Women in Film

THE TITLE of the Currier House film series is almost shamefully apt, for that is pretty much the position of women in the movie industry: women are in films, but rarely on the other side of the camera. A few women have had productive careers as screenwriters-Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, Jane Murfin, Lillian Hellman, and most recently, Adrian Joyce ( Five Easy Pieces ). But even before Pauline Kael began talking about it, it was easy to see that Hollywood treated writers (male and female) as little more than unfortunate necessities. Often, the most powerful women in the movie business are those actresses who married studio executives. Such sexual politics did wonders for the careers of several little or no-talent stars: Norma Talmadge, wife of the president of United Artists back in the silent era; Norma Shearer, who married Irving Thalberg when he was head of production at Metro; and of course Ali McGraw, who is Mrs. Paramount when Paramount is one of the few Hollywood studios in the black.

Outside their own movies, however, even this formidable trio has had little effect; where the game really counts-producing or directing-the female ranks are thin indeed. Lillian Gish directed one film ( Remodeling Her Husband, 1921), and Ida Lupino has half a dozen films to her some-what dubious credit. In Europe, the only woman director before 1960 that springs to mind is Leni Riefenstahl, responsible for the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. The situation in the last decade seems to have improved-with the emergence of Agnes Varda, Shirley Clarke, Mai Zetterling, Joan Littlewood, and just recently, Barbara Loden-but the numerical improvement is probably illusory. The fact remains that movie production in this country (and any other country, for that matter) is and always has been under the control of males.

And yet women, and images of women, have almost always dominated the product that emerged. The great mythic stars-those very useful icons that provide most of the depth of industry movies-are for the most part women. Big male stars (Gable and Bogart, Wayne, Cooper, and Grant) usually last longer in the front ranks, for all the obvious and repulsive reasons. But few of them ever provide the somewhat metaphysical definition of their movies: Bogart did-and Brando for a spell-and certainly John Wayne has defined the Western more than anyone, perhaps, except Ford and Hawks. Nevertheless, most great movie genres (especially before World War II) are female genres, and are dominated in very real ways by their female stars. The classic examples are Lillian Gish and Mac Marsh, who provided the polarities from which Griffith fashioned some of his greatest films. The "screwball" Depression comedies (with Lombard, Colbert, Arthur and the rest), the great foreign sirens (Grabo, Dietrich, and Lamarr), the singing blondes from Fox (Faye, Grable, and Monroe), Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn, are genres unto themselves-this is at least half of the Hollywood product, and a half that could never have existed without women. As the key to the gold mine, all these women had immense power: their properties were their vehicles-and it's often quite clear who was driving the car.

THIS domination of the myth reached its peak during the Depression; what is often referred to as the Golden Age of the movies is, interestingly enough, the Golden Age of Women in the movies. Female dominance is often an assumption in thirties movies; women found work easier than men-if only because their wages were lower-and this social phenomenon finds its reflection in all the working-girl comedies of the decade. Unfortunately, the Currier House series doesn't include any of these movies, with their tough girl reporters and wise-cracking hoofers. As always in popular art, comedy can get away with more social comment than serious work (just as comedy is the easiest place to hide from social comment). The series instead has concentrated on the direct sexual themes of Dietrich in Shanghai Express, Garbo in Queen Christina, and Mae West in She Done Him Wrong. The last film does, of course, touch on the economics of Miss West and her jewels-this is the film version of her stage success Diamond Lil. And for that matter, there is some doubt about the "seriousness" of Shanghai Express, especially with such lines as that of Warner Oland's (playing the Oriental bandit-chieftain): "The white woman stays with me!"

The Dietrich movie is instructive, however, more in what it implies than in what it delivers. For one thing, the plot of the movie denies the gut reaction to Dietrich as femme fatale. The image of the cold-eyed castrator stands up, in fact, in only two of her films- The Bine Angel and The Devil is a Woman, the first and last movies, respectively, of her six-year association with Josef von Sternberg. In most of her work, Dietrich is notable mainly for her almost martial sense of loyalty to her man. She may flirt in Morocco with everything in trousers (and sometimes those in skirts, when she herself is wearing white-tie-and-tails), but in the end, she follows Gary Cooper off into the desert still wearing her stiletto heels. Again, in Shanghai Express, she gives herself to Warner Oland only to save Clive Brooks' life-and ends up getting Brooks after all.

These reversals amount to a "last-reel syndrome": you can get away with anything, so long as everything turns out all right in the end. We resist these endings now, just as one feels the people involved in the movie must have resisted their necessity. In a sense, we know better-Dietrich wouldn't have followed Cooper, just as gangsters (Cagney in Public Enemy or Muni in Scarface) don't have to die-and we ignore the insistence of the censors on "just retribution."

The movies of Mae West deny "just retribution" on almost every level-the Production Code was set up in 1933 to counter the popularity of her films. Suffice it to say, Mae got away with murder-sometimes literally. But the main difference between her movies and those of Dietrich is in many ways implied by the difference in their physical charms. I was horrified to hear someone behind me at Currier House exclaiming: "Can you imagine they used to think she was beautiful" What he didn't realize is that no one, except Mae West, considered her a sex goddess. Even disregarding her face, her figure was not unlike that of Margaret Dumont, the grande dame pin-cushion in countless Marx Brothers movies: an hour-glass with rather too much sand. As Parker Tyler has suggested, West was more a female impersonator than anything else. Her "act" was not offensive because she wasn't ridiculing women, but the way men looked at women. Hers was the satire of sex and sexual attitudes; in a complete reversal of the usual sexual politics, she was the bread-winner, and her men-even the rich ones-were little more than gigolos.

But "just retribution" came, however-not perhaps to Mae West and not really because of the censors-but to women and because of audience (or should I say male audience) demand. Whatever the social or economic reasons, the Depression had allowed the creation of what is still thought of, in some parts of the world, as the modern American woman. Strong, witty, and direct-this image lasted until the Depression ended, and then the war came. The retribution was that women were forced back to where they had been before, on the side-lines of their husbands' lives. If the women of the thirties were best typified by the Garbos and Dietrichs on the one hand, and by Mae West and the "screwball" comediennes on the other-then the forties woman is reduced to the lady-like Greer Garson in a piece of trash like Mrs. Miniver: being brave at the fade-out. Currier House includes none of these movies. (Ophuls' 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman, although made in Hollywood, is not really typical). It's just as well, I suppose; the movies are bad, and the chauvinism (both sexual and political) disgusting.

NOT ONLY women in general suffered from the end of this era; none of the great women stars survived with their strength intact. Mae West's career was finished, and Garbo-after giving in to Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka -was then reduced to "sex farce" in Two-Faced Woman, and left the screen forever. Dietrich went to comedy somewhat more successfully, and revived her career with Destry Rides Again in 1939. But all the comedy was at the expense of her former screen image-and although funny, it somehow smells of self-exploitation. Katherine Hepburn made her first comedy, Bringing Up Baby, in 1938, and spent the forties as a socialite-heroine forever being brought down to earth by James Stewart or Spencer Tracy. Without much flair for humor-until she discovered being mean to Joan Crawford in the sixties-Bette Davis settled for ever-drearier tear-jerkers.

The vision of these women scrambling over one another to make fun of themselves-and, by extension, all women-has all the humor of a crowd of monks on their way to a self-immolation. Certainly, the audience had changed and the industry changed with them: but that was thirty years ago-and where's the phoenix that rises from the ashes?