Jan Sterling

In Ace in the Hole (1951), Jan Sterling’s Lorraine has little patience for the idea that a wife ought to become more generous when her husband suffers. Sterling gives her bitterness a dry, practical delivery. We took a slightly uncomfortable pleasure in it, because she makes the woman’s impatience funny without asking us to find her kind. Beside Kirk Douglas, she holds our attention without competing for volume. She is essential to the film.

Supporting parts in Johnny Belinda (1948) and Caged (1950) came before Lorraine, with the latter casting her as a corrupt prisoner. The 1950s brought much of her film work, and repeated invitations to play cynical or opportunistic women. Her clipped delivery made her well suited to those parts. The danger was that casting her could spare a film the trouble of explaining a character: the audience was being offered a familiar sort of woman before she had done much.

Billy Wilder gives Sterling a worthwhile part in Ace in the Hole, though not always enough room to develop it. The script can make greed predictable, giving some supporting characters too little beyond their willingness to exploit somebody else’s misery. Sterling does much to complicate that pattern, giving Lorraine a force that the reporter cannot simply push aside. There are still points at which the writing makes her too easy to account for, and even that dry delivery cannot supply what is missing.

The High and the Mighty (1954) gave her vulnerability to work with as Sally McKee, while 1984 (1956) cast her as Julia. There was room for sadness in her acting as well as scorn. Substantial film opportunities became scarcer after the 1950s, although she continued occasional film, television and stage work into the 1980s. That gives us a reason to look beyond the cynical women, but no need to dismiss what she achieved playing them. Start with Ace in the Hole and resist the temptation to watch only Douglas.