Starring Miss Barbara Stanwyck: Art
The Purchase Price  1932. Warner Brothers
Director: William A. Wellman
Cast : Barbara Stanwyck ( Joan Gordon)
     George Brent, Lyle Talbot, Hardie Albright,
      David Landau,
Barbara Stanwyck ,
George Brent,,Barbara Stanwyck
Stanwyck is a torch singer that  accepts a mail-order marriage (to George Brent) in North Dakota to escape her gangster lover.
Frank Capra  fourth collaboration with Barbara Stanwyck was a somewhat offbeat story for that time, a film  where Capra had decided to  show "Art with a capital *A*"  and he did.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen  1933. Columbia
Director: Frank Capra
Cast:  Barbara Stanwyck  (Megan Davis)
         Nils Asther, Toshia Mori,  Walther Connolly,
           Gavin Gordon, Richard Loo
Costumes; Edward Stevenson
Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther
                               
Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther,
                               
Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther
                               
Barbara Stanwyck,
                               
Cameraman (as in the other Capra's films) was:
Joseph Walker and She was never so beautifully photographed,
"The Bitter Tea of General Yen" , the story of an American missionary who travel to China to marry another missionary but is kidnapped before the ceremony by the evil General Yen (Nils Asther) and taken to his palace.  At first she abhors him and everything he stands for. They clash repeatedly over his unscrupulous methods until she begins to realize that for Yen it is simply a mean of survival. Soon her hatred turns to empathy and then respect. After his mistress brings about Yen's downfall, She confesses her own love for him and offers to stay with him. He realizes the pain this will cause her, and ,determined to have an honorable death, he drinks a cup of tea he has poisoned.
This is the only art film Stanwyck has ever made, and the picture is "Art" in its execution as well as in its experimental theme. (well ahead of its time and yet that couldn't have been made under the more prohibitive moral codes that were soon to rule the movie industry.) It is visually a tapestry. And Capra and Joseph Walker weave her into it by bathing her in sensuous lighting,ritual and music.
As an "objet d'art" she is most satisfying.
As an "obje