George Cukor (1939)

Every member of the cast of The Women, including the non-human animals, is female.  This famous comedy, based on the stage play of the same name by Clare Boothe Luce, has a screenplay by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin.  George Cukor is renowned as a sympathetic director of actresses.  Yet the whole thing seems thoroughly misogynist.  The persistent implication is that all a woman really wants is a rich man:  true, the principals are members of a specific social group – wealthy Manhattanites in the late 1930s – but they monopolise the screen, and they are legion.  The characterisations are, for the most part, frenzied and derisive.  At the start of a play in the theatre or, perhaps especially, when it’s been adapted for the screen, it’s not unusual to find the performers hyperactive.  Things settle down once the actors have made clear who their characters are.  I assumed that would happen here but no such luck:  The Women is relentlessly high-pitched for 133 minutes.

This self-involved social set is so hard to like that it seems rather futile to distinguish morally between them – especially as the ‘decent’ woman at the centre of the story is more tiresome than her antagonists.  Norma Shearer is the heroine Mary Haines – a pain in the neck when she’s bravely smiling through, insufferably smug when she’s briefly transformed for the climactic cat fight.   As Crystal Allen, the hard, avaricious schemer who’s stolen Mary’s husband, Joan Crawford is more entertaining.  Crawford, as usual, takes a long time to change expression – and an age to work her features into a slyboots look – but she’s good in the first showdown with Norma Shearer, where you certainly sympathise with Crystal’s offhand putdown of noble wives.  The essential snobbishness of The Women is illustrated in the fact that Crystal’s original sin is that she’s a shopgirl (and unto the perfume counter she shall return).  Although she’s mostly overpowering as bitchy fairweather friend Sylvia Fowler, Rosalind Russell’s formidable technique delivers the few comic highlights – a sequence in which she maintains her high-speed delivery while Sylvia’s being put through rigorous physical exercises, a moment when she’s eavesdropping so hard that she walks into a wall.  Joan Fontaine’s Peggy Day is hardly less exhausting to watch.  This is meant to be another of the nicer characters; Fontaine, working up a lather of ingenuousness, chiefly gives the impression of auditioning for bigger and better things.  The competitiveness of the actresses largely upstages the feuds between the women they’re playing.

The cast also includes, among others, Paulette Goddard, Mary Boland, Lucile Watson, Phyllis Povah, Marjorie Main, Ruth Hussey and Hedda Hopper.   (Povah and Main are the only two reprising roles they played on stage.  Hopper, an actress before she became a gossip columnist, doesn’t appear here ‘as herself’, as became standard practice in her several post-war screen appearances.)  The most elegant and amusing bit of The Women comes in the opening titles, when a close-up of each of the main dramatis personae is introduced by a shot of a beast or bird that reflects their personality.  Once the main action gets underway, however, the prevailing overacting extends even to the canine bitch in the story.  The film is in black-and-white, except for a fashion parade interlude.  The switch to Technicolor is accompanied by an abrupt, temporary change of tone:  this weird sequence is interruptive rather in the way of dream ballets in post-war musicals.  But the fashion show is comparatively brief – unlike most things in The Women.

21 May 2017