A new boxed set of Barbara Stanwyck DVDs is reviewed in the Times’ today. I for one am a big fan. How about you?

If Stanwyck resisted camp, it’s because she retained a core of authenticity as unshakable and unmistakable as the Brooklyn vowels that colored her speech. Born Ruby Stevens in that borough on July 16, 1907, she survived a Dickensian childhood. When she was 4, her mother died after a drunk shoved her from a moving trolley; her father, an alcoholic drifter, abandoned the family two weeks after the funeral. Stanwyck spent several years going from foster home to foster home, and by 16 was working as a Broadway chorus girl. She arrived in Hollywood in 1928 as the wife of Frank Fay, a Broadway comic whose promising film career crashed just as hers was taking off, providing one possible inspiration for “A Star Is Born.”