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99 Stage Stanwyck The฀Plough฀and฀the฀Stars,฀Golden฀Boy,฀Clash฀by฀Night Kenneth Tynan wrote that Greta Garbo couldn’t be considered a great actress, finally, because she had never put herself to the test in major theater roles; she had never given us her Hedda Gabler, her Masha in Three Sisters, her Mrs. Alving in Ghosts. This idea that an actor can only truly prove her talent by scaling the heights of classical theater roles is perhaps an old-fashioned one, tied more to British than American tradition , but stage success is certainly helpful, if not infallible, as a gauge of acting ability. Bette Davis is every bit the equal of Katharine Hepburn as a screen actress, yet Davis never played any Shakespeare leads, as Hepburn did on stage. In late middle age, Hepburn offered a definitive Mary Tyrone in a film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Long฀Day’s฀Journey฀ Into Night (1962), and she went on to tackle Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and even Greek tragedy in The฀Trojan฀Women (1970)—albeit with uneven results. The closest Davis came to a testing theater part like this was her Regina Giddens in The฀Little฀Foxes (1941), and that’s a sterling credit. But it’s hard not to wish that Davis had attempted a few more of these “prove your mettle” roles, and that Hepburn had been a bit more discriminating about what parts suited her (i.e., no Amanda Wingfield in Williams’s The฀Glass฀Menagerie [1973]). “I’d drop dead if I had to recite a single line of Shakespeare,” Stanwyck joked to a reporter in the 1940s. Classical drama was out for her, but she had three notable tries at parts written originally for the theater . The first of these was the difficult role of Nora Clitheroe in John Ford’s abbreviated RKO adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s The฀Plough฀and฀the฀ Stars (1936), a disenchanted account of the Irish Easter rebellion of 1916. s ta g e s ta n w y C k 100 When the play premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1926, there was a riot during the fourth performance, led mainly by some of the women associated with the fallen men of 1916. These women objected to the play’s satire on the kind of nationalism that destroys Nora Clitheroe’s middleclass family and dreams (Barry Fitzgerald had to punch a male protestor on stage to defend the actors). In O’Casey’s play, Nora is pregnant, and she eventually loses her mind. She is the heroine of the piece, which employs a large company to play people on the margins of a dramatic event. Though she is often sympathetic, Nora is also a nag and a hysteric, so that the actress playing her has to commit fully to all of her flaws and take the risk of not being liked, at times, in order to be true to the life of this three-dimensional, righteous, sometimes exasperating woman. For his film of the play, Ford uses the dark, expressionist look he favored in this period, and his introduction of his star is striking. We see a woman’s head turn toward the camera, wearing a Virgin Mary–like head-cloak: Stanwyck’s face is creased in doubt, almost folded in half, in fact. The฀Plough฀and฀the฀Stars can be most fruitfully seen as one artist, Ford, looking at another, Stanwyck, in purely visual terms, observing her in different moods and at different angles. In many ways, he films Stanwyck here in a similar fashion to the self-denying, rapt, intense way that he shot Katharine Hepburn’s shadowed close-ups in Mary฀of฀Scotland, made that same year, but with a key difference. Whereas with Hepburn, Ford’s photographic attention is discreetly romantic, with Stanwyck he elevates her as a kind of maternal figure. Away from the city, in a contrasting luminescent sequence at a park where Nora wanders with her husband, Jack (Preston Foster), Ford has Stanwyck wear a stiff white lace hat that he lights like it’s a halo. Though Ford takes care with the illuminated and then darkened frames he puts around Stanwyck’s face, there is no attempt to glamorize or idealize her face itself. Throughout this film, she looks like a real, extremely worried person. Her features are doughy here, as if they were made of lumpy clay, and her swollen Nora looks like a person who sweats and...

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