The Best Actress of the 1940s: Barbara Stanwyck

Okay, I'm not going to beat around the bush. The fact is that Barbara Stanwyck probably should be called the greatest actress of the 30s, 40s and 50s at least. One casual perusal of her resume and it is obvious this woman could no wrong. From her insanely sexy roles in such pre-code "naughty" movies as Illicit and Baby Face all the way through the capstone to her long career in The Thorn Birds, Stanwyck proved she had amazing lasting power and there was no role she couldn't play. Her greatest performances in the 1930s came early in the decade when her sex appeal was at its peak, but she really came into her own during the 1940s.

In the 1940s Barbara Stanwyck moved effortlessly from screwball comedies to melodrama to film noir and that's not even including her indescribable performance in Lady of Burlesque, a film that calls upon her dramatic abilities and her comedic abilities while also demanding that she sing and do a cartwheel in a stripper's outfit while wearing high heels. One of the first movies that Stanwyck made in the 1940s was the Frank Capra classic Meet John Doe. Stanwyck was Capra's favorite actress, probably because of her versatility; after all, a Capra movie is itself an exercise in watching a sometimes seamless and sometimes painful conglomeration of comedy and drama. A Capra film often required an actress capable of making you laugh one minute and cry the next. As great as Jean Arthur was, it's impossible to think of any actress you'd rather see in a Capra movie than Barbara Stanwyck.

The 1940s witnessed the decline of the screwball comedy in face of the horrors of World War II, but before this genre declined into the godawful romantic comedies of Nora Ephron Barbara Stanwyck starred back to back in two of the greatest ever made, Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve. In fact, it was comedy that really defined Stanwyck's early to mid-40s career. In addition to the wild pratfalls and crisp dialogue of her screwball comedies, Stanwyck also excelled in the aforementioned comedy-suspense Lady of Burlesque as well as one of the all time great Christmas movies, Christmas in Connecticut. The latter film eschews the quick pace and rapid fire dialogue of the screwball comedies to present an example of what a romantic comedy should be. In some ways Christmas in Connecticut is what a screwball comedy should be when you take away the screwball.

In between the transition from screwball to romance in the comedy genre, however, Barbara Stanwyck made a movie that defined an icon. If the screwball comedy was a casualty of World War II, then film noir owes its birth to the anxiety and alienation fostered by that nightmare glimpse into the heart of human darkness. In 1944 writer/director Billy Wilder essentially perfected American film noir with Double Indemnity. One of the hallmarks of film noir is the femme fatale and there is no greater example than Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson. With her platinum hair and icy eyes Stanwyck is appropriately chilling and seductive. Most of Stanwyck's best performances in the second half of the 1940s would be in either straight film noirs or other crime-related melodramas. Highlights include such classics as The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Sorry Wrong Number, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, and The File on Thelma Jordan.

Turner Classic Movies generally features a handful of Barbara Stanwyck movies each mother, in part because she made so many truly classic movies. As for Netflix, Barbara Stanwyck is a hit or miss proposition. Although many of her movies are available on Netflix, for some reason such genuinely classic titles such as Meet John Doe and Ball of Fire are unavailable.