‘The Women’ Revisited: 1939’s All-Female Event Film Feels Like The Precursor To ‘Black Panther’ And ‘Crazy Rich Asians’
By Jessica Mason/June 26, 2019 10:00 am EST
(Welcome to 1939: Revisited, a column dedicated to taking a look back at some of the films of one of the most highly-praised years in film history and explaining why they still matter today. In this entry: The Women feels reminiscent of modern blockbusters that focus on groups that don’t often get to dominate the screen.)
In our first installment of this series, we took a deeper look at one of, if not the most iconic motion pictures of all time, The Wizard of Oz. Nowadays, Oz is the defining film of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios and their images are so entwined that the old MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas is basically a Wizard of Oz homage, with it’s emerald walls and towering gold lions. But 80 years ago, Oz was just one of dozens of films released by MGM in ‘39 that helped contribute to the studio’s continued domination of the box office. It wasn’t the crown jewel. If any film made in-house by MGM were to take that title, it would be one that debuted just a week after Dorothy went over the rainbow: The Women.Many modern audiences may not have heard of this film, but its elements and success are highly instructive to things that are still happening in cinema today. It was promoted and propelled by what we’d now call inclusion as a gimmick: a movie showing only females, down to the pets and paintings. Even so, it was a huge, if isolated, step forward for representation. Textually, it’s still all about women’s relationships with men, even if they’re not seen. But in a broader sense, it’s about how women were used, seen and portrayed – and the ways Hollywood, MGM and the world were changing.
Flicks About Chicks
MGM, perhaps moreso than any other studio, made movies for everyone in America. That was the philosophy of studio head, Louis B. Mayer. Mayer, a bespectacled, Jewish immigrant who never went to college and worked in a scrapyard as kid, who entered the film the film buying a burlesque theater to turn into movie house, wanted his studio to be the epitome of class and American family values. While Warner Brothers appealed to the working man, Columbia tried to make films that meant something, and Paramount varied between prestige and cheap populism, Mayer’s MGM was media for mass consumption, offering escape and respite from the dangerous real world.As you might guess, “American family values” meant white, Christian, patriarchal values; and mass cultural appeal meant the kind of neutered, idealist version of reality in line with the production code enforced by the Hayes office. America, as MGM saw it, included women, and people of color, but movies certainly didn’t have to be about these groups to be for them. This viewpoint is what kept MGM in the black, even during the Great Depression, when other studios were floundering. Their movies weren’t expected to be realistic, or progressive, but at the end of the ’30s, with the country still recovering from the depression and global tensions mounting, even MGM couldn’t completely escape the turning tide of a changing world.The Women is based on the play of the same name of name by Claire Booth Luce, which was a hit on Broadway in 1936. It follows the lives of various women in Manhattan as they gossip, divorce, remarry, backstab, and support one another. The film version, directed by George Cukor, was the Big Little Lies of it’s time – frothy and fun but unmistakably female. This in and of itself was novel. It wasn’t the first film starring women, obviously, but quite often, women onscreen were either sexpots or innocent ingenues, maybe a mother if they were lucky. The idea of giving women, especially more than one women, complexity and interiority was rare for the time. And, to be honest, it’s still rare in Hollywood now. While The Women was a hit, it was still a stunt and it’s success didn’t really do much to change things, as you might guess from, well, the current state of things. There was a woman’s pen behind the play and the screenplay (Anita Loos wrote the adapation) and even that is a rarity in our modern time.Still, The Women, is brilliant and important in various ways because of its gimmick. The conceit of telling a story about women’s heterosexual love lives without showing men by its nature necessitates showing women in a wide variety of ways, and via a wide variety of women. My favorite “necessity is the mother of invention” moment in the film is during a big break up scene between our lead woman, Mary, and her husband, Stephen. The entire fight and the decision to divorce is retold by two gossiping maids. It gives us the drama of the fight, the comedy of the impressions and eavesdropping, and the commentary of the maids’ view of their employers, all in one.The Women has a lot in common with recent hits, like Black Panther or Crazy Rich Asians, where the deep dive focus into one group of people that don’t often get complete focus on screens leads to something fresh. The Women’s cast include mothers and matrons, daughters and servants, and though they aren’t all given big moments, the fact we get to see them at all matters.
‘The Women’ Revisited: 1939’s All-Female Event Film Feels Like The Precursor To ‘Black Panther’ And ‘Crazy Rich Asians’
By Jessica Mason/June 26, 2019 10:00 am EST
(Welcome to 1939: Revisited, a column dedicated to taking a look back at some of the films of one of the most highly-praised years in film history and explaining why they still matter today. In this entry: The Women feels reminiscent of modern blockbusters that focus on groups that don’t often get to dominate the screen.)
In our first installment of this series, we took a deeper look at one of, if not the most iconic motion pictures of all time, The Wizard of Oz. Nowadays, Oz is the defining film of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios and their images are so entwined that the old MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas is basically a Wizard of Oz homage, with it’s emerald walls and towering gold lions. But 80 years ago, Oz was just one of dozens of films released by MGM in ‘39 that helped contribute to the studio’s continued domination of the box office. It wasn’t the crown jewel. If any film made in-house by MGM were to take that title, it would be one that debuted just a week after Dorothy went over the rainbow: The Women.Many modern audiences may not have heard of this film, but its elements and success are highly instructive to things that are still happening in cinema today. It was promoted and propelled by what we’d now call inclusion as a gimmick: a movie showing only females, down to the pets and paintings. Even so, it was a huge, if isolated, step forward for representation. Textually, it’s still all about women’s relationships with men, even if they’re not seen. But in a broader sense, it’s about how women were used, seen and portrayed – and the ways Hollywood, MGM and the world were changing.
In our first installment of this series, we took a deeper look at one of, if not the most iconic motion pictures of all time, The Wizard of Oz. Nowadays, Oz is the defining film of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios and their images are so entwined that the old MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas is basically a Wizard of Oz homage, with it’s emerald walls and towering gold lions. But 80 years ago, Oz was just one of dozens of films released by MGM in ‘39 that helped contribute to the studio’s continued domination of the box office. It wasn’t the crown jewel. If any film made in-house by MGM were to take that title, it would be one that debuted just a week after Dorothy went over the rainbow: The Women.Many modern audiences may not have heard of this film, but its elements and success are highly instructive to things that are still happening in cinema today. It was promoted and propelled by what we’d now call inclusion as a gimmick: a movie showing only females, down to the pets and paintings. Even so, it was a huge, if isolated, step forward for representation. Textually, it’s still all about women’s relationships with men, even if they’re not seen. But in a broader sense, it’s about how women were used, seen and portrayed – and the ways Hollywood, MGM and the world were changing.
Flicks About Chicks
MGM, perhaps moreso than any other studio, made movies for everyone in America. That was the philosophy of studio head, Louis B. Mayer. Mayer, a bespectacled, Jewish immigrant who never went to college and worked in a scrapyard as kid, who entered the film the film buying a burlesque theater to turn into movie house, wanted his studio to be the epitome of class and American family values. While Warner Brothers appealed to the working man, Columbia tried to make films that meant something, and Paramount varied between prestige and cheap populism, Mayer’s MGM was media for mass consumption, offering escape and respite from the dangerous real world.As you might guess, “American family values” meant white, Christian, patriarchal values; and mass cultural appeal meant the kind of neutered, idealist version of reality in line with the production code enforced by the Hayes office. America, as MGM saw it, included women, and people of color, but movies certainly didn’t have to be about these groups to be for them. This viewpoint is what kept MGM in the black, even during the Great Depression, when other studios were floundering. Their movies weren’t expected to be realistic, or progressive, but at the end of the ’30s, with the country still recovering from the depression and global tensions mounting, even MGM couldn’t completely escape the turning tide of a changing world.The Women is based on the play of the same name of name by Claire Booth Luce, which was a hit on Broadway in 1936. It follows the lives of various women in Manhattan as they gossip, divorce, remarry, backstab, and support one another. The film version, directed by George Cukor, was the Big Little Lies of it’s time – frothy and fun but unmistakably female. This in and of itself was novel. It wasn’t the first film starring women, obviously, but quite often, women onscreen were either sexpots or innocent ingenues, maybe a mother if they were lucky. The idea of giving women, especially more than one women, complexity and interiority was rare for the time. And, to be honest, it’s still rare in Hollywood now. While The Women was a hit, it was still a stunt and it’s success didn’t really do much to change things, as you might guess from, well, the current state of things. There was a woman’s pen behind the play and the screenplay (Anita Loos wrote the adapation) and even that is a rarity in our modern time.Still, The Women, is brilliant and important in various ways because of its gimmick. The conceit of telling a story about women’s heterosexual love lives without showing men by its nature necessitates showing women in a wide variety of ways, and via a wide variety of women. My favorite “necessity is the mother of invention” moment in the film is during a big break up scene between our lead woman, Mary, and her husband, Stephen. The entire fight and the decision to divorce is retold by two gossiping maids. It gives us the drama of the fight, the comedy of the impressions and eavesdropping, and the commentary of the maids’ view of their employers, all in one.The Women has a lot in common with recent hits, like Black Panther or Crazy Rich Asians, where the deep dive focus into one group of people that don’t often get complete focus on screens leads to something fresh. The Women’s cast include mothers and matrons, daughters and servants, and though they aren’t all given big moments, the fact we get to see them at all matters.
