Barbara Stanwyck by Dan Callahan Read Free Book Online Page B

from different backgrounds and classes. Stanwyck was able to emphasize her Brooklyn accent if thepart called for it, but in
General Yen
she represses it to the point that it’s barely noticeable.
    Megan is introduced in a rickshaw that gets hit by General Yen’s car, killing her driver. When she reprimands the General, he merely smiles and says, “Life, even at its best, is hardly endurable.” Bewildered by his heartless sophistication, Megan gets into another rickshaw (the camera frames her behind the wood of this vessel, as if she needs to retreat from what she’s just experienced), and she stares at Yen and the beautiful Chinese girl in his car with tender curiosity. Stanwyck’s face is open and vulnerable, but it’s Megan Davis’s vulnerability, not Barbara Stanwyck’s, or Ruby Stevens’s. Paradoxically, Stanwyck has discovered that the more you hide behind a part that is different from yourself, the more you can reveal of your true self, an irony that might have pleased General Yen.
    At the wedding party, Megan is boxed in again behind a wooden frame; she’s been cloistered, but she wants to break out. She tries to share her experience with her hostess (Clara Blandick), saying that Yen looked “so civilized,” only to be met with a blast of concentrated racism: “They’re all tricky, treacherous and immoral,” snaps the hostess, “I can’t tell one from the other. They’re all Chinaman to me.” This grossly energetic little outburst conveys exactly the kind of finger-pointing ugliness that Megan wants to escape.
    Her fiancée, Dr. Robert Strike, is played by Gavin Gordan, who was the callow minister to Greta Garbo in her 1930 vehicle,
Romance
, and he’s cast to type here, a solid do-gooder who wants to rescue some orphans from behind enemy lines, but has to get General Yen’s permission first. The General scoffs at Megan’s fiancée. Why does he want to save a few orphans? After all, he says, they’re nameless. Such expressions make us see that the libertine General is almost as bad as the wedding party hostess, albeit in a radically different way. He’s as awful as she is, but his awfulness is dangerously alluring because it’s so aligned to sex, which he reveres, whereas her awfulness is a vile substitute for sex.
    The firelight glistens on Megan’s face as she rushes into the orphanage with Strike. She saves the kids but gets clubbed on the head for her trouble, and she is soon scooped up by the General, who has been hovering around her in his car. A series of dreamy, associative images of her fiancée and the General suggest Megan’s confused psychological state as she wakes in a train with a cold cloth on her head. Sexual tension builds as Megan half-realizes her position, takes in Yen’s concubine Mah-Li (Toshia Mori), then covers the small bit of her leg showing with her skirt when she catches Yen staring at her.
    Capra then cuts to a phallic train hurtling through the night, having established a mood that is sensitive to Megan’s fear and desire while also shyly identifying with Yen’s viewpoint. Stanwyck is now lost to Capra. He’s married another woman and given up hope of marrying his actress, but he wants to glorify her one more time, maybe exorcise her from his system, and he does so by making her play a repressed woman who opens up sexually on screen, just as the sexually abused Kay Arnold learned to open up emotionally.
    Boldly, Capra wants to get at the truth of a certain kind of dirty, sexual power dynamic that is not aligned to anything pure or nice or conventionally romantic. From what we see of him, Gordan’s fiancée is fine and good and Yen is a cruel, cynical dictator, yet we can tell right away who is the more deeply attractive man. We later learn that Yen had drugged Megan on the train and it’s planted in our minds that he might have taken liberties with