U | 1h 46 min | Drama | 1937
Director King Vidor’s “Stella Dallas” is about exchanging dreams: those we choose to exchange and those we’re compelled to. His film draws on Massachusetts-born Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel of the same name.
The daughter of a mill worker in 1919 Massachusetts, Stella (Barbara Stanwyck) dreams of the high life: dressing up, clubbing, and dividing her time between manicures at salons and dancing at concerts.
Stella snags a husband, Stephen Dallas (John Boles), who is wealthy all right, but wants less of high society than it wants of him. He ignores Stella’s obvious lack of social graces. But he’s put off by her insistent clutching at the trappings of wealth and her back-slapping bonhomie with low-class buffoon Ed (Alan Hale). Never mind that Ed has a heart of gold.
With not much to hold the couple together, their beloved daughter, Laurel (Anne Shirley) becomes the binding tie for a while. Stephen eventually reunites with his wealthy one-time fiancée Helen (Barbara O’Neill), but continues to shower affection on Laurel. Meanwhile, Stella repeatedly sacrifices her own interests for her daughter’s. So, Laurel is torn between the promise of pomp and privilege with her father, and relative obscurity and ostracism with her mother.
Prouty’s story has no villain. They’re all good people, giving up some dreams for others. If anything, education, assets, and a classy upbringing separates people and families, defining who belongs and who doesn’t.
Vidor doesn’t quite flesh out Stephen’s interiority; he ends up looking more incidental than he is to Stella and to Laurel. After all, Stephen’s the one insisting that Stella be herself, not pretend to be like someone in the movies, refined but ultimately “dull.”
Still, Vidor makes a moving script come alive with his sensitive camera placements and imaginative choreography. Some scenes are comic: Ed pranking train passengers with itch powder, or drunkenly foisting a Christmas turkey dinner on Stella. At other times Vidor’s characters are silent, thinking and feeling, while others talk. Once Laurel, on the night train overhearing others ridicule Stella, looks down from her bed-bunk, hoping her mother is asleep. Stella, pained at hearing it all, feigns sleep to avoid hurting Laurel.
Stellar Stanwyck
Shirley, only 19 at the time, is superb as conflicted young Laurel, aghast that her adopted high social circle views her mother as an impostor, faking fine breeding. Shirley has some great moments, does them justice, and secured an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
But Stanwyck’s the star. Her performance secured the first of her four nominations for Best Actress. She plays a woman (first young, then aging), yearning for the pleasures of an elite league that wants her out more than she wants in.
Stanwyck plays Stella like a double role, morphing into and out of the character of aristocratic wife and mother that she wants to be, but isn’t. She discovers that, despite her resourcefulness, she’ll only ever be a caricature, never the real thing. Yet, she places Laurel’s joys and interests above her own.
Stella’s head is in the clouds. She’s fixing her clothes and tossing her hair even when she’s just standing around, far from mirrors. Alone in Stephen’s office, she steals a moment to feel the texture of his suit on a hanger. She hankers after fake jewelry, trinkets, and fur coats, imitation or not. All she wants is to “get in with the right people,” only later realizing that staying in isn’t as easy as getting in.
For all her clinging, Stella’s maternal instincts are giving and freeing. And Laurel isn’t the only one who sees it. In a touching scene, Helen, who in any other movie would’ve been a scoffing rival, hears Stella struggling to explain what a wonderful young woman Laurel is. Helen nods, “I know that it hasn’t come only from her father.”
