Sinful Sunday: Barbara Stanwyck and the Steely Butch of "Walk on the Wild Side"
The screen legend delivers a truly memorable performance as a manipulative lesbian madam in Edward Dmytryk's turgid melodramatic noir.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
There’s something uniquely appealing about the queer villains of classic Hollywood. Maybe it’s the fact that their deviance can’t be explicitly stated, or maybe it’s the fact that they’re so often played by products of the old star system (which is to say, genuine stars, in the old-fashioned sense of the term). Or maybe it’s just the fact that they’re just so damn fabulous, effortlessly able to command the screen any time that they appear. Yes, we all know that they’re supposed to be warnings of the dangers of queerness and aberrant sexuality, but when looked at from a certain point of view–and certainly from the point of view of a queer spectator in the 21st century–it’s hard to escape the fact that these are often far more interesting than the heroes, even if they occupy less screen time.
A case in point is Jo Courtney in the seedy, seamy (but also strangely boring) melodrama noir Walk on the Wild Side, directed by Edward Dmytryk. Portrayed by Barbara Stanwyck, Jo may not be one of the most famous of the queer villains of classic Hollywood–she certainly doesn’t rank up there with the likes of Eve Harrington in All About Eve–but there’s still something compelling about her, in no small part because this is Stanwyck we’re talking about, and Stanwyck never met a hard-bitten female character that she couldn’t play to the hilt.
If you haven’t seen the film, it essentially follows the doomed romance of Laurence Harvey’s (ridiculously named) Dove Linkhorn and sex worker Hallie (played by Capucine). Standing in their way are a number of other characters, however, including Jane Fonda’s Kitty Twist, who herself becomes a sex worker under Jo’s influence, and obviously Jo herself. And, for some reason, Anne Baxter shows up as a Latina bartender named Teresina Vidaverri (her accent is enough to move this film squarely into the realm of camp). While it has the makings of a juicy melodramatic noir, it ultimately falls more than a little bit flat, thanks to Harvey’s reliably wooden performance and the lack of any chemistry between the two romantic leads or sense of narrative urgency to their coupling.
The high point of the film, though, and one of its only redeeming qualities, is Stanwyck’s Joe. From the moment she appears it’s clear that this redoubtable butch is not one to be trifled with: draped in furs, she begs us to look at her and to marvel at her dominating power. Given that this is Stanwyck we’re talking about, there’s an iron grittiness to the delivery of her lines, but there is a strange sort of softness to her, too. It’s a flicker in her gaze when she gazes at the women in her charge, for though she rules the bordello with an iron fist, it’s clear that she feels like it’s her duty to make sure that they remain as safe as she can make them, though there are limits to this, too.
There’s no question that Jo’s greatness fondness is for Hallie, who seems to bring out a tenderness in her that she is unwilling (or unable) to show to others. Among other things, she supports Hallie as she tries to pursue a career in sculpting, and any time that the two are in a scene together Joe lets her guard down. Not a lot, mind you, because this is still Stanwyck we’re talking about, but just enough that you can see there’s a genuine love behind those sharp and glinting eyes.
As Joe reveals, part of the reason she is so drawn to Hallie is because her husband lost his legs in an accident, an act which made him something less than a man in her eyes and thus turned her away from hetero desire. Of course, one can question whether Jo was entirely straight to begin with–the gendered androgyny of her name is just one of many hints that this is someone who has had more than her fair share of female lovers–but what’s not in question is just how much she has gone out of her way to emasculate her husband.
Like so many other butches she seems to take pleasure in lording her husband’s inferiority over him, just as she also plays a subtle game with Hallie, not only encouraging her to be both financially and emotionally dependent on her, at one point disparaging her love for Dove as nothing more than a childlike dream: “Oh, Hallie. Hallie. You've been dreaming. You've had a brief dream of young love and candy kisses. And it's all so foolish, so unreal.” She slyly knows just which emotional pressure points to push to get Hallie to do what she wants, though she quickly discovers that the other woman is not to be so easily manipulated or controlled.
Jo is also someone who knows how the levers of power work in the seedy world of New Orleans, and she brings that power to bear in her attempt to thwart the romance between Hallie and Dove. She even goes so far as to manipulate the young Kitty into testifying that Dove trafficked her across state lines as a minor, after which she also brings violence into the equation. This is a woman who, as she says to Hallie, has the patience to wait years for what she wants, though it’s clear that her love for Hallie is of such a degree that she will sometimes abandon her patience. Indeed, she is so besotted with her love object and so determined to keep her from anyone else that there is almost nothing that she can’t or won’t do in the pursuit of this goal.
But, of course, this is also classic Hollywood, and a woman like Jo–both a madam and a lesbian–can’t be allowed to go unpunished by the narrative. Not only does she lose her beloved Hallie when a gunshot goes awry, a neat little postscript (in the form of a newspaper headline) announces that Jo and her accomplices at the Dollhouse were sentenced to life in prison, due in no small part to the electrifying testimony delivered by none other than Kitty herself.
As she would throughout her career, Stanwyck imbues Jo with a tough-as-nails persona that you can’t help but admire. Though the film doesn’t give her nearly as much attention as she clearly deserves, she manages to make the most out of every scene. This is a woman, after all, who gets to deliver monologues like this one and ask us to take her entirely seriously: “Love. Can any man love a woman for herself without wanting her body for his own pleasure? Love is understanding and sharing, enjoying the beauty of life without the reek of lust! Don't talk to me about love! What do you know? What does that young fool know? What does any man know?”
If that isn’t a classic Hollywood lesbian mantra, then I don’t know what is.