Film Review: "Ladies of Leisure" Barbara Stanwyck (1931)

Over the years, classic older films have been popping up in drips and drabs on various streaming platforms. Turner Classic Movies has long featured lesser-known classics and even non-classics, some from the famous “pre-code” era before 1934 when the Hays Code, the Hollywood censor, began to be enforced. 

I was working for Turner Broadcasting when we bought the venerable MGM library in 1989. Ted Turner promised to make the entire library available to the public. His cable operator investors hated the idea, but Turner was vindicated, as he often was, by creating not one but two new much-loved cable channels: Turner Classic Movies and The Cartoon Network, built on the foundation of the old movies and cartoons of the MGM trove. 

As great as TCM is, its business model of only making a hundred or so movies available online at a given time, focusing instead on a single feature broadcast and promoted over the air on regularly scheduled programming, didn’t lend itself to deep dives into the great actors, writers, and director of the past. 

You might love Cary Grant, and set your DVR to record all six of Cary’s movies that TCM might feature in a given month, but you would only scratch the surface of systematically viewing his more than 100 film roles. Six viewed films are not nothing, but neither are 94 unviewed films, many of them classics, all of them worth watching if you’re a true fan.

Something has changed in the past few years, though. Many more older films appear to have been encoded, most legally, some possibly illegally, and are available from a panoply of sources including TCM; Max; rentals from Apple, Amazon, and Google; Prime; other streamers such as The Criterion Channel; library sources like Hoopla and Kanopy; YouTube for some copyright-free films; and DVDs easily obtained on Amazon. You won’t find all the films featuring your favorites, but you will find many, likely a majority.

For the first time, a fan of a vintage star can trace their career and watch them develop from the earliest days of talkies to the advent of CinemaScope and television. 

I first became a fan of the Beatles years ago, not when I stumbled across their albums, but from the collections of their greatest hits known as the Red and Blue albums. It took me years before I acquired all their major albums and more years before I began to fully appreciate their development and innovation from Meet the Beatles to Abbey Road. Learning about how the group grew and changed added immensely to my admiration for the group. The Beatles then became a gateway for me to learn more about music, the sixties, and the creative business. 

That evolution is now possible with early Hollywood heavyweights. I have long been a fan of 1930s Hollywood fare, especially screwball comedies. The stars of that film era, especially women like Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis have fascinated me. I have enjoyed viewing dozens of their films. But I find one star from that era the most fascinating of all: Barbara Stanwyck. From her earliest starring roles in the 1920s to her cheesy appearance in an Elvis film in the 1960s, she has fascinated me with her ability to hold the attention of a viewer.

A slight woman who can play an emotional heavyweight, a floozy who can play the gal with the heart of gold, a girl boss who can melt into the arms of a strong man, she epitomizes the variegated roles that a single professional can tackle with aplomb during the studio era.  Joan Crawford is more strikingly beautiful. Bette Davis is more resonant. Carole Lombard is funnier. And Myrna Loy is my all-time favorite. 

But if you are going to take advantage of the new era of easily available films from the early days of Hollywood to trace the development of the industry through a single powerful personality, you could do far worse than to start with Ruby Stephens from Brooklyn who became Barbara Stanwyck of Hollywood.

Like lots of quests or collections, you choose your first specimen not because you have culled it from an elaborate process but as Edmund Hillary chose his mountains: because it is there. I noticed that a number of early Barbara Stanwyck films were being featured on Max—thrust onto my “because you liked…” screen by the unrelenting algorithm—so my wife Marisa and I decided to try viewing one of her early offerings, Stella Dallas. The film was so unexpected, her performance was so nuanced, that it was a revelation. 

So I began to seek out more information about Stanwyck. I knew her, of course, from her seminal role in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, the performance so powerful that it either launched or turbocharged the genre of film noir. And we always start out our Christmas movie viewing season with Christmas in Connecticut, the 1943 film featuring her as a Martha Stewart precursor—winsome, seductive, businesslike, and a little silly.

I had caught a few other Stanwyck performances along the way, but when I learned that she made five films with Frank Capra, the heartwarming director of It’s a Wonderful Life, Meet John Doe (her last film with him), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and that four of those films were made in the early 30s, including their first which made her a bonafide star, I fired up my Letterboxd and Reelgood apps and scanned my streaming options to see if my wife and I could begin a journey of discovering the full Stanwyck ouvre, at least up until the 1950s when she took a break from Hollywood stardom.

We began with her first Capra film: Ladies of Leisure. Only a year into the talking era, Hollywood was trying to figure out who had the vocal chops to make the transition from silent movies and who didn’t. Very few bonafide stars from silent films succeeded in making the leap. Directors, like Capra, seemed to be more successful. 

Because it was such an era of experimentation, the films from 1929-1931 are fascinating as Hollywood tried out different vocal styles, sound designs, and effects. Many elements that we consider crucial to a film, like a prominent musical soundtrack, were virtually non-existent in those days. Its absence lends more import to the dialog and natural sound. 

Many, if not most, actresses were speaking in the famous “mid-Atlantic” dialect, with a slightly British upper-crust accent. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Irene Dunne all spoke this way. Katherine Hepburn added a strong New England brogue to her delivery. But Barbara Stanwyck stood out as a Brooklyn gal with a crisp, “cut-to-the-chase” “whaddya want?” vibe that set her apart as a leading lady. Lots of mooks and molls inhabited early talkies, but they were usually relegated to character roles. Stanwyck was a leading actress, who not only grabbed every gaze in the room but often took on decidedly feminist, anti-establishment roles that thrust her into a leadership position.

In Ladies of Leisure, we meet Stanwyck as she is rowing herself to safety from a party on an unseen yacht. She is picked up by Jerry, scion of a wealthy railroad-owning father, who had just left a snooty party filled with tuxedo and party dress-clad bon vivants. He is driving to his art studio to clear his head by doing his real love, painting, when he stops to give the lady of leisure, Barbara Stanwyck, a lift from her water bourne journey. 

Like many leading men of this era, Jerry Strong (played by Ralph Graves) is tall, dark, handsome, earnest, and boring as hell. But his passenger is a revelation. She is feisty, funny, earthy—quick to smile and jab. He’s taken aback and only seems to see merit in her when she stops being feisty and falls asleep on his shoulder. He gazes at her lovely face and realizes that she could be the ideal model for his next painting. 

Jerry talks Ann into taking the job, after all, we discover that she and her roommate are “ladies of leisure” whose incomes derive from being sexy at parties (how much more they do is probably impossible for post-pill generations to guess correctly). Jerry’s $2/hr steady income is too good for Ann to pass up, which puts the elements of the story into play.

You can guess what happens from here, but you might not be able to guess how.  Jerry’s family objects to his art career and the presence of a lady of leisure coming to his studio every day. Jerry tries to get Ann to pose looking upward, conveying the idea that she is looking at the stars in the distance but she tells him she can only see the ceiling. She lacks the ability to dream of a larger life.

When Ann begins to see a possible future with Jerry one beautiful evening and she can see the stars after all, Jerry rushes her back into the studio to try to capture the mood. They work so late that she must stay the night. She assumes that he will take advantage of her. In a genuinely scary scene where Jerry creeps out of bed to her guest cot and Capra focuses on his slippered feet as he approaches his prey, Stanwyck is surprised and relieved when his only desire seems to be to put a blanket on her to make sure she is warm. She is awake the whole time. We see her fear and resignation turn to relief and even affection, all conveyed through Stanwyck’s eyes and facial expression. You can feel her becoming a star in moments like this.

Like so many films of this era, their class difference proves the major obstacle to their happiness. Until the very end of the film, which includes scenes of abandonment and a suicide attempt, the couple’s fate seems more likely to end in tragedy than happiness. You’ll have to watch the film to find out if it does.

There is a moment in Ladies of Leisure when Capra’s camera pans up to the stars that brings It’s a Wonderful Life’s scene introducing Clarence the angel to mind. When a character ponders suicide by looking down at the churning water below, it’s hard not to think of George Bailey on the bridge.  Part of the fun of going back to see the earliest work of accomplished filmmakers and actors is to see the evolution of their craft. It’s not surprising that they reuse what works again. Recognizing these gems is one of the rewards of the treasure hunt.

Ladies of Leisure didn’t win any awards, but if you’re a fan of Capra and Stanwyck, it's worth a view. Stanwyck came out a star. Capra came out infatuated with her, which would lead to four more and better films in the coming years.