Stagedoor: How acting is just like karate

Pajama Party: Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers are roommates at the "Footlights Club" a theatrical boarding house on Broadway.

Acting apparently is a body-learned skill like Karate if the movie Stage Door (1936) is to be believed. Katharine Hepburn plays Terry Randall, a blue-blood novice actress who arrives at a theatrical boarding house with three enormous trunks full of clothes, a pocket full of cash and some big ambitions. While the rest of the girls at the boarding house are pounding the pavement looking for work, Terry reads Shakespeare and gives lectures on the topic to a reluctant audience of house mates. She goes on no auditions and insults a major producer to his face and yet she lands the lead role in a new play. Her father, hoping to cure her of the acting bug has gone to the trouble and expense of backing a show for the sole reason of giving her the star role at which he's certain she will fail. If this seems a bit extreme and silly as a method of parenting, you can take comfort in that it utterly fails. Terry who shows no talent in rehearsal, suddenly discovers she can act when one of the members of footlights club commits suicide. Like Daniel-sahn in the Karate Kid, Terry has been unwittingly taking lessons from a master, all the while she thought she was just waxing the cars and painting the fence. Or something like that.

Ginger Rogers and Adolphe Menjou are also in this snappy movie, with Rogers providing most of the zingers in her repartee with Hepburn. Rogers plays a struggling actress who gets a job dancing in one of Menjou's clubs. Rogers is always a delight and it's fun to watch her tap dance away from wolfish non-dancing Menjou. The excellent supporting cast includes Lucille Ball in an early role that showcases her comedic talent, though not as much as we might hope. Andrea Leeds who plays the suicidal Kay Hamilton earned an Oscar nod for her work, which is a touch dated and over the top at times, but still manages a few moments that are truly unsettling. Gail Patrick who plays the villainous Bianca in My Favorite Wife is here playing a prototype of that character.

The best thing about Stage Door is that at its heart it is about friendships between women. Unlike The Women, it's not all about men, though there are a few token members of that sex in Stage Door. The way the actresses talk and interact is the real joy of the movie. There is a gritty realism here from the lousiness of the food to the lumpiness of the mattresses and one instantly senses that all the cynical wisecracks and toughness hide genuine vulnerability.

Pre-code Stanwyck and the opening of the Media Room

Barbara Stanwyck in Frank Capra's Forbidden (1932).

In addition to talking about Barbara Stanwyck's pre-code career, I'd also like to announce the opening of the Cinema OCD Media Room. I decided to start a second blog for shorter reviews of films and books about films. It is getting to the point where I feel like my posts are too long and I don't have enough time to get into the particulars if I'm talking about more than a couple of movies. So after you finish reading about Stanwyck's pre-code career, please check out the Media Room.

I first came to love Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire. She was tough talking, funny, sexy and not afraid to make a straight forward play for the guy she wants. What I didn't realize that dance hall girl Sugar Puss O'Shea, from Ball of Fire was a comic parody of the types of roles Stanwyck was first famous for in her pre-code career. Barbara Stanwyck was one of the many stage actors recruited to act in the newly developed talking pictures. She went west with her husband a vaudeville actor who was testing at Columbia Pictures. Barbara tested as well and got a non-exclusive deal with the studio. She made her first talkie The Locked Room (1929). She played a woman who tries to take her fall for her husband on a murder charge. She played a working class girl, who marries well. This would be a pattern for Barbara over the next five years. She almost always played a character from a humble background who rises either through her own wits and talents, through marriage or by hooking up with the right men. Her characters were almost always street wise and tough-talking, a bit like Sugar Puss but perhaps not quite as funny.

Check out reviews of The Locked Door, Illicit, Night Nurse, Forbidden, Shopworn, The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Baby Face in the media room. There will be at least two more reviews in the days to come so stay tuned.