NFR Project: 'The Women' (1939)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Women’

Dir: George Cukor

Scr: Anita Loos, Jane Murfin

Pho: Joseph Ruttenberg, Oliver T. Marsh

Ed: Robert J. Kern

Premiere: Aug. 31, 1939

133 min.

This movie is a bit of a stunt. It features only women in all its roles, and is concerned entirely with them. (It was directed by the gay George Cukor, who was known as a woman’s director.) It can be seen either as a prehistoric feminist statement, or a masterful women-are-such-feeling-creatures condescension. It’s probably both.

For what all the characters in the film think and talk about is men – how to get them, how to hang on them, how to let go of them, how to forgive them. It equates being an upper-class woman with being a venomous b- jerk.

It was written by women for women. It’s based on Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 about the lives and loves of various wealthy women. It seems that what consumes their time is preparing themselves for men, getting fit for men, thinking what to say to men. It’s not exactly enlightened. What camaraderie exists among the women in this film is stirred by their mutual cynicism about the value and reliability of men.

It’s a bit of an epic, with many speaking roles. The film starts with a group of society ladies interacting. A fine young wife and mother Mary (Norma Shearer, the master of smile-through-the-tears, which she gets to utilize extensively here) finds out her husband has been cheating on her with perfume-counter slut Crystal (Joan Crawford).

She determines to get a divorce, promptly marring their child for life by explaining what a divorce is. She goes to Reno – at this time, Reno was known as a convenient place to file for and obtain a divorce. There, she meets other women with a similar goal, and they bond . . . or don’t. (There is a memorable cat fight.) Mary’s husband marries Crystal, who promptly alienates their child and lolls in the tub, speaking surreptitiously to her new boyfriend!

Crystal eventually sleeps with one too many men, and Mary’s husband leaves her and returns to Mary, begging forgiveness. We last see Mary advancing on the camera, ars outstretched, forgiving like some modem Madonna.

This Passion Play of women’s woes is well-acted, and includes Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, and Rosalind Russell. Marjorie Main, the future Ma Kettle, has a significant of small part, displaying her Western drawl and comic-relief attitude.

Interestingly, there is a six-minute fashion show in Technicolor in the middle of the film, which either stops things dead of you are of one mind, or exists as a kind of female hallucination of beauty if you are of another.

The upshot of all this is that women are aware of emotion, think in terms of relationships, and are capable of seeing things in shades of gray rather than black and white. The film does not expect to explain women. It presents them as witty participants in social game-playing, with questions of honor and integrity paramount in their minds. “A woman’s compromised the day she’s born,” says one. Otherwise, the characters crack wise while they sashay through their man-orbiting business.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Wuthering Heights.