Brooklyn girl Barbara Stanwyck is a leading lady of film noir great and small, including one of the best, Double Indemnity, as well as several lesser examples of the genre, two of which I saw tonight—you guessed it—at the Film Forum.
Stanwyck always seemed to be smart and flinty, yet constrained by the decidedly less charismatic characters she often played. In Witness to Murder (1954), she’s interior decorator Cheryl Draper, who observes a murder, Rear Window-style, in the apartment across the way, then tries for the film’s remainder to make the police believe it actually happened.
The murderer, Albert Richter (the composed and eloquent George Sanders), speaks exactly like Kelsey Grammer’s Sideshow Bob character in The Simpsons. He’s crafty, too, having hidden the body and evidence, as both he and the unwitting police strive to convince (or in Richter’s case, dupe) Draper into thinking she just dreamed up the whole thing. That a rational person could ever explain this much away is stupid. The lieutenant on the case (Gary Merrill) alternates between reassurances that Draper is merely a hysterical woman and taking her out to dinner. Eventually, Richter gets overly cocky in his mind games and opts for the more direct approach of trying to hurl Draper out her own window. A chase leads them up the winding stair of a clock tower for a confrontation at the top, with some filmwork prefiguring the finale of Vertigo four years later, although not as technically adept.
Crime of Passion starts with Stanwyck in a firecracker role as Kathy Ferguson, a San Francisco advice columnist who tells her women readership to take no guff, sasses back to her boss and tells various men point blank to shut up. Then yet another oddly calm lieutenant, Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) moseys into her life and suddenly she’s gooey in love, married and rockin’ the bedsprings with him. (The latter point only implied by some sly dialogue; this was 1957.) All of a sudden, she’s the perfect suburban housewife, fretting over her husband’s social standing among the nattering wives of his coworkers who stop by for canapés and cigarettes, gossiping about who’s been invited to what party and whose husband is getting promoted over whom. And that whole adage about a woman scorned: look out, man. Her conniving ways become increasingly frantic and after an affair calculated to improve her husband’s position at work backfires, she caps the man, a senior cop played by Perry Mason-era Raymond Burr, by shooting him clean through his handsome, raccoon-eyed head. Then she drives home and falls asleep. There’s the Stanwyck I know and love, even though Doyle eventually cracks the case and has to arrest his own wife.