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Screwball Stanwyck: The Bride Walks Out, Breakfast for Two, The Mad Miss Manton, You Belong to Me, Christmas in Connecticut, The Bride Wore Boots
- University Press of Mississippi
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67 Screwball Stanwyck TheBrideWalksOut,BreakfastforTwo,TheMadMissManton, YouBelongtoMe,ChristmasinConnecticut,TheBrideWoreBoots Comedy is not something that came easily to Stanwyck, but she stuck to it and eventually mastered the genre. Early on, she professed that she found light material “a vacation—I was playing, not working.” But later, being interviewed by John Kobal, she confessed, “I am not really a comedienne , per se. I’m not very good. But when they are written as well as TheLadyEve or YouBelongtoMe (1941) . . . both of those films are with Henry Fonda, who is a wonderful comedian . . . or if it is a situation comedy , I’m alright. But—just for me to be funny—I’m not a funny person.” In the mid-thirties, screwball comedy was in vogue, and practically every actress of note tried it, sometimes with spectacular results (Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn) and sometimes not (Loretta Young). We can take Stanwyck at her word that she wasn’t a naturally funny person, and certainly good humor is not the first thing we think of when we think of her. But unlike, say, the always-serious Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, she successfully extended her technique in some small comedies before finally grasping the brass ring with Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks. Her director on the RKO film TheBrideWalksOut (1936), Leigh Jason, admired the fact that Stanwyck “was the only one I ever worked with who would dig to the bitter end for what you really wanted—and then give it to you.” The main thrust of the plot (engineer Gene Raymond won’t let bride Stanwyck work, even though he brings in only thirty-five dollars a week) is consistently irritating. “Women have always worked,” says Stanwyck’s Carolyn, when she wants to continue modeling clothes for fifty dollars a week. “Why shouldn’t they do it in a shop instead of in a kitchen?” Raymond’s unlikable Michael never has a good answer s C r e w b a l l s ta n w y C k 68 whenever she asks about this, and that’s because there is no good answer (it might be worse if he tried to define his sexist feelings, of course). During the film’s leisurely eighty-one minutes, there are four separate , would-be humorous references to wife beating. The most disturbing one comes from Stanwyck’s mouth: “Hit me, that would be the manly thing to do,” Carolyn says to Michael (suddenly it becomes clearer that some of the attitudes of this era were to blame for Stanwyck getting smacked in the face by Frank Fay). In many ways, this movie prefigures a sort of fifties conservatism. The married couple sleeps in separate beds, and in this time of the working girl—the high noon of Jean Arthur and so many other career women of the thirties—it feels absurd, even cruel, to put the mighty Stanwyck in an apron in a tiny kitchen in a small apartment and expect her to pinch pennies on milk, when what she really wants is the trunk full of cash and gems belonging to Baby Face Lily Powers. She can’t cook, of course, and why should she have to? Because that’s what a “real, bona-fide wife” does, according to Michael. This lunkhead Michael is another Fay figure, and he isn’t remotely worthy of Stanwyck, as usual, but TheBrideWalksOut has time for all kinds of diversions around its main plot. Hattie McDaniel has one of her better roles. In her first scene, she talks about the many men in her life, then cracks that “one or two of them I jilted!” In a later, even more telling scene, McDaniel wonders why white men don’t want their women to work (it’s interesting, from a modern perspective, that the black servant McDaniel plays is obviously more liberated and happier than the stymied white woman she works for). Stanwyck has a ball in a short dance scene with Raymond, jumping up on his thighs and thrusting her legs straight out into the air. And she finally pulls off a drunk scene with the help of pro-farceurs Billy Gilbert and Helen Broderick. Broderick’s crack timing is notable. Creditor Gilbert takes away the couple’s furniture and finally comes to Broderick, who is sitting in the last...