Walter Brennan and Barbara Stanwyck

Walter Brennan and Barbara Stanwyck

(c) Copyright (2015) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

From my childhood and adolescence misspent in front of a television set, many of my surviving impressions were accurate, but many others were not.  For years, I recollected Walter Brennan's acting only from remembering his TV series "The Guns of Will Sonnett."  Likewise, I hardly knew of Barbara Stanwyck's film career because I had enjoyed her only as a silvery matron in her TV series "The Big Valley."  Learning about Stanwyck's great performances on film came only much later, and learning that Brennan had won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor three times surprised me.

Nominated four times for the Supporting Actor Oscar, Brennan lost in 1942 for "Sergeant York," but he had already won in 1937 ("Come and Get It"), 1939 ("Kentucky"), and 1941 ("The Westerner").  Gary Cooper, the Westerner actually born in Helena, Montana, a star and friend often paired with Brennan, challenges Brennan's Judge Roy Bean, a lawless lawman erotically obsessed with English beauty and actress Lily Langtry. A depiction of the struggle that cattle ranchers and their cowboys waged against homesteading farmers in the fight to control access to open land, "The Westerner" is well-written as well as well-acted, with Brennan deserving his Oscar

But Brennan acts just as memorably in many other films.  Several other great Hollywood character actors populate "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955)--Spencer Tracy, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine--but I especially enjoyed Brennan as a sharp-tongued town doctor who doubles as mortician.

There is nothing much to Black Rock except an evil secret, and everybody in town worries that the visiting outsider Tracy will find it out. A mortician need never fear unemployment in Black Rock.

Brennan and Babe Ruth (playing himself) give fine support to Teresa Wright and Cooper as Eleanor and Lou Gehrig in "Pride of the Yankees" (1942). "Pride of the Yankees" displays the best of the California studio product--beautifully paced and produced as well as redolent of its period.  I liked Brennan's sports reporter in this film almost as much as his Eddie, the alcoholic sidekick to Humphrey Bogart in "To Have and Have Not" (1944).  While Bogart and his new leading lady, Lauren Bacall, are wonderful as Harry and Marie (who mystifyingly address each other as "Steve" and "Slim"), Brennan as Eddie out-acts everyone.

Brennan also gives great support to Stanwyck and Cooper in "Meet John Doe" (1941), about a fake populist movement turned real, then hijacked to serve the presidential ambitions of a callous, contemptuous, and megalomaniacal newspaper publisher. Stanwyck is one of my favorite golden-era actresses. If you haven't seen her bowl men over like pins as she sleeps her way to prosperity in the early-Thirties "Baby Face" (1933; be sure to see the uncensored version), you are in for a treat. A hardboiled girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Stanwyck's character is great fun to watch and is a far cry from the sedate matron of "The Big Valley."

A good sample of Stanwyck towards the end of her film career is "Clash by Night," with Ryan and Paul Douglas.  In this 1952 melodrama, Stanwyck portrays a tough, cool, self-aware, and strong character.  A fiesty Stanwyck battles her cattle baron father, Walter Huston (in his last film, 1950) in "The Furies," an unusual Western.

Besides all of these dramatic parts, Stanwyck excels in comedic roles.  Very, very funny as "The Lady Eve" (1941), Stanwyck splendidly depicts the con artist daughter of con artist father Charles Coburn. Henry Fonda is wonderful, too, as their mark, Hopsie, the ale fortune heir / snake scientist just back from a trip on the Amazon and ready to be charmed out of his money.

Clearly, Hopsie's Amazonian research had not included the snake in whom Eve confided in Eden.

first appeared in The Woodstock Independent