Barbara Stanwyck's films include "Double Indemnity," "Ball of Fire," "Ladies They Talk About," "The Lady Eve," and "Forty Guns." (Photofest)

There's a moment in "Ball of Fire" (1941) that gives Barbara Stanwyck her due. A chorus girl on the lam, she somehow winds up in a house inhabited by eight bachelor encyclopedia-writers. (Don't ask.) The only female they regularly see is their housekeeper. One look at Stanwyck, and her finger starts to wag. "That is the kind of woman," she declares, "that makes whole civilizations topple." It comes as no surprise, and a considerable relief, when Stanwyck later slugs her and locks the old bat in a closet.

Tomorrow would be Stanwyck's 100th birthday (she died in 1990). This is cause for celebration for anyone who loves movies -- or strong, smart, unillusioned women. How strong? Samuel Fuller wanted to direct her in an Evita Peron biopic. How smart? After meeting her, Ernest Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins about her"good tough Mick intelligence." How unillusioned? In "Clash by Night" (1952), a shocked Paul Douglas finds her in a bar in broad daylight and asks how often she drinks whiskey in the morning."Only when I have a cold," Stanwyck says, with an irony so flat it could be a pancake in Kansas.

Over the course of nearly six decades (from "Broadway Nights" in 1927 to "The Colbys" on television in 1986) Stanwyck forged one of the great Hollywood careers. She may never have attained the exalted status of Garbo or Davis or either Hepburn. But that's part of Stanwyck's enduring appeal. Exaltation was never on her to-do list.

Instead, she always meant business. This was a woman who put her lipstick on without a mirror. When asked what would happen if it smeared, she said, "Then the makeup man fixes it. That's his job. We all have jobs." Even when she was wearing couture, her sleeves seemed rolled up. No screen goddess would ever ask, as she does in "Golden Boy" (1939), "You mean, I look like I been kicked around?" And of no screen goddess could you be so sure she would kick right back. The Brattle Theatre knew what it was doing in calling its Stanwyck series, which runs over the next seven Tuesdays, "Maybe I Am Just a Dame."

Many of Stanwyck's early titles testify to her forthright dame-ness: "Ladies of Leisure" (1930), "Illicit" (1931), "Ten Cents a Dance" (1931), "Forbidden" (1932), "Shopworn" (1932), "Ladies They Talk About" (1933), "Gambling Lady" (1934),"A Lost Lady" (1934). Excessive virtue was not part of her persona, and her most frequent facial expression was a near sneer. It was fate that she should share a screen with that other great sneerer, Elvis Presley, in "Roustabout" (1964).

Yet notice how many of those titles include"lady" or"ladies." So much of Stanwyck's staying power had to do with a consistent tension between street-smart style and aristocratic bearing. She never put on airs -- she didn't have to."Let us be crooked, but never common," Charles Coburn urges Stanwyck in "The Lady Eve" (1941). Exactly right. Onscreen she had an innate authority. Somehow Stanwyck could always square often low down behavior with surprisingly high-flown diction. (She came from Brooklyn, but her vowels didn't.) The contradiction was right there in her name. Barbara Stanwyck, which sounds like a minor Edith Wharton character, was born Ruby Stevens: commonplace surname preceded by a jewel.

Stanwyck could have been the star of her own life story, it was that rough and tumble. She was 4 when her mother died. Her father then abandoned Stanwyck and her older siblings. She quit school at 13 and went to work wrapping packages at a New York department store. "The plain wrapping, not the fancy," she liked to say.

She figured the money would be better working on stage than behind a counter. "I was a dancer," Stanwyck would later say, "not a great one but I knew my left from my right." Right there you have the Stanwyck tone: terse, knowing, with a soupcon of snarl. At 15, she got a small part in the "Ziegfeld Follies." "I was in the 16th row of the chorus and wore a beaded thing and occasionally sat on an elephant." Increasingly prominent acting roles earned her a screen test.

Stanwyck had poise and a sense of barely throttled urgency that the camera feasted on. It was her manner, far more than her appearance, that audiences responded to. "Well, I'm not exactly ugly," she says to Fred MacMurray in "Remember the Night" (1940). She certainly wasn't. Yet Stanwyck was no conventional beauty, either. True, she had a chorine's gams and never lost her trim dancer's figure. (In "Roustabout," the 57-year-old Stanwyck looks better in a pair of jeans than Elvis does.) But her most prominent features were that beaky nose and snaggly upper lip. Her forehead was too high, her cheeks too full. What made her so striking was the slight rasp in her voice, the habit she had of biting her lower lip (simultaneously signaling thought and desire) -- and, above all, the tungsten gaze of those so-often-narrowed eyes. Have shrewdness and skepticism ever been so attractive?

You can see a tectonic shift in movie-star allure in "Clash by Night." Marilyn Monroe plays Stanwyck's sister-in-law. With her soft, pillowy sexiness, Monroe's like a child who's discovered a new toy -- or, rather, that she's the new toy. Far from being a plaything, Stanwyck is well beyond fun and games. Monroe's all jiggly, giggly curves, eager yet coy. Stanwyck, the picture of pared-down, fighting-weight angularity, couldn't be more different. She's not only more mature. She's practically another species. Stanwyck seems so natural on the screen, so unmannered, while Monroe's a bundle of nerves and tics.

The contrast was no less great with Stanwyck's contemporaries. The histrionics of a Joan Crawford (who pirated the title role in "Mildred Pierce" from her) or Davis (who got the lead in "All About Eve" after Stanwyck turned it down) now come across as celluloid Kabuki -- they seem that stylized -- compared to Stanwyck's austere naturalism. Like Garbo, she intuitively grasped the value of stillness, of inwardness. Unlike Garbo, she was able to make that quality seem contemporary and carnal. It's true her emotional range was fairly narrow, running from tears ("Stella Dallas," 1937) to jeers ("The Strange Love of Martha Ivers," 1946). Within that range, though, she was very nearly invincible.

Sarah Bernhardt famously played Hamlet in drag. If Stanwyck could have mastered the verse (and some studio been reckless enough to bankroll the project), she might have been a magnificent Coriolanus. When a Davis or Crawford makes a show of her pride, there's a sense of self-inflation, of preening. With Stanwyck, pridefulness seems as natural -- as necessary -- as breathing.

Of course, she had a lot to be proud of. "The true function of a writer," the literary critic Cyril Connolly declared, "is to produce a masterpiece." If that's true for actors, too, then Stanwyck succeeded twice over. Anyone who appeared in more than 80 movies is going to make a lot of bad ones, and Stanwyck did. She made a lot of good if flawed ones, too -- not just"Ball of Fire" and"Clash by Night," but "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" ( 1933), "Meet John Doe" (1941), and "Forty Guns" (1957), to name only three. She also made "Double Indemnity" (1944) and "The Lady Eve," two of the very best movies ever to come out of Hollywood. Neither is imaginable without Stanwyck.

There are many reasons why "Double Indemnity" remains the greatest of all film noirs. Heading the list is Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson. Hollywood had had female villains before, but never quite like this: as cold, as alluring, as implacable. Stanwyck brings to the role an icy ferocity that's still startling more than six decades later. "I'm afraid to go home with her," Stanwyck said of Phyllis after seeing "Double Indemnity" for the first time. It took a lot to scare Barbara Stanwyck.

Jean Harrington/Eve Sidwich, Stanwyck's character in "The Lady Eve," has a few things in common with Phyllis. She's crooked, for one thing. But she's so much more than that. You believe Stanwyck when she fleeces Henry Fonda. You believe her when she falls for him. You believe her when she's crushed by his rejection. You believe her when she sets out to humiliate him. You even believe her when she falls for him all over again. William Demarest means something quite different when he bellows out the movie's deathless last line,"Positively the same dame!," but it applies no less to Stanwyck's performance -- or whole career.