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. 

 

Regarding Rosalind Russell

Well, it was supposed to be funny. I’m old enough (alas) to remember the Oscar broadcast of 1959. Back in those days, the show’s musical numbers were not nearly as elaborate as they are today. At one point in the evening, three British actresses (one was Angela Lansbury) sang a little ditty about their countrywoman, Deborah Kerr, who was up for Best Actress for her starring role in Separate Tables. While praising Kerr, they took would-be witty potshots at her rivals for the honor. Regarding Rosalind Russell, they cattily opined that “Your mother could have scored with Auntie Mame.”     

 As a kid I realized full well that it’s not nice to compare a film star to somebody’s mother. Still, much as I loved Russell’s madcap performance as the wealthy, uninhibited, fundamentally good-hearted Mame, I definitely put Russell in the middle-aged category.  (She was over fifty at the time.) Years later, I was surprised to learn that before World War II she was a glamorous leading lady type, particularly in comedies. After portraying a conniving society dame in The Women (1939) she graduated to the leading role of Hildy Johnson, ace reporter and the object of Cary Grant’s affections in the wonderfully screwball His Girl Friday (1940). Her first Oscar nomination came for her portrayal of the savvy but lovelorn elder sister in 1942’S My Sister Eileen.  But later in the decade she was again up for the golden statuette for playing a heroic nun in Sister Kenny (1946) and a tragic heroine in the film version of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1947 – not a lot of laughs in that one!).

 In the following decade, Russell was a natural to repeat her Broadway triumph in Auntie Mame. The film version, though overlong, has its own sparkle, as Mame ebulliently proceeds to adopt an orphan boy, a bashful Southern millionaire, and a woebegone unwed mother into her life. (The last of these plot lines is extraordinarily dated, but Peggy Cass is hilarious – and Oscar-nominated – as the addlepated Agnes Gooch.) 

 AS she moved into the 1960s, though, Hollywood didn’t seem quite clear on how to make use of her considerable talents. In 1961 she starred in the screen version of a hit stage comedy, A Majority of One. Broadway audiences had kvelled to the performance of Gertrude Berg (TV’s Molly Goldberg) as a rather stereotypical New York Jewish widow who—against all odds—falls for a Japanese widower (would you believe Sir Cedric Hardwicke?) despite the misgivings of her family. The idea is that Bertha Jacoby, who lost a son in the Pacific during World War II, has a strong distaste for anything Japanese, until she meets a Japanese gentleman with his own sorrows. Of course it’s meant to be a story of love and reconciliation, and audiences of the day found it heart-warming..

 I’m told that Russell herself wanted Berg to repeat her stage triumph, but bowed to  Jack Warner’s insistence that she step into the role. She played opposite Alec Guinness, a talented actor known for his chameleon-like transformations but hardly convincing as an Asian. So a play about the melding of Jewish and Japanese culture was played by two Roman Catholics with roots in the British Isles, in an era long before our current passion for political correctness. Ugh!

 In 1962, Russell took on another hit Broadway role, that of Mama Rose in Gypsy, but it was hardly a triumph, partly due to her limited skill as a singer. She ended her career playing funny nuns in two The Trouble with Angels films. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hildy’s Game: “His Girl Friday”

“Molly’s Game,” which I watched while flipping through Netflix offerings, is a 2017 feature based on the real-life story of Molly Bloom. No, not the earth-mother figure in James Joyce’s Ulysses. This Molly Bloom is a former champion skier, one who was derailed by a freak accident from her quest to join the U.S. Olympic ski team.  Looking for challenges in warmer climates than her native Colorado, she decamped to  L.A., where she soon found herself shepherding a high-stakes celebrity poker game. Though not a gambler herself, she was soon risking her reputation and her legal standing in order to keep raking in a small fortune in tips.

It’s a fascinating story, though one I couldn’t always follow. And I’m still not exactly sure what the film was trying to say.  A corny scene between Jessica Chastain’s Molly and her psychologist dad (played by the always earnest Kevin Costner) didn’t strike me as helpful. Was his attempt to explain her life-choices in analyst-speak meant to seem astute, or oblivious?

In any case, the film was the directorial debut of writer Aaron Sorkin, known for his screenplay for The Social Network as well as such stellar TV as The West Wing. Those who are familiar with Sorkin’s work know that his characters are smart, sassy, and speak very fast. More than one review of the film, which earned an Oscar nomination for Sorkin’s screenplay, mentioned that its characters deliver their lines as if they were part of the cast of His Girl Friday. Exactly! This sparkling Howard Hawks film from 1940 is set not in a high-price gambling den but in the world of journalists and daily newspapers. The cast, led by Cary Grant as editor-in-chief Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as ace reporter Hildy Johnson, speak their lines at a breakneck pace, as though the fate of the world depends on what they have to say. And perhaps, in a way, it does. Though the portrayal of newsmen in the film is hardly sugar-coated—they’ll do just about anything to scoop the competition—there’s still the sense that the news they deliver is important, that the fate of a city (if not the world) hangs on the stories they uncover. Brutal competition is part of the game, and sometimes they may happen to get their facts wrong. But this hardly means they’re manufacturing Fake News. Theirs is an honorable profession, and Rosalind Russell’s Hildy is the best of the best.

The complication is that she’s Walter Burns’ ex-wife, and is on the brink of marrying a much more sedate type, an Albany insurance man played by Ralph Bellamy in the usual Ralph Bellamy role. (Who knew that 20 years later he’d leave behind his boring-nice-guy image by portraying FDR in Sunrise at Campobello?) Walter wants Hildy back, both as an ace reporter and as a wife, and a dramatic jailbreak by an accused murderer arouses her passion for newsgathering just in the nick of time. You can guess how it all ends.

His Girl Friday was based on a hit play of the era, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page. The play is an effective melodrama, climaxing with the jailbreak. In adapting it for the screen, someone had a bright idea. Since it featured a newspaper editor trying to hang onto his star reporter, why not make that reporter a ballsy female, as well as the editor’s former wife? That brilliant stroke foregrounds the interpersonal story, relegating the murderer’s plight to a secondary role. As always, the battle of the sexes makes for boffo cinema.