Despite recently learning from the amazing podcast You Must Remember This that Barbara Stanwyck and husband Robert Taylor were staunch conservatives — with Taylor famous for naming names and stating the he wanted to send all communists in Hollywood “back to Russia!” — I still can’t get enough of Stanwyck on screen, both in comedies and noir.
This Sunday, we’ll watch one of the less well-known Stanwyck noir pictures. Although the film is well reviewed, she’s not the heartless and/or damaged femme fatale of pictures like Double Indemnity and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Instead, Stanwyck plays a down-on-her-luck woman, left pregnant and penniless by a heartless thug (Lyle Bettger). When he gives her train fare to leave town, our suffering heroine ends up in a train crash where she is mistaken for the widow of a kind, wealthy man. The family has never seen their son’s wife, and before she knows it, poor Helen Ferguson is taken for Patrice Harkness and made part of the family. The Harknesses can raise junior as a happy, wealthy boy with a “name,” even if it is a lie. Then there’s her “brother-in-law,” the dead man’s sibling, and it starts to seem like love between them. Further complications arise when the old thug learns the gal he dumped now has money and it’s time for blackmail.
What’s a girl to do?!
Find out on Sunday, 3/20 at 9pm et when we live tweet No Man of Her Own (1950) as our #BNoirDetour feature!
March 18, 2016 at 10:12 PM
Barbara Stanwyck and husband Robert Taylor were staunch conservatives
I too was pretty depressed when I learned this. 🙂
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March 18, 2016 at 10:40 PM
More troubling even than the same kind of thing re Ginger Rogers. The history has made me love Edward G. even more, Bogart too. Though even his leftist activism doesn’t make me like Melvyn Douglas’s screen persona.
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March 18, 2016 at 10:50 PM
Loretta Young was another who went to the Dark Side, but somehow it’s more predictable there.
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March 18, 2016 at 10:59 PM
Ah, and I don’t much like Young, so I feel fine abandoning her. Have you seen Cause for Alarm? It’s just horrible and Young is a mess in it.
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March 18, 2016 at 11:29 PM
Yes, I know Cause for Alarm, and to be honest I think it works pretty well. I’d agree Young’s a bit of a mess in it, but I’d say that was a deliberate directorial decision — part of the whole anxiety-dream effect.
Her part was originally intended for Judy Garland. I have difficulty imagining Garland in the role.
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March 19, 2016 at 3:27 AM
Interesting. I found Cause for Alarm implausible and annoying to watch. Maybe I’ll show it for #BNoirDetour and see what the gang thinks.
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March 19, 2016 at 3:38 AM
I think one of the reasons why (for me) Young was so effective in the part was that she conveyed the possibility that indeed she had been having the affair. That uncertainty, I thought, gave the movie its edge.
As for implausibility, The Big Sleep . . .
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March 19, 2016 at 3:46 AM
I didn’t feel that edge at all, just 50s neurotic female panic. Sullivan was such a one-dimensional foil. But to each our own.
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March 19, 2016 at 10:10 PM
NO MAN OF HER OWN is a terrific film, one that I saw at Noir City DC last year. I hope it will get more exposure through your live tweet. Have fun!
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