopsie’s head! Oh, by the way, Hopsie is also a snake collector! Charles Coburn is an excellent choice as the father-con man and William Demarest is at his best as Hopsie’s “keeper”. Barbara had a wonderful time filming “...Eve” with a congenial, fun-loving cast and amiable director. Henry Fonda does 5 pratfalls in the movie and lived to tell about it. This was also Stanwyck’s first “fashion” picture and she had Edith Head to design her fabulous wardrobe.

At last, La Stanwyck was a gorgeous sexy clothes horse! The movie grossed $115, 000 in its first three weeks and today is considered a screen classic

Capra had a cast before he even had a script. Gary Cooper, Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, James Gleason, Spring Byington and Barbara had all signed to be in his next movie sight unseen. The movie was a morality play inside a stinging comedy based on a story from an old issue of Century magazine. The female lead was Anne, a newspaper woman, with just the cutting edge Stanwyck could play so well. “John Doe” was a fabrication Anne had created about a potential suicide and she had to find someone to fit it.

She chose Long John Willoughby,a down-and-out baseball player played by Cooper. Things get messy (as plots are apt to do) and the real “Doe” decides to go to the ledge. The ending was known only to the four top cast members while the others got their parts scene by scene. Barbara was good but the critics kudos went to Gary Cooper as John Doe. He even landed on the cover of Time.

There is an unwritten law in Hollywood that successful teams should get up to bat again and Cooper and Stanwyck were the Team of the Day after “Meet John Doe”. Sugarpuss O’Shea was a burlesque dancer running from the law right into a nest of naive professors updating an encyclopedia. Soon both the law and her gangster boyfriend want to neutralize Sugarpuss, while prof Cooper is just trying to understand her language. Barbara was sensational as Sugarpuss. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett co-authored a bang-up script and Hawks provided stiletto sharp direction.

Babs has a great intro in bare midriff and sparkles doing “Drum Boogie” with Gene Krupa. It was booked into Radio City for December of 1941. Unfortunately the nation’s attention was riveted elsewhere. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor!

When the Oscars were finally announced, Barbara was mentioned for three movies (“The Lady Eve”, “Meet John Doe”, and “Ball of Fire”) and nominated for the latter. But on the big night, Joan Fontaine won for “Suspicion”.

This would be Barbara Stanwyck’s most talked about picture and, in that blonde wig, her most famous look. They had to use a wig because Barbara wouldn’t dye her hair even when it turned gray. Wilder was the studio’s hottest writer-director and , with Raymond Chandler, planned to override the Production Code and develop James M. Cain’s novel about two adulterers planning to kill the woman’s husband for his insurance. In a clever concession to Code rules, they tell the story in flashbacks insuring that the criminals are seen to get their punishment before delving deeper into the story. Fred MacMurray plays the insurance salesman shown confessing to the foul deed into a dictaphone (for the uninformed, that was the early precursor to the tape recorder).

His accomplice was the victim’s wife Phyllis, already dead and a thoroughly despicable woman. It was a role only Stanwyck could play and even she wondered how the role would affect her career. She also knew it was the best script she had ever been offered. Again Barbara was nominated for an Oscar and again she lost..to Ingrid Bergman for “Gaslight”.