Stella Dallas (1937)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- True heroines don't always save lives. Sometimes they're simply mothers, with an everlasting devotion to their children. Such is the case in Stella Dallas. Starring Barbara Stanwyck in an performance that's as courageous as it is fine, this enduring classic is a vivid and authentic cross-section of American life deeply moving emotional power!
Even after her marriage to well-bred Stephen Dallas ends, irrepressible Stella is determined to give their daughter the life she never had. And when it comes down to her child's happiness versus her own, Stella's sacrifice is truly the epitome of bravery. - Actors:
- Barbara Stanwyck, John Boles, Anne Shirley, Barbara O'Neil, Alan Hale, Marjorie Main, George Walcott, Ann Shoemaker, Tim Holt, Nella Walker, Bruce Satterlee, Jimmy Butler, Jack Egger, Dickie Jones, Lynne Roberts
- Directors:
- King Vidor
- Writers:
- Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama
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Reviews (1) of Stella Dallas
Stella by Name, Stellar by Performance - Stella Dallas review by griggs
Went in expecting a weepie. Got a bedtime story with a moral I wanted to argue with.
Stella spends the film trying to haul herself up a ladder the script keeps kicking away. Bettering herself gets treated as a crime rather than a plan, as if wanting more should come with a fine attached. She's loud, mouthy, unwilling to sand her edges down for anyone — no doormat, whatever the ending eventually wants you to believe.
Barbara Stanwyck carries the whole thing on her back, and the casting has a decent bit of irony in it. Orphaned young, self-made in a way that was genuinely rare for the era, she went from chorus line to the top of the industry through sheer nerve — the same nerve behind Baby Face, Double Indemnity, The Lady Eve, Ball of Fire. Stella wants just as much and gets sent to the naughty step for it. Stella by name, stellar by performance: a woman permanently on display, sized up by every room she walks into, somehow making that look exhausting and magnetic at once.
Then the ending arrives and cashes everything in for one move: vanishing quietly, which the film mistakes for a triumph. The window scene, watching the wedding through the rain, is genuinely gorgeous filmmaking, and it still had me wanting to bang on the glass myself — furious that all that craft went toward a lesson I wasn't buying.
Stanwyck's the star. The story never deserved her.