“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.

Hollywood’s Golden Age produced scores of potboilers in which Brooklyn- and Bronx-born actors invoked the great thriller taboo of “murr-dah” with their hometown accent. But Stanwyck’s lush Borough of Churches purr made “murr-dah” seem, as it did to Fred MacMurray’s sex-struck insurance investigator Walter Neff in Billy Wilder’s 1944 “Double Indemnity,” like it might be worth risking the gas chamber for.

Filmmakers adored Stanwyck. When asked in an interview how he was able to finish Preston Sturges’s brilliant but overwritten script for 1940s “Remember the Night” eight days ahead of schedule and $50,000 under budget, Mitchell Leisen credited Stanwyck. “She never blew one line through the whole picture,” he said. “She set that kind of pace and everybody worked harder, trying to outdo her.”

In her 1930s prime, Stanwyck enjoyed a kind of joint contractual custody between Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros. At Columbia, her six-film collaboration with Frank Capra spanned that director’s transition from contract journeyman to “name above the title” star director. In Capra’s “The Bitter Tea of General Yen,” Stanwyck played a New England missionary who finds herself a willing participant in an unlikely love and lust triangle with a Chinese warlord and his scheming mistress. Erotically charged, multilayered, and radically different in tone than Capra’s better-known agitprop films of the 1940s, “The Bitter Tea” deserves more than the glorified footnote status it has for most Capra admirers.

At Warner Bros., Stanwyck helped Warner’s golden boy producer Daryl Zanuck to develop 1933’s “Baby Face” into a potent and lurid sexual Horatio Alger story. The film’s early scenes, which depicted Stanwyck’s character exploited in a series of unabashedly prurient precode sexual situations, were in fact the star’s idea. What initially appears to be kinky audience titillation turns out to be vital backstory once the film moves from mining camp to boardroom jungle.

Stanwyck ended her relationship with Warner Bros. in the late 1940s over losing the part of Dominique Francon in “The Fountainhead.” Author Ayn Rand, Stanwyck, and Stanwyck’s second husband, Robert Taylor, were all members of the Alliance for Preservation of American Ideals, a rabidly anti-communist organization that welcomed HUAC to Hollywood. The star championed Rand’s book to Warner’s story department for years. When Jack Warner green-lit the long-delayed film and cast Patricia Neal in the lead role, Stanwyck terminated her contract with the studio.

If any actress could have saved Rand’s purple prose and clunky symbolism from the absurd melodramatic oddity it subsequently became, it was Stanwyck. BAM’s program notes to the contrary, there was never anything “campy” about the actress. She was always a force of poised, earthy gravity no matter how over-the-top the film she was in. That’s what I loved about her and still do. She could sell just about any role to any audience as easily as she convinced Walter Neff that “murrdah” was just one of those secret things that lovers do together.

Through May 6 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).