Barbara Stanwyck - The Ultimate Tough Cookie

The series Barbara Stanwyck - Maybe I Am Just a Dame starts at the Brattle Theater today and runs on Tuesdays until August 28. Check the theater's website for showtimes and dates. Ball of Fire is tonight at 7:15 and 9:30.

The Brattle Theatre's series on Barbara Stanwyck begins tonight with 1941's Ball of Fire, a title that pretty much sums up Stanwyck's legend. She would have been 100 years old this week, and her legacy keeps growing.

Recently, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker described Stanwyck's power: "It was a face that launched a thousand inquisitions: the mouth too tight to be rosy, and a voice pitched for slang, all bite and huskiness. When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck."

The thought of Stanwyck turns Lane's mind into butter, for how can the movies be "speedy" and "velvety"? And "bite" and "husky" makes her seem far scarier than she ever was on screen. But Stanwyck has that kind of impact in all of her movies. The toughness she could project, whether in comedies or in film noir, was so powerful that it was difficult to think straight.

In tonight's comedy Ball of Fire, directed by Howard Hawks and cowritten by Billy Wilder, Stanwyck stars as "Sugarpuss O'Shea," a singer and moll who bowls over a professor (Gary Cooper) studying her use of slang words.

The other movies scheduled to appear include Ladies of Leisure, Ten Cents a Dance, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The File on Thelma Jordan, The Lady Eve, The Mad Miss Manton, There's Always Tomorrow, All I Desire, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Night Walker.

Barbara Stanwyck masters the brainiacs in Ball of Fire. VHS cover from Amazon.