Programme notes CH 04 — The Matinee
Ladies of Leisure
A girl from the parties sits for a rich young painter who wants her face for a picture called Hope, and finds she means it.
This is the first time Frank Capra pointed a camera at Barbara Stanwyck, and he seems to have known at once what he had. She plays Kay, hired off a yacht party to model for Ralph Graves, and the film is about how long it takes her to stop performing for him. Capra lets the scenes run long and quiet where another studio would cut to a joke. Watch the night she sleeps on his studio couch: he lays a blanket over her, and Stanwyck, pretending to be asleep, lets the gesture land on her face a second at a time. Marie Prevost, as the roommate, gets the best lines.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Frank Capra
- Photographed by
- Joseph Walker
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
1930, before the Code: two women whose pasts are the plot, in films that decline to punish them for it. MGM gives Norma Shearer the gowns and the speech; Columbia gives Stanwyck a studio couch and lets her keep quiet.
Two 1930 love stories in which a rich New York family sets its face against a woman with a past. Capra lets the boy defy them; Sheldon's bishop spends sixty years wishing he had.