Ladies of Leisure – directed by Frank Capra. Melodrama. 99 minutes Black And White 1930
★★★★★
The Story: a call girl models for a rich artist and falls in love with him and he with her, and all is well until his socially prominent parents intervene.
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To see this film is to see one of the great stars of the movies in her first principal role and to see her at not just her first but her best.
Some movie stars start slow. They take a good long while to jell in the public value: Bette Davis, Bogart, Grable, Monroe, Hayworth. Others appear instantly out of the brow of Zeus, with something so particular, so fresh, so honest, and so inherently entertaining in all that, that the public never ceases wanting again what they first saw in them suddenly and at once: Brando, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Vivien Leigh, Edward G. Robinson, Chaplin, Garbo.
Barbara Stanwyck falls into the second category. And Women of Leisure is her Roman Holiday, East Of Eden, Streetcar Named Desire, and Torrent. She comes forth fresh, full, young, open, ready, and of a wide range within the confines of the material. The confines of the material are large, for they are full scale melodrama.
We don’t see melodrama any more as a serious dramatic medium, but in 1930 and before it was an accepted, honorable, and, by audiences, well understood and appreciated dramatic medium.
Melodrama is a word that means drama with music. And in movies you used to find a lot of it. Now Voyager with its big Max Steiner Score is a good example of it, and as you watch that movie you wonder if the acting of the actors could carry the scenes without the music elbowing in. But what the music did in movies was actually to elbow out written scenes. Movie music supplants writing, speech, dialogue, the working out of human drama through what people say to one another.
But in stage melodrama, the music was not present. (I’m not talking about meller-dramer, which is mock melodrama, in which music often is present: Irma Vep, Little Mary Sunshine.) In real stage melodrama the music is verbal, or rather the emotions attached to the words are a music which the words, in their completeness, cue in the actors. The only modern equivalent still played is opera. Opera dramas are ridiculous; the music sublime; the words are none, they are in a foreign tongue. But in real stage melodrama, the music is written out in lengthy dialogue, and in these scenes, nothing is ridiculous save the comic relief interluding them. Melodrama, that is to say, depends upon dramatic scenes written out to their fullest extent. No twist or turn is left out of the dialogue of a scene. The 19th Century theatre was rich with melodrama as serious theatre. Schiller a great exemplar of it, Pirandello makes use of its tropes, Shaw of its volubility. There is great pleasure in watching. good melodrama played out to the full by good actors willing in invest.
In modern plays, we do not often have such scenes; in modern movies never. Dialogue scenes are short and rationed. Emotion in them is rationed. It’s a different way of playing. It’s a good one. And actors expert at it are (by no means little) admirable since certainly through taciturnity they can avoid being hams. Sometimes less is more.
But sometimes more is more. And melodrama is always more. Screenwriter Jo Swerling has written a good one.
Stanwyck in his piece might become hammy at any moment, and never does. Watch her take the big confrontation scene with the young man’s mother. Seven minutes of sustained and varied dialogue and emotion in a demonstration of screen acting you will seldom ever seen again from any actor at any time in a movie. The scene does not move around, it does not stop and start, it does not cut away from her unduly. Rather it stays on her and watches her and honors what it is seeing in her. It is also written out unflinching through all its permutation and possibilities. Nothing is left to chance. Nothing is withheld. Everything is offered the actors and us. And we revel in it. The length and scenic fullness of melodrama allows the audience to see into the actor’s being. It gives the actor time. That is its key virtue. And it’s a privilege and a responsibility to give ourselves to it.
Provided the actors can negotiate. it.
Any young actress starting out might well place herself here before this actress as she was starting out. It’s a big part, the focal role of the film. It offers her a range, and she takes it and runs with it in directions you would not expect. She is never sentimental, weep though she does, and she is never shallow, wise-crack though she does.
Her co-star is a lunky actor, who is neither good nor bad, so his performance does not sabotage hers. And she has decent support in Blanche Sweet and the rest of the company.
And she is held like a treasure by Frank Capra who directed her. He learned at once that Stanwyck had only the first take, and so he rehearsed everyone separately, went through the blocking with her, and then shot it with two cameras so as to gather the co-actors in the shot. He shot her closeups first so they were fresh. He had a superb sound man, and one of the great cameramen in movies, Joe Walker. Capra said to Stanwyck, “You are not beautiful, but I will do something for you that will bring out the beauty that is in you and in your acting,” and so he and Walker did. Stanwyck’s skin was luminous under light, she had high cheek bones, and an alto voice perfect for sound. And she had the common touch.
Capra did not want to use Stanwyck in this pictures. He interviewed her, and she was surly. She had come to Hollywood and made some bum films that led nowhere; no one was taking an interest in her; no one told her anything about screen acting. She was about to go back to New York where she had had a big success as a stage actress. But she had made a screen test at another studio; Alexander Korda, then a young director directed it; they had no one to act opposite her and no script, so Korda asked her what she wanted to do, and she played a scene from one of her Broadway hits. When she later told Korda that Capra didn’t want her, Korda (or, depending on the story, her husband Frank Fay) went to Capra and took the test over and urged him to see it. Unwillingly Capra did, and in it he recognized exactly what he needed. That surly girl was a brilliant actress waiting to be released.
What he saw, and what all of us still see in Ladies Of Leisure, is a young actress flying at her full potential: honest, straightforward, strong, vulnerable, varied, brave, loving, and smart. These are the qualities Stanwyck has been famous for forever. It is wonderful; it is refreshing to see them here and for the first time.
And no musical score. Stanwyck does it all.