Dears and Bitches: “The Women”

Have times changed? Claire Boothe Luce’s bitchy 1936 social comedy, The Women, was a huge Broadway sensation. The rights were purchased by MGM for a 1939 film that, like the play, features only women in its large cast. That hardly means that men play no part in the Park Avenue world the work depicts. Virtually everything these soignée females do revolves around their intimate connection with (off-screen) men. For MGM, this property was a chance to give meaty roles to the many impressive actresses on its roster. Some, like stars Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, apparently had their own off-camera feuds going. In any case, the on-screen bitchery struck audiences then and now as hilarious, and the film has been rewarded with a spot in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

 The Women was vigorously helmed by George Cukor, known at the time as a “woman’s director.” Cukor (whom I was honored to interview late in his life) could produce work of great subtlety, but The Women is hardly what you’d call subtle. Even the opening credits tell us exactly what to think about the cast of characters. Each of the main women is introduced by her married name: for example, Shearer is labeled as Mrs. Stephen Haines (Mary). And before we see a tell-tale closeup of the actress in character, there’s a quick image of an appropriate (female) animal. Shearer’s sensible, amiable Mary is depicted as a doe. Her soon-to-be archrival Crawford, in the role of a  shopgirl who’s after Mary’s husband, is shown as a sleek, cunning leopard. Third-billed Rosalind Russell, whose capricious character stirs up much of the trouble in the film, is a black cat. Others on-screen are represented by a monkey, a fox, a lamb, an owl, a cow (we then see everyone’s favorite confidante, played by Phyllis Povah, essentially chewing her cud), and an old mare (that would be homespun Marjorie Main as a Reno landlady).

 The outrageousness continues in the film’s opening scenes, set in and around a posh Manhattan health spa full of fawning uniformed attendants . The first thing we see, at the spa’s front door, is two pampered pooches snarling at one another. Quite soon it’s the woman themselves who are snarling, while gossiping over the manicure table and pretending to be each other’s best friends. One spa patron, gazing at another’s face through a magnifying contraption, sweetly declares, “Your skin makes the Rocky Mountains look like chiffon velvet.” Even Shearer’s appealing Mary will eventually learn, while on a trip to Reno to divorce her straying (but still loving) spouse, that there’s no special virtue in being nice: “I’ve had two years to grow claws . . . . Jungle Red.” And speaking of claws, the screen erupts with more than one physical cat-fight among the ladies who lunch.

 Does The Women have any lessons for us? I’m not so sure. True, good-hearted Mary does regain her equilibrium and her spouse, and Crystal heads back to the perfume counter. (These are spoilers, true, but can certainly be predicted from the film’s opening moments onward.) Still, virtue doesn’t exactly triumph. In many ways, it’s bitchery that reigns supreme. It’s curious to note that a 21^st century film remake was attempted. It took fifteen years to develop the project, which ultimately, when released in 2008, starred Meg Ryan, Annette Bening,, Eva Mendes, Debra Messing, Jada Pickett Smith, Carrie Fisher, Cloris Leachman, Debi Mazar Bette Midler, and Candice Bergen. Diane English of Murphy Brown fame wrote and directed, but her attempt at an update left critics (and audiences) distinctly unimpressed. 

 

Juliet . . . & (eventually) Romeo

Methinks that every generation has its own Romeo and Juliet, in which the tragic lovers reflect the concerns of the day. The 1936 film directed by George Cukor came out in the midst of the Great Depression. This was a time when young people going the movies craved glamour and sumptuous production values, things they couldn’t find in their own daily lives. Cukor’s MGM-based production featured major (though overaged) stars. Leslie Howard, as Romeo, was in his forties, and Norma Shearer, who played Juliet (and was married to studio honcho Irving Thalberg), was about 34, more than double the age of Shakespeare’s teenage heroine. The film was shot decorously, on elaborate sets, and given the full prestige treatment, complete with splashy roadshow engagements where illustrated programs were sold. (Yes, my mother bought one, and saved it for many decades)

 More than 20 years later, in 1957, a much-updated version of Romeo and Juliet became the toast of Broadway. This of course was West Side Story. The Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical reimagined the star-crossed lovers as recent New Yorkers from rival cultural backgrounds, with Tony as a Polish-American founder of a street gang called the Jets, and Maria, newly arrived from Puerto Rico, as naturally affiliated with the Sharks. The hit play became in 1964 a mega-hit film that gobsmacked everyone at my high school. We were much taken, in that era, with the promise of social justice for all, and the tragic story of lovers unable to transcend the enmity all around them hit us hard. (Steven Spielberg’s 2021 rethinking of the same musical has its merits, but its box-office reception was far less overwhelming, probably because the concerns of moviegoers had much changed in the intervening fifty-plus years.)

 What I consider MY Romeo and Juliet was the Franco Zeffirelli version that came out in the fraught year 1968. It was filmed on location in medieval Italian towns, and was the first cinematic version to feature actors close in age to Shakespeare’s actual characters. Zeffirelli apparently considered casting Paul McCartney and other rock gods of the era, but ended up with two unknowns, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, who were cast when they were 16 and 15, respectively, but aged a year in the course of filming. We college students of the era, many caught up with our own first big romances, watched this movie in a sort of swoony daze, fully understanding the erotic passions of the two young lovers.

 Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to jazz up the Shakespearean story, giving it a kind of hipster sensibility. The year was 1996, and the stars were Leonardo DiCaprio (then 21) and Claire Danes (about 17). The feuding families were played as 20^th century Miami mobster types, with the Capulets now having some Latin roots. The setting was Verona Beach, and one key scene was played in a swimming pool. There’s still some well-spoken Shakespearean poetry, but also guns and party drugs.

 I’m reminiscing about all this because I’ve just seen the L.A. stage production of & Juliet, a London and Broadway hit musical that posits Juliet (waking in the tomb beside the dead Romeo) deciding not to kill herself for love. What follows is a riotous comedy in which pop songs from Max Martin are incorporated into Juliet’s romantic adventures in Paris. (Brittany Spears’ “Oops!... I Did It Again” becomes an acknowledgement that Juliet falls for cute guys a tad too quickly.) The many teens in the house cheered for Juliet’s developing feminist consciousness and for the “woke” gay empowerment motif that predominates. Me? I just felt rather old.