Barbara Stanwyck by Dan Callahan Read Free Book Online

accident and all her other lousy luck, stoically. Her other co-star on the film, Ralph Bellamy, said that Fay was “a very unpopular guy—he worked at it.” And Fay’s jealousy was misplaced: Stanwyck later told Bellamy that Fay had thought they might be having an affair, when in reality Capra was making his last pitch for her.
    Forbidden
is a personal movie. Menjou’s crippled wife is called Helen, the name of Capra’s first, alcoholic wife. Bellamy’s character is a newspaperman who pursues Stanwyck throughout the film; rejecting one of his many proposals, she says he’s “married to his newspaper.” Menjou’s character is a cad of the most selfish sort, and it’s clear that Menjou is a stand in for Fay, as Bellamy is for Capra. Stanwyck is playing a woman named Lulu, named after the other woman in Capra’s life, Lu, who finally issued an ultimatum to the director and became the second and final Mrs. Capra, a role for which she was eminently suited.
    Unfortunately, as any non-doctrinaire auteurist can admit, “personal” doesn’t always equal “good” when it comes to movies, and
Forbidden
is a case in point. It begins promisingly with a fast montage of town life. We see a plow, trees in bloom, bees pollinating flowers. A dog yawns, and an older man takes up the yawn. The older man is excited because Stanwyck’s Lulu is late for work at the public library for the first time in eight years. She never misses weddings, he says, except “her own.” Lulu is supposed to be a bespectacled, incipient spinster (“Old lady four eyes!” yell some kids as she enters the library), but Stanwyck still walks like a chorus girl, and spring fever swiftly takes Lulu out of town for a two-week vacation in Havana, funded by all her savings. A gamble, life or death.
    She cruises around on yet another “boat of vice,” and though Lulu has taken off her glasses and glammed up a bit, she can’t seem to snag an escort. In her stateroom, she finds a drunken Menjou and inexplicably takes a liking to him (just as Stanwyck’s fondness for the gruesome, abusive Fay looks fairly inexplicable to us now, unless we presume that she felt she deserved trouble). In
The Miracle Woman
, Stanwyck and DavidManners play most of their love scenes with a ventriloquist’s dummy called Al, and in
Forbidden
, she and Menjou share their happiest moments on screen when they play around with commedia dell’arte-type masks. It’s as if Capra is trying to reassure Stanwyck that she’ll be protected and that the exposure of
Ladies of Leisure
needn’t be an around-the-clock vocation. And Stanwyck seems uncommonly relaxed in the mask scene. She’s always touching when she tries to be lighthearted, because you can see how much effort it takes for her to forget 246 Classon Avenue, where part of her lives permanently, waiting on those steps.
    Forbidden
becomes a formula illegitimate baby saga for most of the rest of its running time; a complicated plot twist means Stanwyck has to give up her child to Menjou and his wife. She becomes an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist for Bellamy. Time passes, and we see some grey in her hair (Stanwyck makes her face seem subtly older by holding it more stiffly than she did in the youthful scenes). The musical score goes into overdrive for her big scene with Bellamy, where he threatens to expose her secret and ruin Menjou’s career. He punches her in the mouth, leaving a trickle of blood that looks alarmingly
right
on Stanwyck’s face.
    She shoots him from behind a door, then opens it and shoots some more, jabbing the gun in the air like a knife, just as Jeanne Eagels does at the beginning of
The Letter
. The camera moves close for an iconic shot of her face; there’s blood on the left side of her mouth and a jewel-like tear glistening in her right eye. In her last scene with Menjou, he remembers how he