Stella Dallas
Stella Dallas, the star vehicle for Barbara Stanwyck, hinges on a thought experiment: if you knew that by pushing a button your child would be happy for the rest of her life—but the cost of this happiness was that you could never see her again—would you do it? Mike and Dan talk about King Vidor’s 1937 melodrama as an example of what movies do so well: getting viewers to understand why people make decisions that defy logic but which are emotionally reasonable. Mike calls Stella a character who exhibits the maximum of emotion with the minimum of introspection: is he correct? Skip that birthday…
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