The Thinking Machine #65

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.

Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) was among the greatest stars of film and TV – and yet she cultivated, in her independent career choices, what cinema historian Pamela Hutchinson has called “outsider status”. And, quite literally as the central figure in melodramas or melodramatically-tinged romantic comedies, she often embodied the situation of the outsider: beyond the norm of home, family and married couple, looking in with a mix of longing and despair. No matter the director, the mise en scene is uncannily similar…