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There is nothing more shocking pre-code, than an early Barbara Stanwyck movie. Some of her most infamous, really stretched any semblance of a code before Breen took over as the strict enforcer of the code. Ladies of Leisure (1930), Illicit (1931), The Miracle Woman (1931), Ten Cents a Dance (1931), Night Nurse (1931), The Purchase Price (1932), Forbidden (1932), Shopworn (1932), The Bitter Tea of General Yen(1933), Ladies They Talk About(1933), and the very notorious Baby Face(1933) which I am thinking just about drove the censors right over the edge. These movies while good, really pushed the envelope.

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck is an intimidating looking book at 860 pages (really 1044 pages if you include appendixes of Stage, Film, Radio, and Television Chronologies etc.). We learn about her life of practically growing up on the stage. Then her move to Hollywood and her 36 movies made between the years 1927 through 1940. It is an excellent film reference book, that doesn’t read like a reference book.

It is an impressively written stage and filmography of not only Barbara but Directors, Actors, and film friends that worked with Barbara. The author Victoria Wilson also includes information about the early labor unions in film, politics, and breakdowns of who got paid what on each film or play Barbara was involved in. It is a well written book that reads like a who’s who of early Hollywood. I’ve read other Barbara books but this is the pièce de résistance.

Don’t be put-off by the size of Vol. I. It is a good, curl up and get lost in classic Hollywood book.  Of course now I can’t wait to read Vol. II I’m hoping I don’t have to wait too long for it to be published…

“A Life of Barbara Stanwyck” by Victoria Wilson ends
abruptly in 1940. Still ahead are “The
Lady Eve” and “Ball of Fire,” “Meet John Doe” and “Double Indemnity,” not to
mention more than 40 other movies and four years as the matriarch of a sprawling
19th century ranch on the television series, “The Big Valley.”

Yet the book, which takes Stanwyck from birth in 1907 to the
age of 37 and stardom in a town she hated for the “pretense” of its “so
self-important” people, is exactly 1000 pages long if you include its
meticulous stage, film, radio and television chronologies and notes on
sources. And it has a cast of thousands,
with each director, actor or owner of a speakeasy Stanwyck encounters given not
only his own backstory but the histories of the people with whom he has worked
or played. Carole Lombard, for example,
tended the “cows, chickens, ducks, pair of mules, goat, rabbits” on the 21 acre
estate she and Clark Gable turned into a working farm.

The 36 movies Stanwyck made between “Broadway Nights” in
1927 and “Remember the Night” in 1940 are treated the same way. The chapter on “Stella Dallas,” the movie
that brought Stanwyck the first of four Oscar nominations, not only includes a
biography of Olive Higgins Prouty, who wrote the novel, but a biography of Belle
Bennett who played Stella in a 1925 silent movie.

There are books in which details are piled on top of each
other harum-scarum until the reader struggles to breathe under the weight of
them. This is not one of those
books. In “A Life of Barbara Stanwyck,”
the accretion of detail, told simply and unemotionally, builds a living
thing. Do we really need to know that
one of the many families with whom the half-orphaned child Ruby S

volumes : 25 cm

"Fifteen years in the making, the first volume of the full-scale astonishing life of one of our greatest screen actresses whose career in pictures spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound--the first to delve deeply into Stanwyck's rich, complex life and to explore her extraordinary range of eighty-eight motion pictures, many of them iconic; her work, her world, her Hollywood through an American century.Frank Capra called her, "The greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known." Yet she was one of its most natural, timeless, and underrated stars. Now Victoria Wilson, gives us the most complete portrait we have yet had, or will have, of this magnificent actresses, seen as the quintessential Brooklyn girl whose family was in fact of old New England stock...her years in New York as dancer and Broadway star...her fraught marriage to Frank Fay, Broadway genius, who influenced a generation of actors and comedians (among them, Jack Benny and Stanwyck herself)...the adoption of a son, embattled from the outset; her partnership with the "unfunny" Marx brother, Zeppo, together creating one of the finest horse breeding farms in the west; her fairytale romance and marriage to the younger Robert Taylor, America's most sought-after male star...Here is the shaping of her career working with many of Hollywood's most important directors: among them, Capra, King Vidor, Cecil B. Demille, Preston Sturges, all set against the times--the Depression, the rise of the unions, the coming of World War II and a fast-evolving coming-of-age motion picture industry. At the heart of the book, Stanwyck herself--her strengths, her fears, her desires--how she made use of the darkness in her soul, keeping it at bay in her private life, transforming herself from shunned outsider into one of Hollywood's--and America's--most revered screen actresses. Written with full access to Stanwyck's family, friends, colleagues, and never-before-s

Old books and old movies. Two passions of my life, and I got a little of both this weekend.

The San Francisco Antiquarian Book, Print and Paper Fair was held at the Concourse down on 7th and Brannan this weekend … and in case you think it’s all giant tomes of Vasari or esoteric German philosophers, think again.

These are book collectors, and like book readers, they come in all varieties. Some like cookbooks, some like children’s books, some like art and prints, and some like it noir.

I got to drool over an ARC (advanced reading copy) of Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep. Price? $6,500. Still cheap by comparison to a first edition Harry Potter (one pricey version was something like $40,000 … yeah, those were four zeros).

You can drift down the aisles, peeking at booths offering a first of The Maltese Falcon (complete with gorgeous dust jacket), British editions, paperback editions, obscure editions of books that sound familiar because you know the movie better.

There will be authors you know that are still active and writing, like Robert B. Parker, and authors who invented a world that turned into a multi-billion dollar empire, like Ian Fleming. Thriller writers, traditional mystery writers, noir and hard-boiled pulp writers … to quote Hamlet, words, words words … and all of them choice.

It’s a fantasy for me on a lot of levels. First, as a collector and fan –“Wow, look at that pristine copy of Chandler’s Smart Aleck Kill!” — and secondly, as a writer myself. Because some of the books were written by people I know or have met, and you’re thinking … maybe it’s within my grasp. Maybe, one day, someone will have a first edition of my first book at a book fair, complete with mylar cover.

Y’see, the reason the books are valuable is because these are writers who have achieved major success (and for some, a demi-god status). But whe