Word: stanwycks
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...There were revelations aplenty, especially in the early-'30s Warner melodramas; they instructed a new generation of old-film fans in the urban snarl, panache and breathless efficiency of the young James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis, plus a bunch of directors that scholars had mostly ignored. But TNT was clogged with commercials, sometimes 15-20 mins. an hour. In time, the oldies format gave way to basketball and reruns of '70s TV shows. The FOOFs were disconsolate... and ecstatic when free TCM premiered Apr. 14, 1994 (again with Gone with the Wind). The same library would be ransacked...
...Beverly Garland, 82, played it steely in '50s B movies (she starred in five early Roger Corman cheapies), then sweet as Fred MacMurray's wife on My Three Sons. A cut-rate Barbara Stanwyck, she deserved better scripts than she got. In Edgar G. Ulmer's meat-B noir classic Detour (1945), Ann Savage, 87, invested her sharp features and scraping-chalk voice in, unquestionably, the harshest, most conniving bitch in movie history. More than 60 years later, Guy Maddin cast her as another harridan-hellion - his mother - in the recent "docu-fantasia" My Winnipeg...
...half weren't even nominated for Best Picture. But what about the acting categories? Surely Hollywood has recognized its most potent performers. Not always. If this year's nominated actors want to join the exalted ranks of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Peter O'Toole and Barbara Stanwyck, they'd better hope they lose, since none of these luminaries received a competitive Oscar...
...gone to a handful of comedies (including It Happened One Night and Annie Hall), but generally the Academy prefers to be edified. The year of Citizen Kane, 1941, was also the year of Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, today regarded as one of the great American comedies, with Stanwyck and Henry Fonda brilliant as a cardsharp predator and her millionaire prey. None of them got even a nomination for this supreme farce...
...actor could encapsulate the limitations of the Oscar mind-set, it would be Stanwyck, who in the early '30s all but created the movies' image of the tough broad, surviving and thriving in the Depression through a wily, earthy cynicism. Stanwyck was sensational in grimy melodramas, from Illicit and Night Nurse to the immoral, immortal Baby Face. But she didn't get an Oscar nomination until 1938, when she broke from her normal screen character to play the nobly sacrificing mother in Stella Dallas. Seven years later, when she was a finalist as the rotten femme fatale of Double Indemnity...