Performing Resistance: Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck in Postwar Cinema

Asher Benjamin Guthertz Film and Digital Media March 23, 2018 Thesis Advisor: Dr. Shelley Stamp

This thesis has been completed according to the Film and Digital Media department's standards for undergraduate theses. It is submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Film and Digital Media. Introduction: Performing Resistance

In the sunny California town of Santa Lisa, amidst a round of applause, veteran Frank

Enley (Van Heflin) hands his toddler to his wife and struts onto a makeshift stage. In front of a crowd gathered to celebrate the opening of a new housing complex, he declares: “It was you fellas, you and your families, that really put this thing over. You stuck together and you fought for what you wanted, and if I gave you any help at all, well believe me, I am very happy.” His wife, holding their young son, beams. Frank musters all the spirit of war time camaraderie, and expresses that American belief that with hard work and a communal effort, anything is possible.

But as Act of Violence (1949) unfolds, Frank’s opening speech becomes sickeningly hypocritical.

A former army comrade sets out to murder Frank, and halfway through the film, Frank tells his wife Edith (Janet Leigh) why.

The revelation takes place on an outdoors stairway at night. The railing and fences draw deep angular shadows on the white walls, and the canted angles sharpen the lines of the stairs and floor. A sense of enclosure looms; Frank mutters that he betrayed his troop. Edith locks her big eyes onto his: “I can understand how something like that can happen in a ­ prison camp.” She pauses before “prison camp,” a word outside of her world. Frank shakes his head, and walks down some stairs. Edith follows his descent, where he finally explains that he ruined his troop’s escape plan by informing the Nazi guards. As he speaks, he walks back up the stairs, and Edith again follows him, a wife trying to hear her husband, to stand where he stands. Frank walks back down the stairs again, and Edith starts to follow. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Do I have to draw you a picture? I was an informer!...The Nazis even paid me a price, they gave me food, and

I ate it.” Edith collapses into tears. Frank descends the steps, telling Edith she can leave without saying anything. She does. Edith gets up and runs up the stairs and out of the building.

Act of Violence is one of the rare postwar films to speak directly about the war, and one of even fewer films to refer to the horrifying, soul shattering conditions that a world war enables.

As the film makes clear, World War II veterans carried the weight of memories that could collapse the postwar family structure. The efforts to reconstruct American family life after the war, such as the housing project Frank participates in, necessitated moral certainties about community, hardwork, and the American spirit which men like Frank knew to have been untrue.

Edith tries very hard to understand her husband. As her quivering delivery of the word “prison camp” reveals, the details of Frank’s war experience are incomprehensible to her. Yet, in her pacing up and down the stairs, following her husband in his pitch black journey down memory lane, Edith tries very very hard. Ultimately, she cannot. Not through any fault of her own, Frank knows, preemptively forgiving her for leaving him. The conditions of war are at odds with the conditions of postwar.

If Act of Violence is a rare film, Daisy Kenyon (1947) is wholly unique. In one of the great performances of her career, Joan Crawford plays Daisy, a commercial artist living with her female colleague in a Manhattan apartment. Her on­and­off again relationship with a nauseatingly arrogant but undeniably charming married lawyer, Dan O’Mara (Dana Andrews) is put on hold when she meets, and very quickly marries, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda), a troubled veteran who sometimes screams in his sleep. Much like Act Of Violence, Daisy Kenyon explores the psychic damage done by the war, but unlike the former, the latter interrogates everyone, not

only the serviceman. As interesting and unique as the film’s plot is, Crawford’s performance articulates the struggles and desires of the post­war woman with unrivaled clarity and nuance.

This essay demonstrates that by closely attending to screen performance, one can find new questions, ideas, and lines of thinking in even the most discussed of films. The writing of film scholar Andrew Klevan provides a clear model of how to write about film performance with nuance and imagination. “Fresh aspects of even familiar films emerge when we attend to gestures, postures, expressions, and voice — and how they are situated. Interpretations unfold and complicate with our moment­by­moment experience of viewing the performer’s activity,”

Klevan notes in the forward to Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation .1 Klevan illuminates the ability of performance analysis to open up even well­trod film texts. Staying attentive not only to the specific qualities of performance (“gestures, postures, expressions, and voice”), but also to how those qualities interact with other aspects of film production like cinematography, screenwriting, and production design, generates new understandings.

“Attending to the moment­by­moment movement of performers...encourages us to attend to a character’s physical and aural detail and reminds us, because we are prone to forget in our literary moods, of their ontological particularity in the medium of film. A living human being embodies a film character.”2 Often, if performance is mentioned at all in film writing, it is discussed with static finality: a bad performance, a good performance, comedic acting, method acting. Klevan highlights the importance of looking at the “moment­by­moment movement” of actors, rather than sweeping generalizations about acting quality. The end of this quote addresses

1 Andrew Klevan, F ilm Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London: Wallflower Press, 2005). 2 Ibid, 7. the central possibility of writing on film performance: to engage in “the ontological particularity” that in film “a living human being embodies a film character.”

One of the central questions of Daisy Kenyon , and the one most pertinent to this essay is: how does one love the returned soldier? After forgetting a date with Daisy, Peter visits her at her apartment late one night. He explains that the door to the complex was open. He says he supposes he did something bad by entering unannounced. Daisy looks up at Peter, her body stiff and composed. She is covered in low­key soft lighting that accentuates her eyes and gaze in a close­up. “Yes, I guess you did,” she utters, but her voice softens, ending on a higher pitch, and her eyes drift up towards his own. Flirtation, confusion, and fear start to spin together. As he explains that he forgot about their date, a look of amusement flashes across her face. She looks down, takes a breath, and then declares: “Look, it’s late, I’m afraid you’d better get along.”

Crawford bears a smile as she delivers the line, but as soon as she stops speaking, her face loses expression, though she continues to watch him intently. This hodgepodge of curiosity, fear, anger, and attraction reaches its climax when Peter suddenly grabs Daisy and tries to kiss her.

She tells him not to. He says he just wants to hold her for a moment because “the world’s dead, and everybody in it is dead but you.” Daisy looks fearful, frozen in his grasp, her quizzical lips open, her big eyes set to burst. Then, in a quiet but dynamic shift, she relaxes slightly, leans into a smile, and asks: “How did they come to die?” She locks her eyes on to him as he walks from her and the question.

Daisy Kenyon (1947), Directed by Otto Preminger

America’s construction of a gendered world underwent a massive shift during the 1940s.

During the first half of the decade, as most able men went off to war, the country had to reckon with massive amounts of married women moving into the public spheres of factory and industrial work, as well as other forms of civic participation. After the war, popular culture as well as educational texts and government policies all urged the movement of women back into the homes. More than ever, women were told that what America needed, and in particular, what

American veterans needed, were women­as­healers.3 In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War, Elaine Tyler May quotes the actress Ann Sothern’s advice to the wives of returning soldiers: “When he comes back it may take a few years for him to ‘find himself’ — it’s [your] job — not his— to see that the changes in both of [you] don’t affect the fundamental bonds.”4

3 Elaine Tyler May, H omeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era ( New York: Basic Books, 2008), 58­89. 4Ibid, 64.

Joan Crawford performs a woman alone with a recently returned and clearly affected veteran in

Daisy Kenyon . She encapsulates a myriad of complex and contradictory sentiments in shockingly small amounts of dialogue. Daisy clearly harbors fear towards this man who was, until recently, involved in, or at the very least adjacent to, acts of unspeakable violence. Yet this fear coexists with lust and amusement, and some deeper fascination which manifests as she asks him how all the people in the world came to die.

Postwar American cinema was largely written and directed by men (though, interestingly, all three of the Crawford vehicles discussed in this essay were based on stories written by women). The dominant cinematic narrative of the effects of the war on American life is male­authored. However, intensely capable actresses gave some of the best performances of their lives in this period. They conveyed intricate sentiments about their characters’ relationships to their lovers, their safety, their bodies, their worlds. Utilizing Klevan’s method of close performance analysis, I look at three actresses in the immediate postwar period in order to center their contributions to postwar cinema and to meditate on female fears and desires in the era. All three of these actresses are white women, and so the fears and desires that this paper aims to locate are likely the fears and desires of white women. Women of color may have related to aspects of these performances, especially as there were so few films in the era staring women of color, but there is no reason to assume that these white women would have been able to represent the struggles of women of color in any real way.

In The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Myrna Loy, best known from the Thin Man series of the 1930s, transitioned into a performance of subservience at odds with her electric portrayal of Nora Charles in the previous decade. At the same time, in quiet, ambiguous gestures, Loy

complicates the feelings of her character towards her husband and her postwar life. In Possessed

(1947) and Sudden Fear (1952), Joan Crawford plays women psychologically and physically abused by men. While the films bask in the torture of their female protagonists, Crawford imbues her characters with a quality that resists a male gaze and asserts power and independence.

Barbara Stanwyck’s performance in Double Indemnity (1944) has baffled critics and audiences since the film’s release. Her character Phyllis Dietrichson has been critically dehumanized, labeled an unfeeling monster. However, close attention to Stanwyck’s performance finds many currents of desire rippling through the character, creating a deeply complex, but in no sense inhuman, woman. These performances act as a quiet but sharp denouncement of the violence and dehumanization of women on screen in these films and in the world at large.

The Girl You’d Like to Be Married To

What made Nora Charles “the screen’s most perfect wife,” as Photoplay called her in

1936?1 Why did a group of adult men calling themselves the ‘We Want to Marry Myrna Loy

Club’ mail Loy a 300 square foot proposal letter?2 Throughout the 1930s, Myrna Loy’s performance as Nora Charles in the Thin Man series (1934­1946) functioned as an ideal image of the married woman. While Nick Charles constantly insisted that his wife not involve herself in his murder mysteries, her presence always wound up proving invaluable. Nora was funny, game, and only mocked her husband's alcoholism and silliness a little. Unlike her husband, she came from money, but was never put off by Nick’s colorful working class community. Her joyful participation in her husband’s life, along with lighthearted acknowledgement of her subservient role, made her a perfect representation of the marriage ideal of the era.

Loy starts her appearance as Nora Charles off with a crash. In her very first scene in The

Thin Man (1934), in the tow of the iconic dog Asta, sporting a gigantic fur coat and a boatload of presents, chased by angry maitre d’s, she shouts that she has no control over her excitable dog.

Loy sways to one side and then the other, in heels, until, splat! She nosedives into the ground.

The fall is perfect slapstick comedy: quick, enthused, and unaffected. As the waiters help her up,

Loy wiggles her arms and shoulders, as if to shake off the pain and embarrassment. “Women and children first, boys.” In her opening quip, her voice is crackly and high, but as soon as she recovers, she finds her steady, upper class east coast accent. Nora’s class presentation is immediately and permanently central to her performance. Nora is dressed well, but notes to a

1 Dorothy Manners, “At Last—The Heart­Stirring Love Story of Myrna Loy,” P hotoplay, August 1936, 12. 2 James Castonguay, “Myrna Loy and William Powell: The Perfect Screen Couple,” in G lamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s, ed. Adrienne L. McLean (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 237.

secondary character that she’s only wearing the fur coat because she just went Christmas shopping. She has poise, but never loses her sense of fun. A little later in the scene, Nora and

Nick sit down. When he tells her that he’s five martinis deep, she asks the waiter: “will you bring me five more martinis.” She draws out the spaces between the words, and stresses her vowels, sounding affectedly elitist. “Line them right up here,” she requests, tapping the table in five places. Myrna immediately performs a joyous and raucous participation. Nora orders cocktails as loudly as she crashes into floors, and she never stops moving.

In the first film of the series, as in many others, Nick tries to keep Nora out of the investigation, but her curiosity and drive pull her in, often putting her in danger, and finding clues that Nick missed. Her energy, though, is framed not as a passion for detecting, but as passion for Nick and his world. At a Christmas party, Nick and Nora have filled their house with an eclectic assortment: homesick drunkards, toothless old men, ex­cons that Nick put in jail but love him anyways, future suspects, bloodthirsty reporters, and dopey cops. Nora plays hostess to one and all, never for a moment revealing any emotion other than excitement and amusement.

She smiles as she zips up and down her apartment, encouraging everyone to drink, eat, and be merry. “Don’t bother to announce anyone...they’re all his friends,” she tells the reception desk. A few minutes later, Nora walks in on Nick hugging a distressed female acquaintance of his. She raises her eyebrows, he scrunches his face. She returns the gesture, than cherrily offers the other woman a drink.

The Thin Man ( 1934), Directed by W.S. Van Dyke

Nora Charles yearns, perpetually, to be in on the fun. Loy performs this desire in every squeak, pratfall, and side glance. She commits, not only to physical and verbal comedy, but to reaction shots, making faces like this one. The faux­serious scrunched face allows her to critique her world in an entirely non­threatening mode. Her face makes the gestures of reproachment, but she fills it in with a vitality with suggests nothing so dour as anger. Even as she frowns, she seems in danger of breaking into a smile. Nora Charles has no other options. In her marriage, she can participate as much as she wants in her husband's life, but she never has equality. If she really was upset about her husband’s behavior, what could she do? The ideal wife can only scrunch her face and move on.

By the end of the 1940s, the threat of the independent woman had come too close to the forefront of the American consciousness; unlike Nora Charles, the ideal wife was now passive

and confined to the home. During World War II, the female labor force grew by more than fifty percent as women married and unmarried filled the jobs the men on the homefront had left behind. Even while positive images of working women spread, such as the infamous Rosie the

Riveter painting on the cover of Saturday Evening Post in May 1943, women outside the home were still presented as a danger to American society. A wartime pamphlet lays this out pretty well:

“The war in general has given women new status, new recognition. . . . Yet it is essential

that women avoid arrogance and retain their femininity in the face of their own new

status. . . . In her new independence she must not lose her humanness as a woman. She

may be the woman of the moment, but she must watch her moments”3

As servicemen returned at the end of the war, and policy like the GI Bill focused on educational and employment opportunities for male veterans, women were expected to return to the domestic sphere. Emphasis was placed on women’s duties to their man, their children, and their home.

Literature from the time period focused on the readjustment of veterans and emphasized the role women could play in helping their returning men: relinquish their own independence, and soothe his ego. Parenting guides proliferated as well, many of which stressed the responsibility of mothers, and the consequences of being either watchful or neglectful. Lastly, the sudden influx of domestic products like washing machines and refrigerators, sold as time savers that would make women’s lives easier, ended up giving them higher standards to reach for.4 The message was clear: ‘Women, get out of our factories, you have enough to do at home.’

3 Elaine Tyler May, H omeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era ( New York: Basic Books, 2008), 68. 4 May, Homeward Bound, 6 5­71; Susan M. Hartmann, “The Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s,” (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 43­60.

As the image of the American wife underwent a massive shift, William Wyler cast Myrna

Loy in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Like Loy’s well­known character Nora Charles,

Milly Stephenson (Loy) is a loving and devoted wife. Her husband Al Stephenson (Fredric

March), a bank executive (but a platoon sergeant in the war) returns home with a drinking problem and a new affinity for the working class, both of which threaten in quiet ways to ruin the life they have built together. Loy’s star persona, almost singularly tied to The Thin Man , invites a reading of Al and Milly as a postwar iteration of Nick and Nora. Echoes of Nick loom in Al’s character: an alcoholic lover of the people who spontaneously bursts into song and can’t stop quipping with his wife. While Nick and Nora are tacitly evoked, the drastically different tone of the film morphs those character types. Gregg Toland’s deep focus, long take cinematography insistently frames pairs or groups of people for long periods of time, insisting on their togetherness. Milly is rarely provided with close­ups in Best Years . Mostly, she occupies just a little space towards the back of the frame, watching her husband or her children. She has few lines, and in at least one scene, is entirely silent. In this way, the film frames Milly as a character important only in relation to others. Loy, while performing in a similar manner in terms of posture, tone, and mannerisms, does not characterize Milly with the same curiosity and vitality that defines Nora Charles. In the postwar melodrama, the ideal wife stays home and isn’t so excited to participate in everything.

In the first real scene of conversation between Milly and Al, their children surreptitiously head off to bed, leaving the living room to their long­separated parents. Fans of The Thin Man might have expected dynamic facial expressions and witty rapport from Loy and her onscreen husband, but mostly Loy just watches March, trying and failing to engage him in conversation.

Milly watches Al fumble with his cigarette, and the bright smile she held while her children were in the room starts to flicker, replaced by a glance of of concern which she reiterates throughout the film. Toland’s camera places Loy and her watchful gaze at one end of the frame and March’s haggard mess on the other. March is much closer to the camera then Loy, so that her look becomes a kind of diagonal line across the image. In this manner, Toland centrally frames her watching of him. In this new position, Loy maintains the poise of Nora Charles, with affected erudite speech and composed posture. She also looks like she’s about to get up and do something, like she can’t sit much longer. The gaze of the new wife is strong, composed, and unstable.

The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946), Directed by William Wyler

Milly asks Al what he thinks of the children; Al jerks up and irately mumbles that he doesn't recognize them. She looks up at him with playful eyes; he avoids contact. “I tried to stop them, to keep them just as they were when you left, but they got away from me,” she squeaks, her voice light, airy, but also drawn out. As she jokes, March walks behind her, avoiding eye contact and not responding. She then turns away from him, lowers her eyes, and folds her hands in her lap. Loy and March perform a failure of communication, one which involves her star persona as the screwball wife. Her dialogue is a one line joke, the sort of thing Nora would say to

Nick with a cocktail in her hand. In The Thin Man , Nick would rapidly follow up the joke with a retort of his own, but March just looks away. The following gesture, in which Nora folds her hand, reads as direct response to the failure in communication. The postwar husband seems to require something different from Loy. The loose, flexible joy of Nora Charles does not ‘read’ anymore. What can she do but sit, joyless, resigned?

The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946), Directed by William Wyler

Milly resiliently tries again to communicate with Al. He paces behind her, asking whether their daughter Peggy has a boyfriend, and whether Milly has told her everything she needs to know about dating (and implicitly, sex). Loy turns her head towards Al, and locks eyes with him, her eyes big. After a silent moment of looking, she asks in one light, long breath: “What, for instance?” She holds eye contact with him for a while, clearly trying to resurrect their romantic and sexual relationship with language. Sexual innuendo is a necessary means of communication in Hays Code screwball comedies like the Thin Man films, but in this post war melodrama, innuendo fails. Milly loves Al, wants to speak with him and be with him in ways that echo how

Nora spoke with and was with Nick. Al harbors different desires; he asks Milly to fix him a drink, so she leaves the living room for the kitchen. Loy performs her Thin Man persona in a breathy voice, fast quip delivery, and visual and tactile engagement but she also performs the failure of this mode to connect with her partner. Loy then shifts into a performance steeped in quiet and stillness, demonstrating the role that she settles for in the post war world. Milly’s failure to forge the playful bond of the screwball couple reframes Loy’s performance in The Thin

Man as an antiquated mode of femininity.

In a tragic irony that would make Nora Charles gasp, Loy’s last real scene in Best Years is a tiny appearance where she marches onto the porch to make sure her husband is not drinking.

While the scene lasts moments, Loy occupies its center, framed by Toland’s camera and by all three leading men. Milly and Loy pack a lot of sentiments into seconds: a deep warm smile and hug for groom Homer, a wary side glance at Fred who has unclear intentions with her daughter, and a policing gaze aimed at her alcoholic husband. A medium shot frames her body between the

men’s bodies, underscoring the film’s feelings that Milly’s most important function is to relate to and helps out the men in her life . As she sips his drink, Milly looks Al in the eyes, making connection. She then lowers her eyes and tilts her head to the side, in a seemingly conciliatory gesture. That gesture is immediately complicated when her eyes dart back at her husband’s, and the scene ends.

The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946), Directed by William Wyler

Her final moments trouble a reading of Milly Stephenson as passively subservient. As she looks Al in the eyes, all sorts of reactions (anger, frustration, even joy) all seem possible. The scene ends immediately, holding Milly’s truth indefinitely out of reach. In The Best Years of Our

Lives , Myrna Loy performs the ideal wife as a pinnacle of domestic subservience. As the most beloved wife of the previous decade, Loy was the one to do it. Yet, in moments, Loy manages to

trouble the image, adding nuance and complexity to a woman bound to the background by its dominant male creators. The wide in scope but heavily managed gaze of Best Years only catches her trouble in glimpses, unlike the films discussed in the following sections, which follow the faces and bodies of Crawford and Stanwyck with much more attention. Loy does much with what little space she is given.

Her Face Set Against Hardship

“There’s something rather repellent about Joan Crawford,” asserts Chadwick Jenkins in his 2017 article “The Hollywood Star as Fetish Object.” Crawford’s ability to “push back against the viewer...to keep them at arm’s length or further away” provides her with much of her star power, he believes. Jenkins locates Crawford’s power of repellency in “her face set against hardship, her eyes seething with defiance, her lips frozen in a grimace that dared the world to confront her, to defy her.”1 His reading of Crawford’s “gorgon stare,” while clearly a misogynistic reduction of female performative power into monstrosity, is also a shockingly common interpretation, throughout the history of Crawford’s star discourse, but especially in the works of modern critics. Mick LaSalle, writing in 2000 about pre­Code actresses, asks: “What is it about Stanwyck’s rage that makes us like her more, while Crawford’s does not? Perhaps it’s that Stanwyck takes the audience into her pain, while Crawford is all bitterness and self pity.”2

Perhaps, also, it is this perception of Crawford as bitter and self­pitying that led a group of young men to jeer at her during a screening of Mildred Pierce (1945) at my university in 2017. The uncommon occurrence in an advanced film class was, in my mind, provoked by Joan Crawford's

“gorgon stare,” as Jenkins calls it.

Writing on Crawford from the 1940s betrays some of the same derision. “Joan Crawford suffers agonies everytime anyone whispers that she’s past forty...her vanished girlhood can make her life miserable, at the very time when she should be reveling in the sweets of a distinguished

1 Chadwick Jenkins, “The Hollywood Star as Fetish Object: Joan Crawford in ‘Mildred Pierce,’” PopMatters, June 4, 2017, https://www.popmatters.com/the­hollywood­star­as­fetish­object­joan­crawford­in­mildred­pierce­2495389 368.html. 2 Mick LaSalle, C omplicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre­Code Hollywood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 136­137.

Hollywood career.” She should be grateful for what she has, this article in a fan magazine entitled “How Long Can You Stay Great?” implies.3 “Miss Crawford is, of course, an old hand at being an emotionally confused and frustrated woman,” the New York Times writes in their contemporaneous review of Daisy Kenyon (1947) .4 Articles on Joan Crawford with titles like

“Just Because She’s Joan” and “Strange Woman” similarly mark her aberrancy.5 At the same time, writing contemporary to the time period is much more able in identifying Crawford’s strength and intense acting capacity. “Just Because She’s Joan” ends with a story of Crawford on the set of Possessed (1947). Unrehearsed, she bursts into a performance of a woman in the middle of a psychotic episode. “Joan’s hysteria seemed almost to be out of control. She was helped from the bed and to her dressing room.”6 While the description of her out of control hysteria smells of derision, it is used to depict Crawford’s incredible ability to submerge into a mentally straining role. Similar articles describe Crawford’s intensity and seriousness without the contempt that later critics wield.

Crawford, particularly in several ‘Scorned Women’ roles in the late 1940s and early

1950s, performs a strength, located in the female and independent, which unsettles and resists as it is enacted. In Possessed and Sudden Fear (1952) , Crawford plays women abandoned, ignored, and abused. Most of these films contain unquestionably misogynistic dominant narratives.

Sudden Fear obsessively gazes at the debilitating pain of an older woman (dressed to accentuate her age); the juxtaposition of Crawford’s character with a young, beautiful romantic rival suggests that her pain is the natural and necessary tragedy of female aging. In Possessed , Louise

3 George Benjamin, “How Long Can You Stay Great?,” M odern Screen, September 1948, 104. 4 T.M.P., “At The Roxy,” T he New York Times, December 25, 1947, 32. 5 Carl Schroeder, “Just Because She’s Joan,” M odern Screen, May 1947, 57­58, 64; Eric Bishop, “Strange Woman,” Modern Screen, August 1947, 36­37. 6 Schroeder, “Just Because She’s Joan,” 64.

eventually finds strength in herself, but that strength, marked feminine, reveals itself narratively as irrational and uncontrollably destructive. In these films, however, Crawford utilizes what

Jenkins calls the “gorgon stare” and Mick LaSalle calls self pity, in which she performs, mostly through facial expressions, a hardening, an impenetrability, and the transmutation of pain into power. Crawford takes all the hurt these films throw at her her characters, all the scorn and abuse shot right at them, and she builds something strong with it.

Halfway through Sudden Fear , Myra Hudson (Crawford) stumbles across a recording of her new husband and his lover planning her death. Myra is a rich playwright who falls into a whirlwind romance with Lester Blaine (Jack Palance), a scam artist in love with his partner in crime Irene (Gloria Grahame). In the scene where Myra learns this, Crawford is shot almost exclusively in close and medium close shots which focuse the scene on her reaction to the horrible information. As Myra listens to the recording, Crawford performs all the crippling, body­encompassing pain of the revelation. Her eyes widen, her lips tremble, and her gaze wanders as her eyes dart to the left, then straight ahead, and then down again, as if uncertain of where to look. After a moment, still listening to the recording, she starts to take long heavy breaths, and her posture finds a stillness. Before she can get calm though, another barrage is fired. In the recording, Lester says “Sometimes when I’m with her it’s all I can do to keep from saying: be yourself, wise up. Love you? I never loved you. Never for one moment. I’d like to see her face.” At first, tears well up in Crawford’s ’s eyes, and she cocks her head and furrows her brow. The sadness is mixed with a disbelieving concern; she is puzzled and genuinely shocked, hearing her husband speak in this way. She closes her eyes and breathes; again attempting to pull her strength together. But as she opens her eyes, Lester’s voice­off blares: “Love you, I never

loved you.” As Lester and Irene flirt on the recording, Myra starts to breathe heavily, and swings her head from side to side, as if searching for a place to look. Unfortunately, there is no sightline that will stop her from hearing what she is hearing. Though most of the scene is shot in close up, the rising and falling of Myra’s shoulders suggest that she is limping a little as she walks up and down part of the room. While the later part of the scene depicts the film’s eponymous sudden fear (Myra’s discovery that her husband plans on killing her), Crawford initially performs Myra's suffering not on the basis of fear, but on that of romantic and sexual betrayal, and its own immobilizing effects on the body. By foregrounding the body debilitating effects of mental and physical cruelty, Crawford’s performance resists the devaluing of (older) female bodies, of the emotional life of women, and of female­specific dangers (like marrying a man who manages you, traps you and tries to murder you).

Sudden Fear (1952), Directed by David Miller

After the discovery of the murder plot, Myra has a terrible nightmare where she is thrown off a building, driven off a cliff, and strangled with a pillow. She wakes up screaming, and when

Lester comes to check on her, she has to hold her boiling fear inside. After Lester leaves, Myra lies up in bed, her head resting on her clenched fist. Myra, deeply serious and almost unreadable, is lost in thoughts the viewer is not fully privy to. Crawford, however, bears a slight grimace and wide eyes, and her chest falls and rises quickly with heavy breathing. During this sequence, a distorted echoing voice­over of Lester and his lover plays; the disturbing revelation bounces in

Myra’s head as she thinks. When the film cuts to the next morning, Myra has visibly transformed into an impervious figure of strength. She lies awake in bed, similarly blank­faced, but with less tremble in her eyes and lips. As the clock rings, Myra rises. Sitting up, she pushes herself fluidly off the bed and takes four lengthy and determined strides. All the while, her gaze remains firmly fixed on something off screen. After her first steps, Myra abruptly pauses. She straightens her shoulders, then marches forward, her arms glued to her sides. She sneaks into Lester’s room, and steals his key to Irene’s apartment. In this entire sequence, Crawford never says a word. She performs Myra’s transformation from fear to resolution silently, allowing the change to exist inside of herself, away from prying eyes. The transformation is gradual, as Crawford demonstrates in the night scene, when fear leaks in to her thinking face. The result, though, is unmistakable; Myra becomes an unshakeable woman, firmly in control of her fears.

Sudden Fear (1952), Directed by David Miller

The subversive power of Crawford’s performance lies in its relationship to a misogynistic script and direction. In her book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject ,

Saba Mahmood undergoes an ethnographic study of a women’s mosque movement in Cairo. As she notes: “The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded within a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status.”7 How can women who participate in a tradition which subordinates women be considered feminists? How can their work be worthy of study by feminists? The same questions may be asked of Joan Crawford (and of many other studio actresses) whose performances serve films that enact all sorts of cruelties and violences to women. For Mahmood, a major takeaway from Judith Butler (and in Butler’s work, from Michel

Foucault) is that no subject can be removed from the power structures which subordinate it.

7 Saba Mahmood, P olitics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 4­5.

“Such an understanding of power and subject formation encourages us to conceptualize agency not simply as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that specific relations of subordination create and enable.”8 Crawford’s performative response to a misogynistic structure in which her characters finds themselves is enabled and created by that same structure. As male directors and writers craft humiliations and cruelties for Crawford to perform, she is imbued with the power to resist. Because she is working within a misogynistic structure, her performative abilities have the specific capacity of agency to respond to the cruelties of that structure.

In Sudden Fear, Myra becomes a pillar of strength, but her power is imbued by the pain

Crawford first performs. Myra is a woman made unshakeable by being shaken so strongly. The shaking of Myra Hudson is at its core a subordination made possible by a patriarchal capitalist structure; Myra is a rich and successful older woman targeted by a man who sees her as an object of ridicule and disgust. Myra/Crawford’s aging body is a site of local agency because a war has been started there, by all the men who look at her, and make of her body what they will. In the film, Lester makes Myra’s body into something loathsome in order to take advantage of it. In his book, Mick LaSalle makes Crawford’s body loathsome in order to dismiss it. For Crawford to ultimately perform a sudden unfear of Lester and of patriarchy is to resist the ways she is represented or understood by forces outside of herself. Her agency to resist, not grounded in a desire for a concrete or politically determined freedom, is enabled by the cultural misuse of her body and image.

8 Mahmood, P olitics of Piety, 17­18.

Possessed , directed by Curtis Bernhardt, could be read as a simple ‘dangers of female emotional excess’ flick. In the film, Louise Howell, played by Crawford, holds an unrelenting love for David Sutton (the inimitable Van Heflin), who constantly rejects her, up until she murders him and consequently suffers a psychotic episode. Crawford’s performance, however, embodies a strength much more precise than the loose danger of the jealous crazy woman stereotype. The film, told in a series of flashbacks, begins with Louise post­murder. In the hospital, men fawn over her in an attempt at diagnosis. Louise is frozen in a catatonic state, and

Crawford’s wide and still eyes, pointed somewhere slightly above the camera, turn immobility into a permanent gaze. Her facial features, long penciled eyebrows and sharp cheekbones, accentuate her still face and her gaze. The camera, shot from the point of view of the doctors taking notes on Louise, places the viewer in the point of view of the looking­men, but

Crawford’s face redirects. The intensity and power of Crawford’s frozen face evokes strength in its feeling­less­ness, strength in being frozen.

Possessed (1947), Directed By Curtis Bernhardt

While Sudden Fear depicts Myra’s transformation from pain and scorn into a new and stronger woman, Possessed begins with Louise already transformed by emotional cruelty. The film could be read ideologically as a warning about the emotional instability of women, but

Crawford performs that instability as power, as an intense gaze redirected. The scrutiny of the doctors, which is also David’s scrutiny and the scrutiny of the vast number of writers and thinkers who have trapped Crawford in the box of crazy, transforms in Crawford’s eyes into a look of horror, wonder, and anger. In Sudden Fear , Crawford locates resistance by performing the transformation of pain into power, but in Possessed , resistance finds itself in the power of

Crawford’s eyes to take in scrutiny, and mold a gaze and a face that work outside of it.

Crawford’s performances locate agency and strength in the lives and bodies of women alone. The perception of female independence underwent several massive shifts in the 1940s.

The labor shortage created by the war necessitated mass female labor. Between 1940 to 1945, the paid female labor force in America grew by more than 50 percent. During the war, active participation in civic life was also asked of women. Millions worked in the Red Cross and the

Office of Civilian Defense. They acquired information for the Office of War Information and gathered money for war bonds. This mass movement into public spheres of American life did not mean that women were perceived as less tied to their traditional domestic roles. Marriage rates rose throughout the forties, and new emphasis was placed after the war on domestic responsibilities, especially for wives of returning veterans.9 In The Home Front and Beyond:

American Women in the 1940s , Susan Hartmann quotes the advice of sociologist Willard Waller, who believed that the wives of servicemen needed “more than the wife’s usual responsibility for her marriage,” that they must provide “lavish — and undemanding — affection” with “no immediate return.”10

In her films of this era, Crawford plays working single women who have pain and sorrow inflicted on them by men. The movies could be read as ideologically conservative warnings for women about the ways they might be treated outside of the domestic married sphere. However,

Crawford performs deep and meaningful strength in the alone­ness of her women. This is what it means to create local sites of agency. Crawford's resistance is not ostensibly political; there is no advocacy for new laws or structures of political representation. She instead works within the idea

9 Susan M. Hartmann, “The Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s,” (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 43­60. 10 Ibid, 47.

that the woman alone is wretched and miserable. She asserts agency in her performance, rewriting that myth.

Her Lack of Definition

Femme fatales in general, and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double

Indemnity (1944) in particular, have been largely understood as women with empty centers: male sexual desire splattered onto the screen in woman form. Mysteriousness, a key descriptor of the femme fatale, indicates the narrative embodiment of this male fantasy. Unlike the male protagonists of noir, whose twisted desires sharpen and pull them into sudden doom, femme fatales lather in the unknown until, at the end of the film, they are murdered. This form of dehumanization occurs textually, in which the death of the woman can be justified by her lack of motivation/desire and therefore humanity, and in critical literature, where femme fatales are often dismissed for their lack of clear psychoanalytic motivation. Phyllis Dietrichson has been dehumanized since the film’s release. The Chicago Daily Tribune , for instance, labeled her the

“cold, calculating, insinuating daughter of evil” in their review of the film.1 Her desires are contradictory and fluid, allowing them to be ignored, but in fact, Phyllis is filled with desire.

Stanwyck steeps her performance with an overabundance of expressive desire, making her desires illegible, or at least, ineffable.

Phyllis Dietrichson and the other formative femme fatales have always been defined in terms of their sexual positioning to men, both within their films and in film criticism. In “Women in Film Noir,” Janey Place writes

Film noir is a male fantasy, as is most of our art. This woman here as elsewhere is

defined by her sexuality: The dark lady has access to it and the virgin does not..film noir

is hardly ‘progressive’...But it does give us one of the few periods in film in which

1 Albert Goldberg, “Movie ‘Double Indemnity’ is Superb Drama’,” C hicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1944, 22.

women are active, not static symbols, are intelligent and powerful, if destructively so, and

derive power, not weakness, from their sexuality.2

Place expresses the dominant feminist understanding of the femme fatale; she is unquestionably a male fantasy, a woman whose impending death contains her sexually­constructed power. While film noir offers the delights of watching intelligent and powerful women on scene, we are never to confuse femme fatales for progressive representations. Femme fatales are made by men, and they die before their power can really mean anything. Even in Angela Martin’s revisionist essay

“‘Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!’: The Central Women of 40s Film Noirs,” the femme fatale label is a mark that must be stripped in order to re­evaluate the women of noir. “There is no question, where the femme fatale is truly present, of deadliness.

What is in question here is the seeming inability of (male) film noir theory to recognise female characters as performing other narrative functions.”3 Many women in noir have been mislabeled femme fatales, according to Martin, but the ones who really fit the bill are still just a “masculine view of female sexuality.”4 Martin argues that, in a list of eighty film noirs with central female characters, only eight are undoubtedly femme fatales. Phyllis Dietrichson is one of Martin’s eight.

While Double Indemnity is a predominately male­authored text (Raymond Chandler,

Billy Wilder, James Cain), focusing on Stanwyck’s performance allows me to think about the female construction of the femme fatale. In what ways does she exist outside of male fantasy?

What fantasies does she harbor? Andrew Klevan, the foremost film critic writing about female

2 Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in W omen in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: BFI, 1998), 47. 3 Angela Martin, “‘Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!’: The Central Women of 40s Film Noirs,” in W omen in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: BFI, 1998), 209. 4 Ibid, 208.

performance in 1940s films, participated in this line of questioning in “Restraint,” his chapter on

Double Indemnity in Stanwyck , his book­length performance analysis of Barbara Stanwyck. The restraint of Stanwyck’s performance leads him to the faulty conclusion that Phyllis Dietrichson does not exist outside of male fantasy. For Klevan, the infamous scene in which Phyllis hides behind an open door is a metaphor for her inner state: “Hiding, held back, taut, silenced, and trapped, she is present but also absent, and concocted from the talk of others”.5 Stanwyck apparently enacts this present absence through restraint; she hints at various feelings and states of beings, but never solidifies a single performance. Klevan, looking at the only significant female authorship in the construction of the femme fatale (performance), seems to finds nothing new.

Dietrichson is once again rendered by critical writing as male fantasy, not as human. Yet, much of what Klevan focuses on in his chapter are moments in which Stanwyck performs, with clarity and intensity, emotions and feelings that remain narratively unexplained. Finding contradiction is not the same as finding nothing. Stanwyck performs a complex swirl of sexual desire and disinterest that, while confusing and contradictory, points to the inner life of a woman who has only ever (in the movie, in writing about the movie) been conceived as some form of male fantasy or fear.

In her performance Stanwyck continually hints at various and often contradictory desires and feelings that complicate psychoanalytic readings of her character. “Her lack of definition gives the film an instability, something profoundly ungraspable at its heart,” Klevan writes.6 His argument for this lack of definition is rooted in moments when Stanwyck performs emotions which seem out of place. One key example he uses of the first type of destabilizing occurs when

5 Andrew Klevan, B arbara Stanwyck ( London: BFI, 2013), 106. 6 Ibid, 104.

Walter returns to Phyllis’ house. Clearly seeing the invitation to visit Phyllis alone during the day as a come on, Walter makes an insinuation about running the vacuum cleaner for her. As Klevan notes, Stanwyck “brushes him off by saying ‘Fresh,’ almost under her breath, in an unimpressed, and understated, ‘I’ve seen it all before manner’...she discovers unusual dimensions in familiar, risqué scenarios, and upsets the characteristic currents of desire”.7 Her delivery of the line is certainly as unimpressed as Klevan claims, but to write of it as an unusual dimension that upsets the current of desire is to view the moment as an abberrance. Perhaps instead, her crushingly cold delivery of the line is part of a more comprehensive simultaneous performance of sexual desire and discomfort in the scene as a whole.

At the outset of the scene in question, Phyllis is upbeat, but does not give or reciprocate the flirtatiousness that Walter initiates. As the two walk into the living room, Phyllis asks Walter if he wants ice tea. Her pitch drops slightly as she responds that she “never knows what’s in the ice box.” A long take tracking shot follows the pair as they enter the room, allowing the performers room to interact with each other and the environment in a less cinematically contrived manner. In that single take, Stanwyck performs an incredibly fluid movement where she turns her head to the stairs to shout at the maid, swings her gaze back towards the tea but lands on Walter’s hand, which is suddenly lighting a cigarette. Instantaneously she sees the cigarettes, frowns, and returns to the tea. This is perhaps another of those “unusual dimensions” of Stanwyck’s performance, but as blink­and­you­miss it as the moment is, partly because of the camera’s lack of interest in the expression (Stanwyck does not even get up a close­up in this

7 Ibid, 101.

portion of the scene), her facial expression is not mysterious. Stanwyck clearly performs disapproval with Walter’s behavior.

Double Indemnity (1944), Directed by Billy Wilder

A few seconds later, Phyllis shouts for the maid again, as Walter lights another cigarette.

In a split second, he tosses the match on the ground near her, and though she does not address it verbally, she does point her flat hand towards him in a ‘stop’ or ‘no thanks’ sort of gesture. The gesture does not correspond with the line she delivers about the maid’s day off (suggesting discord between the script and Stanywck’s performance?). Walter saddles up to Stanwyck here, leering: “as long as it’s the maid’s day off, maybe there’s something I can do for you.”

Stanwyck’s slight smile disappears. In another impressively fluid gesture, caught in the same

medium shot long take, she looks up in the opposite direction of Walter, hands him his tea, closes her eyes, and looks at the ground. And then she says “fresh,” as understated and unimpressed as

Klevan discusses. Instead of as a mystifying moment out of line with the rest of her performance, this delivery can be read as the culmination of Stanwyck’s signals throughout the scene. Walter asserts throughout the film that he was seduced by Phyllis and fell right into her trap; in this way, the film makes female sexuality its true villain. Barbara Stanwyck, however, performs disinterest and unattraction exactly at the moment where Walter would say he is being seduced, and in doing so she deeply complicates the film’s dominant narrative of a seductive vixen entrapping an innocent man.

In Phyllis’ last scene on screen, Stanwyck performs in multiple registers, creating various possible ‘true selves’ for her character to reveal herself to be in her final moments. Before Walter arrives, she hides her gun under her chair and then freezes on top of it in a posture of recline, smoking a cigarette, “languid and rigid.”8 When Walter asks if anyone else is home, Stanwyck delivers the line “Nobody, why?” in a smooth, soft cadence. One of the moments in the film in which Stanwyck masterfully performs performing, Phyllis almost sounds as if she is genuinely wondering without malice why Walter would ask who was home. As she remains frozen, she watches Walter like a hawk. As Walter pushes her, Stanwyck's voice gets nasally and sharp and she sounds more like her lower­class characters in Ball of Fire (1941) and Lady Eve (1941) and less like the iced tea­drinking housewife she first appeared as. This first segment of performance can be read as: Stanwyck performs Phyllis performing innocence, and then caught red­handed,

8 Ibid, 103.

Phyllis finally drops her guise. If the scene ended here, Phyllis might finally be the err femme fatale: seductress who, when backed into a corner, reveals her true monstrosity.

In a medium shot, Walter closes the window blinds, and is suddenly shot. By the time the film cuts to Phyllis, Walter is stumbling towards her. Her body is not present in the cinematic depiction of the only violent act she commits in the film. Phyllis points her gun at the ground, still clenching it. He forcefully grabs her gun; she looks up, gazing at him. Except for a brief cut to Walter, the camera holds on a close­up of Phyllis in her last moments. Walter asks if Phyllis loves him; Stanwyck’s eyes get big and watery, and she cocks her head a little before she speaks; she looks sad and hurt and filled with desire. “I never loved you, or anyone else,” she tells him in one soft, low breath. This line reading is the most interesting moment in the movie, because it would have been so simple for Stanwyck to say “I never loved you or anyone else” the way she earlier confessed to seducing Nino Zachetti, in a sharp, nasally voice, the voice of a cornered villain confessing to her crimes. Or it would have been so simple for Phyllis to say in an earnest cadence that she does love Walter, as a desperate ploy for her life. But instead, Stanwyck utters

“I never loved you” gently, while gazing at him and stroking him, as if confessing her undying love by not confessing it. Phyllis, at the end of her rope, is several threads that do not fit together but are all really there. Her voice starts to screech and crack as she says she did not think she would ever be unable to kill someone.

Double Indemnity (1944), Directed by Billy Wilder

Phyllis begs Walter to hold her close, and then she grabs him and holds him close. The medium close up holds on her face as she closes her eyes and pushes her head into his chest. The desperation of the movement can be ascribed to Phyllis the seductress’s desperation to stay alive or to Phyllis the lover’s desperation to feel her lover one more time. Suddenly, she flings open her eyes and bolts upright. She looks Walter in the eyes, and for a moment, her face is void of fear. She faces her doom with some kind of courage. In the last instant before she is shot, she opens her mouth and her lips tremble, as if she is thinking of something to say. Stanwyck performs Phyllis’ finale not as the absence of presence, but as the overabundance of presence. In one moment, Phyllis is the treacherous (class marked) monster who drops her guise and snears when caught. In another moment, she is a criminal who has fallen in love with her victim, and is

desperately caught in the snares of romantic and sexual desire. Phyllis is a strong femme fatale who will face death head on. Phyllis is a human, terrified of dying. All of this is there, and

Phyllis Dietrichson is unknowable because she is too knowable, because the audience sees more of her than it can make any sense of.

Barbara Stanwyck was a master of performing complex iterations of desire. In an early starring role in the shocking pre­code Baby Face (1933), Stanwyck plays Lily Powers. Powers, an impoverished bartender, engages in sexual encounters with men of various social classes as she moves further and further up the economic ladder. The question of sexual desire, sexual power, and the intersection of the two runs through the body of her work, from Baby Face all the way to Forty Guns (1957), in which she plays a powerful tycoon shot by her lover and

‘resurrected’ as a chaste and non­threatening girlfriend. Stanwyck’s mastery at nuanced renderings of desire allow her to complicate the dominant critical understanding of the femme fatale. Phyllis Dietrichson is one of the most vilified women of noir; even critics engaged in

‘saving’ female characters of noir from simplistic labels do not bother with her. Yet, if the label femme fatale is reserved for creations of male fantasy, the contradictory desires that Stanwyck charges her performance with complicate Phyllis’ role in that category.

Conclusion: She Wields Her Finished Artistry

In 1956, a Mr. Nat Shapiro wrote to the New York Times to express his support for Bosley

Crowther’s scathing review of Autumn Leaves (1956) starring Joan Crawford. “You will probably receive a shower of letters from many women indignant at the slights cast upon their heroine. However, do not let this disturb you. The men of the nation are behind you 100 per cent.

For how long should we endure these horrible roles of the good and pure woman made to suffer at the hands of the predatory and unworthy male sex?”1 The revulsion towards Crawford, while perhaps cartoonishly extreme in this case, is nothing new. As discussed earlier, male film critics have criticized Joan Crawford as a performer for as long as they could, often utilizing vile misogynistic language. However, Shapiro’s easy assumption that Crawford was the heroine of many women is less trod territory. Personally, I am disappointed in my lack of success in finding writing by female movie fans of the 1940s. Was Nat Shapiro right? Did the women of this nation love and defend Joan Crawford for a time? What about Barbara Stanwyck and Myrna Loy? More specifically, what did their performances mean to the female movie­going population? Did

Crawford’s turn in Sudden Fear motivate any women to reconsider their own strength and independence?

Admittedly, this line of questioning is speculative, particularly in a paper mostly committed to textual analysis, as opposed to historical research. I do want to suggest, however, that close analysis of performance has the ability to locate ideas and feelings these films may have generated which have not been as analyzed in critical literature. Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck manifested resistance in their performances in three different manners.

1 Nat Shapiro, “A Man Speaks,” T he New York Times, August 19, 1956, 101.

Myrna Loy mostly performed normative femininity, but in The Best Years of Our Lives she troubled a subservient housewife role with moments of disquiet. Joan Crawford performed a defiant female strength within demeaning roles crafted by men. Barbara Stanwyck filled the burgeoning trope of the femme fatale with nuanced desire and humanity. All of their performances complicate the male­authored texts that they work within. Close analysis of screen performance, which Film Studies has not dedicated enough energy towards, has intense capacity to locate these kinds of nuances, troubles, and resistances. Even the most analyzed of films, like

Double Indemnity , contain performances which trouble their dominant narratives.

Undoubtedly, many women expressed deep reverence for the actresses I have written about, and I can only imagine that these complex and challenging performances played a role in this love. In a 1938 issue of The Chicago Daily Tribune , Mrs. M.C. Hann sent in this poem, lovingly dedicated to Myrna Loy. “The Queen” evokes the deep regal strength of the actress’s craft, making it a fitting end to this essay.

The Queen

Like a lovely portrait rare — Smiling, charming, gracious, fair She flashes on the silver screen, Our choice for this year’s queen!

With a rhythm sure and free, She wields her finished artistry, Into a symphony of grace To suit the most capricious taste.

May she reign long and proud, And on her brow no cloud Disturb the quiet poise serene Of our choice for this year’s queen.2

2 M.C. Hann, “Voice of The Movie Fan,” C hicago Daily Tribune, April 3, 1938, 2. Bibliography

Benjamin, George. “How Long Can You Stay Great?” Modern Screen , September 1948.

Bishop, Eric. “Strange Woman.” Modern Screen , August 1947.

Castonguay, James. “Myrna Loy and William Powell: The Perfect Screen Couple.” In Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s , ed. Adrienne L. McLean. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

Goldberg, Albert. “Movie ‘Double Indemnity’ is Superb Drama’.” Chicago Daily Tribune , November 3, 1944.

Hann, M.C.. “Voice of The Movie Fan.” Chicago Daily Tribune , April 3, 1938.

Jenkins, Chadwick . “The Hollywood Star as Fetish Object: Joan Crawford in ‘Mildred Pierce.’” PopMatters , June 4, 2017. https://www.popmatters.com/the­hollywood­star­as­fetish­object­joan­crawford­in­mildr ed­pierce­2495389368.html.

Klevan, Andrew. Barbara Stanwyck. London: BFI Publishing, 2013.

Klevan, Andrew. Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation . London: Wallflower Press, 2005.

LaSalle, Mick. Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre­Code Hollywood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Manners, Dorothy. “At Last—The Heart­Stirring Love Story of Myrna Loy,” Photoplay , August 1936.

Martin, Angela. “‘Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!’: The Central Women of 40s Film Noirs.” In Women in Film Noir , ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 202­228. London: BFI Publishing, 1998.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” In Women in Film Noir , edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 35­67. London: BFI Publishing, 1980.

Schroeder, Carl. “Just Because She’s Joan.” Modern Screen , May 1947.

Shapiro, Nat. “A Man Speaks.” The New York Times, August 19, 1956.

Susan Hartmann. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s . Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

Filmography

Bernhardt, Curtis. Possessed . 1947. Warner Brothers.

Miller, David. Sudden Fear . 1952. RKO Pictures.

Preminger, Otto. Daisy Kenyon . 1947. 20th Century Fox.

Van Dyke, W.S. The Thin Man. 1934. MGM.

Wilder, Billy. Double Indemnity . 1944. Paramount Pictures.

Wyler, William. The Best Years of Our Lives . 1946. Samuel Goldwyn Productions.

Zinnemann, Fred. Act of Violence . 1949. MGM.