Stella!

Doing justice to bad taste in Henry King's 1925 version of Stella Dallas.

The following is adapted and expanded from notes for an introduction to a screening of Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925), presented on May 11, 2025 by Cinema Reborn. It contains spoilers.

How do you show bad taste on screen? More specifically, how do you show it in a way every viewer can recognise, even those most lacking in taste themselves? Going by the original silent version of Stella Dallas, directed by Henry King in 1925, the answer hasn’t changed in a century: through excess. Stella (Belle Bennett), the lower-class heroine who marries into wealth, is too much in every way for her new environment: too boisterous, too up for a good time, too visibly a creature of flesh and blood (Bennett, a onetime circus performer, reportedly gained weight for the role).

Stella’s fatal lack of class shows above all in her dress sense, a trait carried over directly from Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1923 novel, where a whole section of the plot turns on an especially ill-advised black-and-white striped frock that draws all eyes to her at a fancy resort. “She resembled a zebra somewhat,” Prouty’s narrator tells us, as malicious as the tittering observers within the fiction. As imaginatively brought to life by King’s costume designer Sophie Wachner, who went on to the Martian outfits for the 1930 science-fiction musical Just Imagine, the look is no more outlandish than a good deal of haute couture since. Still, we couldn’t be further from the clean lines of Helen Morrison (Alice Joyce), Stella’s conveniently widowed romantic rival, who retains her flapper physique even as the mother of three increasingly strapping sons.

As in the novel, dress serves as a metonym not just for social class but for sexual propriety, or rather for the impropriety Stella is suspected of, not without reason, after her husband Stephen (Ronald Colman) departs for New York a few years into their marriage, while she stays behind in Massachusetts with their young daughter Laurel (played from the age of around ten by Hollywood newcomer Lois Moran, who holds her own with Bennett in what is a mother-daughter love story above all). With the couple permanently separated though not divorced, Stephen allows himself the consolation of a rekindled platonic friendship with his childhood sweetheart Helen, while Stella starts stepping out with Ed Munn, a local good-time Charlie played by the character actor Jean Hersholt, furnished with his own wardrobe of clashing patterns and leering no less coarsely than he did a year earlier in Erich von Stroheim’s Greed. How far Stella is deliberately rebelling against convention is never wholly clear, but the shakier her claims to respectability become, the more she doubles down on ruffled skirts, lace trimmings and pancake makeup, piling her bird’s-nest curls ever higher when not hiding them under what Prouty calls “futurist hats”.

Stella does eventually give Ed the boot, after he wrecks her last chance to reconcile with Stephen—and when she seeks him out years later, it’s purely to use him as a tool in her plot to guarantee the best possible future for Laurel, whose growing taste for life’s finer things may be a genetic inheritance from her father’s side. The point is that while class origins may be ineradicable they’re not the whole story: Stella and Ed are alike in some respects, but less alike than most observers come to believe, including even Laurel herself. Ed may be even worse than he appears, going by the horror the teenage Laurel shows at the very mention of his name; Stella’s vulgarity is what marks her as one of the elect, the outward and visible sign of a Christlike capacity for self-abnegation.

That in itself is rather a vulgar idea, and one of the strengths of King’s film—shared with King Vidor’s better-known 1937 remake, starring Barbara Stanwyck—is an awareness that its own place on the class hierarchy is open to question. Indeed, the melodramatic twists of the plot aren’t so far from the kind of trash favoured by Stella herself, who prefers racy bestsellers to highbrow mystification and is not condemned for doing so (as the scholar Jennifer Parchesky notes, traditional literary values held more sway in Prouty’s staunchly middlebrow novel, which the New York Times compared to Willa Cather). Both films invite judgement on Stella while retaining a reluctant complicity with her, which is part of what makes her such a usefully flexible protagonist: we can look up to her unselfishness and down on her naivety, empathise with her shame or rejoice at her defiance of society’s standards, set ourselves apart or think of her as one of our own.

Indeed, we can do all of these things at once or by turns, depending on which of Stella’s insecurities happen to mirror ours. Another part of this flexibility is how readily Stella’s efforts to fit into high society can be mapped onto a range of anxieties about “passing”. Biographers have speculated that Samuel Goldwyn, the mogul who produced both the 1925 and 1937 films, had a special personal affinity with the material—connecting it to his Yiddish-speaking mother back in Europe, or to his own uneasy aspirations to “class”. In more recent decades, Stella’s excessive yet insufficient adherence to the codes of gender has drawn considerable attention from feminist film scholars (among others). While she may be the ultimate mother, she demonstrates this by refusing to be a mother at all—and while she’s all woman, she’s no lady, which means that in the eyes of her betters she’s never quite woman enough.

All this holds good in both the 1925 and 1937 films, which differ in tone and emphasis but follow the same basic plot with the same “sock scenes,” as Variety put it (the 1990 modernised remake Stella, starring Bette Midler, falls outside the scope of this discussion). Still, the 1937 film has attracted far more critical attention than its predecessor, which has long been hard to see in a version that does it justice, though a Blu-ray of the recent restoration surely can’t be too far off. Viewed side by side, the two films can be taken as a test case for auteurism, which is not to diminish King and Vidor’s respective collaborators behind the camera, such as the celebrated screenwriter Frances Marion, who scripted the 1925 film among hundreds of other silents (and then transitioned seamlessly into the sound era, crafting hit vehicles for Greta Garbo and Wallace Beery back to back).

Nor is it to deny that Bennett and Stanwyck were always destined to be very different Stellas. Stanwyck told the Saturday Evening Post she had been inspired by the “magnificent performance” of Bennett, who died of cancer in 1932—but if so, it would seem she was inspired mainly to avoid repeating the same effects. Given her first star part in the movies at the age of 34, Bennett set out to show what she was capable of, progressing through a series of transformations from alluring youth to blowsy middle age to the finale where she appears to be at death’s door (“I can make up for any part from fourteen to eighty,” she boasted). Central to her interpretation is a sad-clown quality reminiscent of Chaplin, whose Little Tramp travestied the traditional notion of the “gentleman” as Stella travesties the “lady”; something like direct homage is paid in a wide shot in which she toddles away from the camera, using a parasol much as the Tramp used his cane.

Though not without a degree of cunning, Bennett’s Stella is increasingly woozy, even a little stupid—qualities beyond the range of Stanwyck, who substitutes a tour-de-force of another kind, focusing less on outward transformation and giving us a heroine more stubborn and emotionally reckless than truly lacking in self-knowledge. These contrasting approaches are well-matched to their respective directors: Vidor’s moving camera shares the dynamism of his heroine, whereas King, a classicist even by the standards of 1925, renders the story as a series of illustrative tableaux, holding the characters at a literal as well as figurative distance (when Stella wins Stephen as a husband, she literally snares him in the vines that dangle over one side of her front porch, an inspiration taken from one of her favourite magazines).

Restraint of this order may have been more King’s default setting than a specifically intended counterpoint to Stella’s crassness—but for all the “invisibility” of his style, careful examination reveals that he was anything but a primitive, either by comparison to Vidor or in general. With the mania for system which so many “classical” directors possessed but never spoke of, he builds his film around the notion of vision: what matters is not just what we see, but whose eyes we’re looking through, whether or not their judgement is one we’re led to share. Thus the opening scene, showing the idyllic youthful courtship of Stephen and Helen, is revealed as the dying vision of Stephen’s embezzler father—who looks on from a window of his study before turning away to shoot himself, his emotion betrayed only by his trembling hands as he clutches the newspaper that proclaims his disgrace.

Numerous variations on the theme follow: Stephen’s first out-of-focus glimpse of Stella as he strides past her family home, Stella’s mischievous younger brothers spying on the new couple and the camera spying on them in turn, the prying eyes of Laurel’s headmistress keeping watch on what Stella and Ed get up to when Stephen is out of town. Laurel spends a substantial portion of the film’s second half fretting about what might happen should her mother be seen by her new upper-crust friends, in particular the boy she likes, Richard Grosvenor (Douglas Fairbanks Jr). But what does Laurel see, when she looks at her beloved mother, and when does that start to shift? What does Stella see when she looks at herself, to the degree she ever manages to do so squarely?

The uncertainty of vision, and the unreliability of judgement, are central to this whole story (if Steven had “seen” Stella as she appears to him later on, he might not have married her at all). Stella herself is far more the person being looked at than the one who does the looking, until the famous denouement, where she guarantees the happy ending by shutting herself out of it. Having given up all claim to glory of her own, she’s now at one with the rest of us out there in the dark, peering over the railings into a well-lit room where Laurel is celebrating her marriage to Richard (Helen, the official mother of the bride, is the only one to guess the secret, compassionately or sadistically ordering that the curtains be left open so Stella can see). It’s the nadir of her descent, but also her triumph, and selfless mother-love isn’t quite all there is to the equation: Stella may be hiding in the shadows, but we know she’s orchestrated this spectacle every step of the way, gratifying both her own tastes and those of the public.

This is one of a handful of moments where Vidor more or less directly replicates King’s mise-en-scène, built on the ideally straightforward mechanism of shot-reverse-shot. But the nuances of performance differ, especially in the aftermath. A surprising range of emotions move across Stanwyck’s face as she walks off into the night, the camera tracking back to keep her in view; indeed, the character herself seems surprised by the pleasure rising within her, putting a finger to her chin as if light had dawned for the first time. This gives way to a musing look as if to say “Well, that’s that, then”—and from there her stride takes on pace and certainty, while her eyes glow with the satisfaction of a job well done.

Again, Bennett’s simple-hearted Stella is very different: her luridly haggard appearance makes Stanwyck look glamorous by comparison, and her last moments after she turns from the window are much briefer, since King’s camera doesn’t travel with her. Still, she’s no less pleased with herself, after her own fashion: she totters away with a look of dazed ecstasy, permitting herself one final glance back at what she’s wrought, and lifting up her hands as if imitating a gesture she saw at the movies long ago. Where Stanwyck’s Stella is clear-sighted at the last, Bennett’s is lost in her own dream: if this isn’t another dying vision like the one that opened the film, it might as well be. We can see, though, that she still has feathers in her hat.