Spoiler Warning: As a necessity of fully discussing films in Unseen Images extensive plot descriptions are given.INTRODUCTION
If one looks at the careers of Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and William Wellman you will see many titles that stick out from Stella Dallas to Double Indemnity for Stanwyck, Of Human Bondage to All About Eve for Davis, Wings to The Ox-Bow Incident for Wellman. And of course, many, many more. To say that this list is anemic is an understatement. Given the amount of the classic and highly regarded films of these three it is akin to reading the sentence "It was the best of times it was the worst of times" and claiming you have read A Tale of Two Cities. Perhaps it is because of the abundance of classic films done by these three that So Big is just not very famous. Or perhaps it is because of its time period: Early sound era. Many movies from this time have fallen by the wayside due to poor preservation, poor sound quality and acting that, only four years removed from the full advent of the "talkie", still relied on part silent film pantomime technique and part proper stage acting usually accompanied by loud and specific e-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-i-o-n so as to be sure to be picked up by the microphone.
Whatever the reason, on this day, the hundredth birthday of Barbara Stanwyck, we celebrate one of her earliest and most unglamorous films, So Big.
So Big was only Stanwyck's eleventh film which would be the equivalent of someone's second or third film today, given the rate at which they produced films in the twenties, thirties and forties. It was directed by William Wellman, coming off the heels of his smash hit, The Public Enemy in 1931. And in a smaller role was Bette Davis, in only her eighth film (four in 31 and another nine (!) in 1932).
The film was based on a 1925 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Edna Ferber. The New York Times literary critic of the day, Louis Maunsell Field, said, "The plot is slight very slight, in fact the novel is a chronicle rather than a story, but a chronicle rich in variety and contrast”. This, as it turns out, is an accurate critique of the film as well. Clocking in at a mere 81 minutes and yet covering three decades, the movie has little time but to give you the progression of the story without a lot of lingering over emotional repercussions. That comes later, after you've watched the movie. So Big operates with a story-telling efficiency commonplace in films of the thirties (especially the early thirties) that would be lost in the decades to follow. Today, telling a story efficiently (and economically) seems lost for good in an era where it takes nearly three hours to weave the latest empty Jack Sparrow tale. The thirties closest modern day equivalent remains Tender Mercies, told in just over an hour and a half. Like So Big, Tender Mercies doesn't dwell on emotional repercussions allowing the audience to do that for itself, internally. In both films the primary characters are simpler rustic people, and it would seem disingenuous to show them engaging in emotional mental masturbation over their hardships. They accept their hardships, or deal with them as best they can, and move on. It is their fortitude that keeps them going and allows us, the viewers, to do the feeling for them.
SYNOPSIS
As So Big begins Selina Peake (Barbara Stanwyck) is living the easy life, a rich father providing everything for her. Then Selina receives the bad news: He's been killed, was an addictive gambler and there's no money left. The next thing we know, Selina is being shipped off to Dutch country where she will be a school teacher. She takes up residence with a farming family, the Pooles, and the culture shock is immediate. As Klaas Poole (Alan Hale) is driving her to their house in his horse-drawn wagon Selina comments on how beautiful the landscape is, particularly the fields of cabbages. Klaas balks, "Cabbages is beautiful?" He then ridicules her repeatedly for this, ridicule from which she shrinks, regretful of ever saying it. It is one of the first scenes in the film but immediately sets up the philosophy or "message" of the film: Some people see beauty and others don't. Those that see it will be happier. It is a motif repeated throughout the film but at this early stage the scene also signals something else. Urbanites have a way of romanticizing the rural lifestyle that rarely agrees with reality. Selina sees a beautiful field, Klaas sees hard labor and back-breaking monotony. Once at the Poole home Selina begins to see it to.
Inside the Poole home, Klaas' wife Maartje Poole (Dorothy Peterson) shows Selina to her room. She explains how to light the stove. She shows her her sparse accommodations and then mentions her marriage to Klaas, how young a bride she was (fourteen) and how long its been (seventeen years). This immediately shocks Selina and the audience: Maartje could easily pass for fifty. Clearly this is not a romantic rural lifestyle but a hard, brutal existence.
Later at dinner, Poole and another farmer continue to jab at Selina by saying, "Cabbages is beautiful" while laughing. This is when we are first introduced to Roelf Poole (Dick Winslow), Klaas' twelve-year-old son. He enters carrying wood for the stove after working in the fields all day. He sits down and begins reading the dictionary. Selina asks him what he's doing and he explains he is reading it every day until he gets through all the definitions. Besides, it's the only book in the house. Selina is clearly excited by the fact that someone in the house is looking for a way to enlighten himself. Later, when Roelf has delivered wood to her room, he says just before leaving, "I think cabbages are beautiful too."
The next day as Selina prepares for her first day of teaching Roelf once again shows up with firewood. He gives her a picture he stayed up to draw, of the cabbage fields. In return she gives him books to read and asks him if he will stay. Of course, he can't. Beyond learning to read and write, which he has already done, there is no school for him. He is a farmer. That's his life.
Soon after her arrival, Selina attends a church auction in which dinners made by local women are bidded on by the men. Selina had no idea the dinners would be as extravagant as they were and brought instead a picnic basket with jelly sandwiches. Again, she is ridiculed by the crowd. (It would appear Ferber felt that farm folk had a sinister side: Elevating themselves by mocking those unfamilier with their customs.) Pervis De Jong (Earle Fox), another farmer, upset with her treatment bids far more for her basket than any bid made for any other dinner. Shortly after he asks her to tutor him and from there, to marry him. Roelf is heartbroken. Selina was the first women (or person in general) he felt any real connection to and now she will be leaving the Poole home to live with Pervis.
The day after their wedding Pervis wakes her up shortly after four. "It's still nighttime," she says. "You're a farmer's wife now," he replies. The honeymoon, and the romantic ideal of rural life, is now over. (A quick aside: They are both sleeping in the same bed as they should be as a married couple. Just one year later, when the Production Code began to be enforced, this would not have been allowed.) It is in these scenes that Selina De Jong now confronts the reality of her life: backbreaking labor, day in and day out for little to no reward.
It is at this point in the film that Wellman sets up the best scene in the film, cinematically speaking. By now Selina and Maartje have begun to resemble each other with Selina aging rapidly. Selina is pregnant and Wellman alternates from Selina as she begins to feel the pangs of labor with Maartje who is in her own kitchen. Both women are in their respective homes but the homes and the women look so similar that one has difficulty distinguishing who is who. Both women suddenly feel ill, Selina from oncoming labor and Maartje from presumably a body that is simply, finally failing. As Selina calls for Pervis we see her and Maartje collapse. It is a disorienting scene, purposely. We are shown Selina now, fully entrenched in the farm life about to give birth, and what Selina's future will be in the person of Maartje.
The following scenes tell us that Selina had a boy, named Dirk (Dickie Moore) , whom she nicknames "So Big" based on her question to her little boy daily, "How big is my boy?" and her answer with outstretched arms, "Sooooo Big." *
Heartbreakingly we see the Poole family waiting outside the door of Maartje's bedroom until Klaas Poole emerges and says bluntly and coarsely with no emotion, "Your mother's dead." Roelf is furious at the lack of feeling and runs away. Later he will show up in the field of Selina's farm to tell her he is going to go to Europe. We will not see him again until the end of the film.
Over time Selina tries to convince Pervis to grow asparagus as it is a much more profitable crop. He refuses. It takes three years before a new crop can be fully implemented and until then what are they to do? Cabbages may not sell for much, but they're quick and easy.
Pervis eventually becomes ill with pneumonia and insists on continuing his farm labor until he can do so no more. In their bed, wracked with disease, he dies. Selina and Dirk are now on their own. Selina takes Dirk with her to market as they sleep in their wagon and sell their crops. Selina, desperate for a better life for her and her boy, plants asparagus. The crops are successful and the movie now takes us some twenty to twenty-five years forward.
Selina is a success, her asparagus selling in markets around the country. She no longer has to work fields as her incorporated farms have hundreds of employees but she does help out nonetheless. Dirk (Hardie Albright) has graduated from college and wants to be an architect but is impatient with the work necessary to get ahead. Maybe being a stockbroker would be a faster track to success. Selina is brokenhearted. She wanted Dirk to see beauty in life and pursue an artistically fulfilling career. She had hoped architecture would inspire him. It did not.
It is here that Bette Davis finally makes her entrance in the film, playing a young designer, Dallas O'Mara, who has caught the eye of Dirk. Dallas is unimpressed with Dirk's desire for the easy way out and even when he reveals the hard life his mother had it still leaves her cold. Selina did the work, not Dirk. Dallas, like Selina, appreciates the beauty in life. She remarks that she'd rather design someone's backdoor than an entire building for a bank. She leaves for Paris and returns (in a twist that would have made Dickens proud) with Roelf, now a celebrated sculptor in Europe. The two have fallen in love but Roelf has only one woman he wants to see in the States: Selina.
In the film's final scenes Dallas brings Roelf to Selina so that Roelf can tell her how much she improved his life, how much hope he gave her and the inspiration to continue to see the beauty in the world that helped him become an artist. As Dallas, Roelf and Selina talk by her window looking out onto asparagus fields it is clear that Dirk (So Big) is not connected to their world. The film closes with no redemption for Dirk, and the reiteration that those who see beauty and follow their creative needs end up happy. Those that seek money and material goods are forever unsatisfied.
CONCLUSION
Obviously, coming in the early years of the Great Depression, this was a movie message that wasn't too hard to sell: Hard work and adherence to ideals in the face of defeat will win the day. And it's perhaps a bit ironic that in a movie arguing against material goods that the characters who reject materialism and follow their creative impulses seem to come off pretty well financially by the end. But in a film told as economically as this one, these are small quibbles indeed.
William Wellman had a philosophy of directing that ran completely counter to the auteurists of later years: "The best director is the director whose handprints are not on the film." Maybe that's why, despite directing The Public Enemy (1931), A Star is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), you don't hear much about Wellman these days. He had a sure hand as a director, just not a visible one. The same could be said here. The film is well done but there are no extraordinary touches or visual flairs. The pacing is expert but that probably has more to do with the brevity of the movie than anything else. The film is not extraordinary by any normal cinematic standards. And yet, it deserves to be seen.
The film world has always been broken down into eras: The Pre-1914 period (before epics like Cabiria), The Classic Silent Period (reaching it's zenith with films like The Crowd and Sunrise), Early Sound Period, The Golden Age (mid-thirties through the late forties, possibly early fifties) and on and on. Each period has films that stand out including the Early Sound Period with films such as All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page, M, Duck Soup, King Kong and I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. So Big deserves to be added to that list. It does not have many of the bells and whistles that immediately make it stand out until one steps back and realizes that it is precisely the lack of bells and whistles that does make it stand out. It is a simple story, well-told with a great central performance holding it all together.
Barbara Stanwyck gave a lot of great performances in her career (Stella Dallas, Double Indemnity, The Lady Eve) but here, early on, we can see something different. In Stella Dallas she gave us pathos, in Double Indemnity and The Lady Eve she gave us cunning (one a little less lethal than the other) but in So Big she gives us naivete, sweetness and a love of beauty. It is unlike many of the performances she gave for the rest of her career and she does it beautifully. In the early scene, discussed above, when Klaas ridicules her for saying that "Cabbages are beautiful" we feel a genuine sympathy for her. She is being made fun of for expressing something too few people do and she is made to feel stupid for it. Stanwyck does this with simple looks down or to the side, no overt shock or embarrassment on her face, just a subtle sense of defeat.
Those same looks of defeat are there again when she talks to her son about his career choices. She doesn't understand why he would want to give up architecture for easy money. Her bewilderment makes us wonder the same.
Finally, in the closing scenes, Stanwyck conveys a sense of pride in Roelf, a sense of fulfillment with who he became that is spoken silently through her eyes with looks and glances. Throughout the film her performance is subtle and restrained, enough of an achievement for any actor, but in the early sound period when over-the-top was still the order of the day, it is truly remarkable. She wasn't nominated for Best Actress. It's possible that at the time, the performance just didn't seem (no pun intended) "big" enough to merit a nomination. Too bad. In a film with many good qualities her performance is the best thing in it.
So Big celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and Barbara Stanwyck would be 100 on July 16th. Stanwyck will never be forgotten, but So Big? If only for her performance, let's hope not.
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* There is an inadvertantly funny moment late in the film when the older Selina asks the older Dirk the question "How big is my boy?" and Dirk, feeling sorry for himself, holds his two index fingers a couple of inches apart and says, "So big." Oops.
