We know how often her power and independence are curtailed by the requisite happy endings of heterosexual romance. After her death, her ashes were given to the wind at Lone Pine Desert in the High Sierra mountains-a long way from the streets of Brooklyn. Horseback riding in westerns frequently took Stanwyck out of Los Angeles to shoot on locations and landscapes that she came to love. If so, her career as a rider is studded with falls, which she came to incorporate into her star persona as a wannabe stunt performer. In this, one of her first films, the novelty of the sparkling image might be seen as symbolic of the promise of Stanwyck’s stardom. She finds only Bob (Adolphe Menjou), who turns out to be married.

The scene is supposed to be Havana in the moonlight, where her librarian character, Lulu, has gone to find romance and excitement. The scene is quickly inserted into a long and rambling story about a fallen woman, and it seems to carry the full weight of the height from which she falls. It’s a remarkable image of freedom and transcendence, unique in her career in its speed and cinematic energy. In profile her hair flies behind her as the camera tracks beside her fast-moving silhouette. In an early scene in Forbidden, Stanwyck is briefly seen riding a horse on a beach in a dazzle of sunlight. At the same time, the transcendent, enabling, independent image of horseback riding was produced within an industry of illusion and deception. Certainly, those images have outlasted the culture in which they were produced, offering another image of a woman on the 20th-century screen. Looking at some of Stanwyck’s many horseback-riding scenes, it is clear that the strong, dynamic imagery of riding enabled her to rise above the entrenched misogyny of the industry. Aligning her body with nature, she gained some distance from the glamour of Hollywood culture while challenging gendered conventions of movement and stasis. Her body was arguably a site of struggle, as she repeatedly put it on the line as a mark of sincerity and action. Why aren’t similar reassurances applied to human beings?Īkira Lippit continues this thought by reference to the prolific representation of violence against men and women in fiction films and suggests that the “human counterpoint to this disclaimer” is “all resemblances to persons living or deceased is purely coincidental.” And yet much violence is often meted out against actors on sets-and not simply psychological violence.īarbara Stanwyck was frequently injured in film shoots, and she wore it more as a badge of honor than a grudge, as evidence of her hardiness and professionalism. “No animal was harmed” … serves a taxonomic purpose, separating the two principal film genres, fiction and documentary….

Forbidden honor by may dawson