Essentially a creative critical biography, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck belongs to a greater project of re-examining Hollywood and decentring the phallocentrism of film history. It is the latest book in the series Women’s Media History Now! which focuses on the unexplored work of women in film. Established in 2009, this series became even more timely with the advent of #MeToo and with books such as Helen O’Hara’s call to arms, Women vs Hollywood (2021). The purpose of this new women’s media history is, according to Catherine Russell, to seek out its ‘absent’ or ‘lost’ women protagonists. Barbara Stanwyck (1907–90) may be neither absent nor lost. Indeed, as Russell admits, there is a wealth of material on Stanwyck, including monographs, biographies, and entire archives dedicated to her, and her films are still shown regularly in cinemas, on digital platforms, and on free-to-air television. Nonetheless, Russell argues that Stanwyck has been undervalued as a creative force in the films she helped make memorable. Hence the curious title of the book, which seems more suited to the study of a director than an actress. Russell sets out to show how Stanwyck ‘made’ films by making herself a master of her craft.

While Russell’s approach may be that of ‘the fan and the collector’, she nonetheless demonstrates how Stanwyck ‘challenged the gender conventions that dominated in every decade of her sixty-year career, and […] survived the doctrinal misogyny of the American film industry with her bank account intact’. Russell’s main reference point is Jane Gaines and Monica Dall’Asta’s landmark collection Doing Women’s History, which provides Russell with a critical-historical approach. The first step in this re-evaluation is to shift the focus from ‘women-as-spectacle to women’s agency’, particularly by recognising that acting is first and foremost a type of labour, and it is the image of Stanwyck as above all else a hard-working, independent woman with a shrewd head for business that Russell seeks to promote.