The Barbara Stanwyck Collection

The six Universal Studios films in this collection span two decades and multiple genres but are unified by the presence of Barbara Stanwyck, the toughest cookie among the leading ladies of her era. The earliest entry in the collection, director Alfred Santell's oddly-titled Internes Can't Take Money (1937), introduced the character of Dr. Kildare to the screen (played by Joel McCrea here), but the spotlight is on Stanwyck, portraying a hard-luck survivor desperately searching for her little girl, who's lost in a system of orphans and foster kids. It's pure Depression-era entertainment, with a streetwise doctor in an art deco hospital, good-guy gangsters, and a scrappy attitude. Stanwyck and McCrea reteam for filmmaker William Wellman's much stodgier The Great Man's Lady (1942), a sprawling but unremarkable historical drama of 19th-century nation building with the romantic sacrifice of Stanwyck's character at the center. Douglas Sirk directed both the turn-of-the-century melodrama All I Desire (1953), a sharp social portrait with Stanwyck starring as an actress in a seedy traveling company who returns to her hypocritical little hometown, and There's Always Tomorrow (1956), with Stanwyck as an adventurous woman having an affair with married toy inventor Fred MacMurray (as suffocating a portrait of suburban middle-class life as you'll find in '50s cinema). The set is filled out by Irving Pichel's screwball comedy The Bride Wore Boots (1946), costarring Robert Cummings, which revolves around spousal misunderstandings and romantic interlopers, and Michael Gordon's shadowy drama The Lady Gambles (1949), starring Stanwyck in the titular role of a gambling addict, and costarring Robert Preston. Presented in an extra-less three-disc set, this is recommended. (S. Axmaker)