The following is an excerpt from my video about Barbara Stanwyck. Unfortunately, the video is about as long as The Odyssey so I have to post my writing in parts. This section covers her comedic work through 1945. This piece was edited for Substack by Spencer Glesby.
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It is a great testament to Stanwyck’s versatility that she followed up Stella Dallas with Breakfast for Two, a comedy in which she plays an heiress who tries to get a playboy heir to get his act together by buying his shipping company out from under him. Stanwyck had done some comedies before Stella Dallas, but she took some time to warm up to the genre. For a while, she wasn’t sure she could pull it off. “I don’t even know if I could play comedy,” she said in an interview early in her career. “It’s always seemed to me there’s something too heavy about me. I mull it over in my mind, but I can’t connect myself with comedy.” (51) Her agent, Zeppo Marx—who, being a member of the Marx Brothers, knew a thing or two about comedy—thought she would be great at it. It’s not really hard to see where he’d get the idea. While films like Ladies of Leisure and Baby Face aren’t technically comedies, she has moments of impressive comedic performance.
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