Barbara Stanwyck: Fire and Desire (Richard Schickel, 1991)

This television documentary by Richard Schickel plays at Il Cinema Ritrovato on June 17, 2026. — EK

“Kiss me in my mouth as if we are lovers,” a 76-year-old Barbara Stanwyck – still provocatively breaking taboos – tells a priest (Richard Chamberlain) in the TV miniseries The Thorn Birds (1983). Rejected by him, she lambasts a vengeful God who cruelly punishes bodies and beauty – in effect a God who undoes a star, though in Stanwyck’s case not entirely successfully.

This is the opening of Barbara Stanwyck: Fire and Desire (1991), written and directed by critic and occasional documentary filmmaker Richard Schickel, who is always capable of bringing a conversational tone to his densely argued surveys of star careers. More inclined to develop central arguments rather than accumulate anecdotes, Schickel argues that Stanwyck knew how to abandon dignity and how to command silence – both essential ingredients for an actress who deepened the notion of melodrama in cinema.

Paradoxically, the documentary is narrated by Sally Field, who embodies the conventional image of the American sweetheart, sometimes to the point of banality. This stands in stark contrast to Stanwyck: the dyed-blonde killer and brunette murderer who made a glorious career out of crimes of passion, eliminating ineffectual men on her way to the top (which, under the Production Code, inevitably meant a last-minute nose-dive to the bottom). Even in the neurotic, daddy’s-girl persona she constructs in films such as Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), Stanwyck’s self-absorption carries a similarly destructive force. Yet Schickel is quite right to look closer and locate, beneath these extremes, a heart of gold.