Stella Dallas **** (1937, Barbara Stanwyck, John Boles, Barbara O’Neil, Anne Shirley, Tim Holt, Marjorie Main, Alan Hale Sr) – Classic Movie Review 3176

Director King Vidor’s incomparable 1937 version of the tear-jerker soap opera tale of a warm and gutsy but slatternly lower-class woman who sacrifices herself for her daughter was previously filmed in 1925, and remade as Stella in 1990 with Bette Midler.

Barbara Stanwyck is superb as novelist Olive Higgins Prouty’s brassy but sensitive working-class heroine Stella Martin, who traps an upper-class businessman called Stephen Dallas (John Boles) into marriage and soon they have a daughter named Laurel.

But then her cheap jewellery, clothes and behaviour make him leave her for a posh girl, his prior fiancée Helen Morrison (Barbara O’Neil), whom he marries. Stella also embarrasses her now teenage daughter Laurel (Anne Shirley), who marries a smug young lad, Richard Grosvenor (Tim Holt), but she would sacrifice everything for Laurel.

Stanwyck was Oscar nominated as Best Actress in the first of her four Oscar nominations, though, shamefully, she never won. Shirley was Oscar nominated as Best Supporting Actress – her only nomination.

Also in the cast are Marjorie Main, Alan Hale Sr, Edmund Elton, George Walcott, Gertrude Short, Nella Walker, Bruce Satterlee, Jimmy Butler, Jack Egger, Dickie Jones, Ann Shoemaker, Jessie Arnold, Leon McAllister, Laraine Day, Lillian Yarbo, Etta McDaniel and Harlan Briggs.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3176

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