Barbara Stanwyck, was forty-nine when she starred in “Crime of Passion” (which I discuss in this clip), Gerd Oswald’s harsh film noir, from 1957, about an accomplished woman’s conflicting desires. It’s one in a series of great melodramas that appeared in the mid-fifties about an unmarried middle-aged woman who grasps at what feels to her like the last chance at love. Stanwyck herself was in several great ones, including Douglas Sirk’s “All I Desire,” “There’s Always Tomorrow,” and even Samuel Fuller’s Western “Forty Guns,” Around the age of fifty, Joan Crawford (born in 1905) starred in some, such as Robert Aldrich’s “Autumn Leaves,” Joseph Pevney’s “Female on the Beach,” and Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar.” (It’s also worth looking back to Otto Preminger’s “Daisy Kenyon,” from 1947.) Of course, a paragon of the genre is Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows,” starring Jane Wyman—who is in fact a decade younger and whose relative youth Sirk factors into the story.
And I confess: these are the movies of Stanwyck’s and of Crawford’s that I love best; they’re the ones in which the actresses, having shed the ingratiating airs of the ingénue, perform with a stark intensity that, for all of its artful control (itself a factor in the drama), seems to aim neither to charm nor to please, and appears to be enriched by a vast and often painful fund of professional and personal experience. I wrote here recently about Howard Hawks’s “To Have and Have Not,” the movie that revealed the artistry of Lauren Bacall. Great as her performance there is, I’m even more astonished by her incarnation as a lonely professional in Vincente Minnelli’s “Designing Woman,” from 1957, in which the agony of widowhood in her early thirties—by which time she had already lived an amazingly accelerated working life—comes through with a bitter force. I hope that the lesson of these artists in accepting and making use of their age and their circumstances in Hollywood movies isn’t lost on today’s performers—and on the filmmakers who write for them and direct them.
