Barbara Stanwyck movies are all over 50 years old. In the recent retrospective of her films at the BFI Southbank season, half were over 80 years old. Yet what stands out from this body of work is how modern the films are, not in their plots or settings but in the characters she played and how she played them.
Stanwyck was never meek, decorative, or incidental to the plot. Whether a young woman sleeping her way to the top in Baby Face (in 1933, before the Hays code), a preacher in Capra’s The Miracle Woman, or an eroticised missionary’s wife in The Bitter Tea of General Yen, she chose a range of parts in which strong-minded women made a difference to how the story turned out. In her 82 films she had top billing in all but three.
She held out against the studio system in which stars on long-term contracts could be told what to do and was unusual in working for several studios, often in quick succession. She was prepared not to work …
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