In the most complex of her maternal roles, Barbara Stanwyck plays Naomi Murdoch, who abandoned her husband and three children – one still an infant – to pursue a career on the stage. Even today, such a woman might be seen as a monster, but Douglas Sirk’s film – the first in a cycle of melodramas he made for producer Ross Hunter at Universal – treats her story with rich ambivalence. After ten years away, Naomi decides to visit the small town and family she left, and her arrival stirs up a quiet storm of regrets, resentments, and conflicted feelings. Sirk wanted to keep the original title of Carol Ryrie Brink’s 1951 source novel, Stopover, which implies a temporary return. Hunter insisted on a lusher title and a more upbeat ending. The scene where Naomi approaches her old home at night and stands outside, gazing at the lighted windows, is among the finest moments in Stanwyck’s career, enriched by echoes of scenes in Stella Dallas, Remember the Night, and others. She cuts through the sentimentality of the situation and the film’s turn-of-the-century quaintness with her stripped-down focus and profound interiority; as critic Dan Callahan writes of these closeups, “It’s as if we’re seeing into the engine room of her talent, the bottom of her being.” In both of her films with Sirk (the second, 1956’s There’s Always Tomorrow, was her elegiac final pairing with Fred MacMurray), Stanwyck disturbs a complacent middle- class family with her devastating, face-up-to-it honesty. Sirk’s fluid, sensitive camerawork pays tribute to her subtlety and economy. “There is such an amazing tragic stillness about her,” he observed. “She never steps out of it and she never puts it on, but it is always there, this deep melancholy in her presence. She impressed me all the time as someone – what can I say? – someone who had really been touched deeply by life in some way. Because she had depth as a person.”

Imogen Sara Smith