lecinemadreams.blogspot.

 

When a studio is forking over big bucks for a glamour actress, they want the audience to see her as glamorous. The concern is that the baggy fashions and severe makeup styles of the '30s (thin eyebrows, bow lips, thick stockings, figure-concealing frocks, etc) will look odd or comical to '60s audiences. A point well taken, I concede. but it doesn't address the jarring incongruity of seeing women with '60s bouffants and bullet bras stepping out of DeSot.

 

PERFORMANCES

 

Where to start? To say that I enjoy all the performances in Walk on the Wild Side is not at all saying that many of them are any good. If anyone emerges from the chaos with their dignity intact, it's Barbara Stanwyck. An actress virtually incapable of giving a false performance Stanwyck is not really called upon to deliver more than a professional, standard-issue, tough-broad performance; but she's nevertheless the most believably passionate person in the film for me. She wants Hallie and I don't doubt it for a minute.

 

In this her first film since 1957's Forty Guns, the very private Stanwyck was yet another classic-era star forced to embrace the burgeoning era of movie permissiveness and take on a role she at one time might have considered unsavory.

 

Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons disapproved of Stanwyck taking on such a role, to which 

Stanwyck is said to have responded "What do you want them to do, get a real madam and a real lesbian?"  

 

On the bright side, at least she was playing a lesbian madam in a major motion picture, by 1964 Stanwyck would be following in Joan Crawford's B-movie footsteps and starring in a William Castle schlock thriller, The Night Walker.

 

Barbara Stanwyck was outed as lesbian in two substandard books: The Sewing Circle by Axel Madsen, and the pull-no-punches Hollywood Lesbians by Boze Hadleigh. If they're to be believed, Walk on the Wild Side was a film set with more closets than a Feydeau farce: a closeted leading man (Harvey); a closeted lesbian, possibly bisexual leading woman (Capucine), and a closeted lesbian co-star (Stanwyck).

The strikingly beautiful Capucine may not be much of an actress, but she's not helped much by a script which calls for her to behave like a non-stop pill from the minute she's introduced. Male screenwriters unfamiliar with how women actually think are often guilty of writing about "beauty" as though it were an actual character trait rather than a physical attribute.

 

In the case of Hallie Gerard, so little of the character's much-talked-about passion, restlessness, or joy is conveyed that we're left to imagine she's fought over by Dove and Jo simply because she's so outrageously pretty. If the Hallie we now see is supposed to represent a broken woman whose life-force has been drained out of her by her having "fallen down the well," all the backstory we're left to imagine requires an actress substantially more skilled than what we're given. You get about as much emotionally out of Capucine as a walking/ talking entity as from one of her model photo shoots from the '50s.