King Vidor (1937)

This maternal self-sacrifice tearjerker is based on the 1923 novel of the same name by Olive Higgins Prouty (best known to me as Sylvia Plath’s supporter:  Prouty sponsored a Smith College scholarship for ‘promising young writers’) and has been adapted for the screen several times over the decades.   This one is generally regarded as the definitive version, thanks to Barbara Stanwyck in the title role.  The opening scene alone is enough to remind you what a great actress Stanwyck is.  Working-class Stella Martin lives with her parents and brother.  He and her father are both blue-collar workers at a paper mill in a Massachusetts town.  Stella stands outside the house as the mill workers come home.  Her ruffled blouse is conspicuously dressy and she’s posing with a book entitled ‘Indian Love Lyrics’ – she wants to be noticed by the boss of the mill, Stephen Dallas, when he passes by.   This sounds (and is) an obvious idea but the depth of dissatisfaction and appetite for something else that Stanwyck conveys transforms it.

In the last shot of Stella Dallas, she’s differently but no less compelling.   Stella marries Stephen but, soon after the birth of their daughter Laurel, he decides that his wife is irredeemably vulgar and they separate.  He pays for his daughter’s education but Stella, with whom the girl stays, has to earn their keep by dressmaking.   The story moves, incredibly but inexorably, to the point at which Stella not only agrees to divorce Stephen (back with his first love, the now widowed Helen, and her three sons) but to give Laurel up – because her daughter’s happiness and future are of paramount importance to her, and Stella stands in their way.  In the film’s closing scene Laurel is marrying old money (the groom’s name is Richard Grosvenor III) and, in the rainy street outside, crowds are pressing to get a glimpse of the brilliant society wedding.  Stella negotiates a front row view:  she watches Laurel through the window then turns and walks away from the house towards the camera, tearful but with a widening smile, elated in the achievement of what she wanted for her daughter and, therefore, her own self-realisation.

Stanwyck has incredible emotional vitality and variety but you don’t believe in Stella the way you believe in her characters in The Bitter Tea of General Yen or Forbidden or Double Indemnity because the mechanics of the melodrama are so crude.  The plotting depends on Stella’s switching between an inability to conceal her native coarseness and a capacity for not just self-denial but also self-awareness.   When Stephen pays a surprise Christmas visit (to take Laurel away for the holiday), Stella is so conscious that she needs to look ‘respectable’ that she removes some fancy bits from a dress before appearing in it.  Later on, when she’s saved enough (it’s not clear how) to take Laurel on a posh holiday, she makes an overdressed fool of herself.  Stella entertains her disreputable friends at home, which is enough to send the dull, proper Stephen (John Boles) on his way.  She and the dissolute gambler Munn (Alan Hale, Sr) are loud and outrageous in a railway carriage where the other travellers include two of Laurel’s teachers – as a result, neither they nor any of the schoolfriends invited turns up for Laurel’s thirteenth birthday party, which Stella has planned meticulously.   At the start, she’s strikingly shrewd and calculating in her attempts to land Stephen Dallas, and there’s never any doubt that Laurel means everything to her.  When does she stop noticing that her behaviour impedes what she wants for her daughter?  (It’s especially puzzling that she continues to keep company with Munn, who’s hardly attractive and who disgusts Laurel.)  All this might seem to be taking the whole thing too seriously – but it matters more than it might because Stanwyck is so truthful a performer.

Another problem is that the moneyed life which Stella wants Laurel to attain is so repellent, especially the younger generation who partake of it and their deadly high spirits.  Still, Anne Shirley, although she’s pretty insufferable in simulating girlish enthusiasm as a pre-adolescent, plays Laurel with commitment and consistency, and she eventually wins you over.  The cast also includes Tim Holt (as Richard Grosvenor III), Marjorie Main (Stella’s careworn mother), George Wolcott (Stella’s brother), Barbara O’Neil (the drearily noble Helen), Anne Shoemaker (Laurel’s teacher Miss Philibrown) and Hattie McDaniel (Stella’s maid, and a couple of stone slimmer than in Gone with the Wind).

6 March 2011