Woman with a Whip
“I’m a tough old broad from Brooklyn. Don’t try to make me into something I’m not. If you want someone to tiptoe down the Barkley staircase in crinoline and politely ask where the cattle went, get another girl.”
—Barbara Stanwyck on her role in The Big Valley (1965-69)
It shouldn’t be contentious to state that the lasting image of Barbara Stanwyck is an urban one: a street-smart city girl with pin-straight back-seamed stockings, slit skirt, and perfectly coiffed bangs, whether sleeping her way up the corporate ladder in Baby Face (1933), teaching slang to a clan of cloistered academics in Ball of Fire (1941), or cold-bloodedly plotting murder in that quintessential noir Double Indemnity (1944). It’s an image that aligns well with the trajectory of her own hardscrabble, prefame life. Born into poverty in Brooklyn and orphaned at age four, Stanwyck (at that point known as Ruby Stevens) bounced among foster homes and the on-again, off-again care of her older showgirl sister, who introduced the ten-year-old to the showbiz life when she brought her on tour. After a series of low-paying office stints, Stanwyck made her way into the Ziegfeld Follies at age 15, and from there to Broadway and ultimately Hollywood, where she became a star in Frank Capra’s Ladies of Leisure (1930)—the first of several ’30s films in which she played some variation on the prototypical “party girl,” wised-up and hard-boiled but with a proverbial heart of gold.
It’s somewhat surprising, therefore, to learn that of all the films in her prolific career, Stanwyck was most proud of her Westerns, of which she made more than a dozen between 1935 and 1957—not to mention her post-cinematic outings on such TV, , and her own hit series (1965-69)—and even earned an induction into the Hall of Great Western Performers in 1973. Despite the depth of Stanwyck’s work in the genre, however, it’s pretty much inarguable that only two of them—Anthony Mann’s (1950) and Sam Fuller’s (1957)—retain any significant cinephilic cachet today. And they do so precisely because they foreground and (literally) weaponize that element of transgressive sexuality that was so intrinsic to her persona in the ’30s and ’40s, reaching a level of psychosexual kinkiness that goes beyond even the jaw-dropping, miscegenation-themed dream/nightmare that Stanwyck enjoys in Capra’s (1933).
