“A frivolous masterpiece. Like BRINGING UP BABY, THE LADY EVE is a mixture of visual and verbal slapstick and of high artifice and pratfalls. Stanwyck keeps sticking out a sensational leg and Henry Fonda keeps tripping over it. She’s a cardsharp and he’s a millionaire scientist who knows more about snakes than about women; neither performer has ever been funnier. Based on a story by Monckton Hoffe and screenplay by Sturges, the film is full of classic moments and classic lines; it represents the dizzy high point of Sturges’s comedy writing.”—Pauline Kael. “For all its fun, THE LADY EVE also quite seriously describes a process of disillusionment in youthful, nonsense romance and the sort of constantly renewing attraction that is necessary, by hook or by crook, for any long-term sexual relationship after the first flush fades and is replaced by deeper knowledge.”—Dan Callahan (94 mins.)

Introduced by Dan Callahan on Friday evening.

“Sam Fuller’s cracked Arizona gunslinger epic pits new-in-town pacifist marshal Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan) and his two younger brothers against oppressive rancher Jessica Drummond (Stanwyck) and her posse of 40 (!) hired guns for control of the county. Naturally, Griff and Jessica fall head over heels, much to the chagrin and confusion of the good and bad guys. The idea of packing all 40 gauchos into one scope frame was surely a visual gag too great for Fuller to pass over. It’s one of the wildest and most grandly weird westerns in cinema history.”—Museum of the Moving Image (79 mins.)

Introduced by Dan Callahan on Saturday evening.

One of the key noirs of the late 1940s, the claustrophobic SORRY, WRONG NUMBER puts a murderous spin on the idea of the telephone as sole connector to the outside world. Stanwyck, in an Oscar-nominated performance, plays Leona Stevenson, a rich, bedridden heiress who overhears a vague murder plot when an operator accidentally crosses lines. Her absent husband Henry (Burt Lancaster) may be involved, but Leona quickly learns that there may be more deceit in store. “Told nearly in real time and almost entirely through telephone calls, the radio play-based NUMBER derives sleek hysteria from its audaciously constraining narrative strategy.”—Village Voice (89 mins.)

In this atmospheric noir, Stanwyck is Cheryl Draper, an ordinary woman pushed into extraordinary circumstances. One night, she awakens to see an apparent murder happening across the street. But her vision is not exactly what it seems, according to both the physical evidence and to Lieutenant Larry Mathews (Gary Merrill). Meanwhile, the suspected murderer, ex-Nazi Albert Richter (George Sanders), maintains his innocence. As Cheryl’s insistence grows more desperate, she goes to increasingly greater lengths to prove Richter’s guilt. With stunning cinematography by John Alton and a subtly devastating performance by Stanwyck, WITNESS TO MURDER is an undervalued B-noir gem. (83 mins.)

“Barbara Stanwyck is sassy, saucy Sugarpuss O’Shea, a wisecracking nightclub singer on the run from mob kingpins. Gary Cooper is good egg Professor Bertram Potts, a naïve scholar who meets the crooner while researching slang. Two worlds collide as Sugarpuss hides out with Potts and his nerdy crew of lexicographers in Howard Hawks’s wonderfully hilarious romantic comedy, which garnered four Oscar nominations including Stanwyck for Best Actress and Billy Wilder and Thomas Monroe for Best Original Screenplay.”—American Cinematheque (111 mins.)

“After she’s fired, newspaper reporter Ann Mitchell (Stanwyck) decides to bow out with a bogus story about an unnamed idealist, John Doe, threatening to throw himself off the roof of City Hall on Christmas Eve as a protest against the continued mistreatment of the little man. When the story sells papers she has to find an unemployed man to become her John Doe. But she gets more than she bargained for when she gives the job to Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), a baseball pitcher put out of work by a bum arm. Capra directed Stanwyck in five films starting with LADIES OF LEISURE (1930), the film that made her a star. They had not worked together since 1933’s THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN. Historians have credited him with helping her refine her acting for the screen. By the time they reunited for MEET JOHN DOE, she was one of Hollywood’s top stars.”—Turner Classic Movies (122 mins.)

In this frisky pre-Code effort, Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, the down-and-out daughter of an overbearing small-town speakeasy owner (Robert Barrat). Following tragedy, she hightails it with her friend Chico (Theresa Harris) to the big city where she quickly climbs the corporate ladder at Gotham Trust by essentially sleeping her way up. However, when she meets wealthy heir Courtland Trenholm (George Brent), her ascent stops and her fortunes change drastically. “Whatever the results of the tug of war between censors, studio, and producer, Stanwyck’s performance is the most powerful element of BABY FACE. Lily is like a simmering cauldron on the verge of boiling over. She destroys lives, but only because life destroyed her first.”—Senses of Cinema (76 mins.)

Stanwyck garnered the first of her four Oscar nominations for her portrayal of Stella, a woman who marries into money in the form of wealthy mill tycoon Stephen Dallas (John Boles). They have a daughter, Laurel (Anne Shirley), but after an embarrassing incident, Stella begins thinking that her family’s life may possibly be better without her in the picture. “Barbara Stanwyck’s Stella, an ambitious lower-class woman who ends by sacrificing everything she’s won for her daughter, takes the film beyond the simple pleasures of well-made melodrama.”—Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune (106 mins.)

In DOUBLE INDEMNITY, arguably Stanwyck’s most famous screen role, she portrays bored housewife Phyllis Dietrichson who illicitly takes up with Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), a nonchalant insurance salesman. While ostensibly interested in making a sale, Neff is, in the end, more interested in romancing the customer’s wife—although it’s unclear who’s really making the advances. An ill-conceived plan to simultaneously free themselves of Phyllis’s husband and scam Neff’s insurance agency leads them both down a path of deceit and betrayal where no one can come out unscathed. DOUBLE INDEMNITY is arguably the prototype film noir and Stanwyck’s chilling Phyllis Dietrichson the prototypical femme fatale of the genre. (107 mins.)

One of Douglas Sirk’s least discussed and most underappreciated melodramas, THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW features Stanwyck opposite DOUBLE INDEMNITY costar Fred MacMurray, with entirely different results. This searing, romantic moral fable about a toy manufacturer who falls for an old flame in light of his crumbling marriage shows Stanwyck as a home wrecker with a conscience. “[Stanwyck] can effectively portray a woman strong enough to succeed in a man’s world who might still retain a core of romanticism. An actress of complex signals, she is the physical embodiment of a Sirkian universe.”—Bright Lights Film Journal (84 mins.)