Molly Haskell, Wonder Woman at the Movies

To my mind, Molly Haskell is a feminist icon. Haskell—author, teacher, film critic—is also a gracious individual, and I’ve enjoyed chatting with her over the years about movies and life. (Yes, she wrote a fabulous blurb for my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How The Graduate Became the Touchstone of a Generation.) Haskell has published books about everything from Gone With the Wind to the career of Steven Spielberg to her brother’s late-in-life transformation into her sister. But her best-known book is still her first. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. First published in 1974, it was updated in 1987, and then reissued in a beautiful paperback edition in 2016.

Haskell’s thesis, presented in lively prose, is that female characters—who were once at the very center of Hollywood screen scenarios—have been increasingly marginalized. Whereas there  used to be heroines of stature, more recent films have regarded women as villains or victims, or else basically non-existent. Haskell’s study ends in the eighties, but has much to say to today’s moviegoers. A Wonder Woman or an Ocean’s Eight notwithstanding, just think of all those Hollywood hits that are essentially all male, with a few bimbos and wives-back-home added as set decoration.

Haskell is uniquely sensitive to the part played by movie stars in Golden Age Hollywood. She regards stars like Garbo, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn as auteurs in their own right, casting their larger-than-life shadows over all of their roles. She also finds a particular fascination in the so-called Woman’s Film, the once hugely-popular genre in which a female star faces (and often triumphs by way of) heartache. Her book contains so many provocative thoughts that it’s hard to corral even a few of them, but here, as she discusses the Woman’s  Film, is her take on child-bearing and child-rearing: “Children are an obsession in American movies—sacrifice of and for children, the use of children as justification for all manner of sacrifice—in marked contrast to European films about love and romantic intrigue, where children rarely appear at all and are almost never the instruments of judgment they are in American films.”

Such Haskell pronouncements led me to compare two classic films about mother love, Stella Dallas (1937) and Mildred Pierce (1941). Both contain powerful central performances by genuine Hollywood stars: Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford. Crawford, as Mildred, claws her way up the food chain in order to provide all the finer things for her social-climbing daughter, Veda. Ultimately, after years of being rebuffed by the ungrateful Veda, Mildred finds herself trying to save her daughter from a murder rap. In Stella Dallas, Stanwyck plays a high-spirited young woman from the wrong side of the tracks. We see her woo and win a man who’s her social better, and their marriage—doomed from the start—produces a charming young daughter named Laurel. Stella works hard to give Laurel every social advantage, but mother and daughter are snubbed by Laurel’s prissy schoolmates and their parents. Finally, in the name of mother-love, Stella pretends to reject Laurel, turning her over to her father for a more genteel upbringing. The final scene shows Stanwyck standing in the rain, spying through the window of a mansion on her daughter’s fairytale society wedding. 

Molly once told me that “you find what you need in movies.” Her affection for Doris Day in films like Lover Come Back stems from her own youthful desire to move to New York (from her home in Richmond, Virginia) and become a working woman. At that she has succeeded magnificently.

Michael Curtiz: He’s No Angel

To those of us who are fascinated by early Hollywood, director Michael Curtiz has always been a puzzlement. He was born Manó Kaminer, began his professional life as Mihály Kertész, and (once he moved from his native Hungary to the U.S.) evolved into a flag-waving American known as Mike. He shrugged off his Jewish heritage as easily as he cast aside his several out-of-wedlock children, yet was consistently loyal both to his brothers and to his second wife’s growing son. (Bess Meredyth, officially married to Curtiz until his death in 1962, was a prolific screenwriter who participated in all her husband's screen projects. Her son John Meredyth Lucas went on to become a director as well as a producer on such hit shows as The Fugitive and Star Trek.)

During a fifty-year career that covered some 170 film projects, he proved himself a total workaholic, taking pride in always being the first one on the set. Yet he also loved retreating to  his expansive San Fernando Valley ranch, and (outside of sex with every sweet young thing who struck his fancy) his favorite form of recreation was polo. One thing about him was consistent: his total inability to stop mangling the English language.

I get my information from a colleague, Alan K. Rode, who’s no stranger to contradiction. A former naval officer, he spent years dividing his time between writing and toiling as an aerospace general manager before committing himself fully to chronicling the history of classic Hollywood. His love for the entertainment industry is deeply rooted: his mother and several other family members were all once involved in film production. Aa a lifelong movie buff, Alan has interviewed and befriended many of the stalwarts of Golden Age Hollywood. His special passion for film noir has led him to be active as both a commentator and a preservationist. He’s one of the leading lights behind the Film Noir Foundation, and helps host the nation’s various Noir City film festivals, as well as his own Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs. He curated UCLA's recent three-month Curtiz retrospective, and this April he'll be appearing on TCM with Ben Mankiewicz, spotlighting Curtiz's Hollywood career.

When I first met Alan, he had one book under his belt: Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy. But he told me then he was laboring over something really big. Big it certainly is—Alan’s Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film is a jumbo-sized volume from the Screen Classics series put out by the University Press of Kentucky. It’s a serious, critically acclaimed survey of the director’s long career. In it I learned about Curtiz’s skill with a camera, his fraught relationship with his home studio, Warner Bros., and his involvement in making everything from Captain Blood to Casablanca (for which he won an Oscar) to Life with Father to the Bing Crosby musical, White Christmas. Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Bette Davis became stars on his watch. In addition, James Cagney brilliantly shifted gears in his George M. Cohan biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Joan Crawford—making a comeback after being sacked by MGM as “box office poison”—won an Oscar for her title role in Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce. He was the first to make movies starring John Garfield and, much later, Doris Day. (Seeing Day, a popular band singer, as possessing unmistakable star quality, he forbade her to take acting classes.) In 1958 he directed Elvis Presley in the film generally considered his best, King Creole. 

Curtiz’s achievements don’t entirely make up for his shenanigans—like his temper tantrums and the late-career big-budget botch called The Egyptian in which both he and producer Darryl Zanuck cast their mistresses in featured roles. Rode discusses, in fascinating detail, how Curtiz ended up making a movie, Mission to Moscow, that could be considered a Soviet propaganda film, but then emerged from the McCarthy era wholly unscathed. Some in Hollywood loved him; some hated him. But one thing’s for sure—without him, Hollywood would have been a much less interesting place.