‘Barbara Stanwyck — I loved her!" One grows accustomed to those oaths while cultivating the habit of seeing vintage films on New York's repertory screens. The audience participation that goes on in the city's old movie halls is alternately one of the great perils and epiphanous pleasures of joining the local film-nut elite when they meet, alone but together, in the dark. Such incantations sometimes feel like a summoning of and reckoning with old ghosts. In a particular theater in the basement of a particular Manhattan museum on a particular afternoon in 1990, the conviction and intensity of the anonymous 70-something guy in stained chinos sitting next to me and addressing the screen suggested that he was doing exactly that.

Stanwyck, you see, had just passed away a few weeks before. The film, Sam Fuller's "Forty Guns," was part of a retrospective of the director's work and not a tribute to its star. For most of those assembled, certainly for that one guy who, following his unsolicited testimony as Stanwyck made her first appearance early in "Forty Guns," spent the bulk of the film rattling a shopping bag while tears streamed intermittently down his face, the screening was an unexpected memorial to the then-recently departed. The timing just lined up that way.

On the occasion of what would have been Stanwyck's 100th year, BAM Cinemateque presents "Ball of Fire: Barbara Stanwyck Centennial," a 12-day, 12-film tribute to the Brooklyn orphan (born Ruby Stevens) turned hoofer who evolved into a leggy Hollywood femme fatale icon and then a steely, sturdy matriarch on television in the 1960s and '70s. In not one of the films on display at BAM is her timing less than perfect.

In her day, Stanwyck was America's real sweetheart —not a chirpy grinning innocent, but a dark-eyed, flesh-and-blood woman. She brought her characters an intelligence, unorthodox beauty, and sensual presence that could be unapologetically cruel or selflessly loving depending on a story's twists and turns. Accompanied by a shake of her head and a slight and sexy baring of her teeth, Stanwyck's low voice made dialogue that would've betrayed a lesser actor ring with urgent truth.

This is cache, read story here