Every year, I try to watch three of her films. I used to watch Meet John Doe, but Walter Brennan makes me fucking sick.
[italic]Remember the Night[/italic] (1940): Fred MacMurray, Beulah Bondi, Elizabeth Patterson and Sterling Holloway. A shoplifter, Lee Leander (Stanwyck) is forced to spend the holidays with the district attorney, John Sargent (MacMurray) who has to prosecute her. They travel to Indiana to visit with his mother, aunt and farmhand (Bondi, Patterson and Holloway). Heartwarming drama with a great supporting cast. Directed by "woman's picture" director Mitchell Leisen. Preston Sturges wrote the script and promised Barbara that he'd put her in a real comedy, which was the superb [italic]The Lady Eve[/italic]. Also, it was the first of many successful collaborations between Stanwyck and Edith Head. The turn-of-the-century wedding gown, complete with corsets, is something to behold. I just hate the way Fred McMurray's African-American butler is portrayed as a stereotyped buffoon. What was the deal with Sterling Holloway? Was he or wasn’t he gay? One thing, I’ll never get him mixed up with Sterling Hayden.
[italic]My Reputation[/italic] (1946): With George Brent, Eve Arden, Lucile Watson and Scotty Beckett. A recent widow, Jessica Drummond (Stanwyck) falls in love with a wolfish Army officer Scott Landis (Brent) she meets on vacation with her friend Ginna (Arden) and her husband, which shocks her upper-class social set, especially her humorless, exhausting mother (Watson). Directed by Curtis Bernhardt. Not bad, but the film falls short in some ways, mainly because of George Brent, who was as bland as week old oatmeal. Plus, some of the Edith Head costumes aren’t as stylishly brilliant as they were in other Stanwyck films. But Barbara makes it better than it deserves. She seems cast against type as a shy widow dominated by her pushy mother and teenaged sons. Of course, when she’s had enough and starts telling folks where to go, you know that it’s a Stanwyck movie. Originally made in 1944, it was first shown only to US servicemen overseas and not released in America until 1946. Supposedly, this was also done with several other films.
[italic]Christmas in Connecticut[/italic] (1945): With Sydney Greenstreet, Dennis Morgan, Reginald Gardiner and S.Z. Sakall. Not my favorite either, but Barbara’s in it and she can do no wrong as the Martha Stewart-like writer who can’t cook or decorate as she claims to in her popular column; her friend Felix (Sakall), a chef, gives her all of her recipes. So, when her magazine editor Mr. Yardley (Greenstreet) invites a war hero to her fictional house in Connecticut, she has to act fast. She has a boyfriend, John Sloan (Gardiner) who happens to have a farm in Connecticut that will be an ideal setting for Elizabeth Lane (Stanwyck) to perpetrate her hilarious fraud to war hero Jefferson Jones (Morgan). He thinks that she’s married to her boyfriend but she takes one look at him and feels very unmarried. My favorite scenes are when she bathes her fake baby and flips the flapjacks in the frying pan. Morgan was another blandly appealing actor in the Warner Brothers stable; does he have fans here? Discuss.