Academic feminist film
criticism has brought some attention to the woman's film as a genre,
but most widely-known woman's films gained their cultural prominence
through the attention of men – gay men, who made a cult of Garbo
and Dietrich, Hepburn and Stanwyck, and especially Crawford and
Davis. It's an oddity of the history of Hollywood film reception that
straight men hero-worship the male directors they've nominated as
“auteurs” while gay men diva-worship the female stars. Moreover,
to judge from the type of directors likely to be embraced as
important auteurs by either the French New Wave critics or their
American followers you might assume that the great American cinematic
subject is “men being violent” (although sometimes this subject
is under scrutiny, as in the films of Nicholas Ray and Paul Thomas
Anderson). Perhaps the only prominent male critic to write about the
woman's picture is Stanley Cavell in the 90s, and I have never seen
this work cited by other critics, whereas I see his work on screwball
comedy cited all the time. Douglas Sirk (taken seriously since the
championing of Fassbinder in the 70s) is the single fashionable
auteur who directed woman's pictures.
The “machismo” of
the American film canon is all the odder when you consider that the
gynocentric side of the war between Fieldingites and Richardsonians
in academic criticism of the English novel triumphed over the
androcentric side long before the advent of academic feminism, with
F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948) a pivotal salvo in
the battle. Harold Bloom has often spoken of the “lines” of
Richardson and Fielding and their separate supporters; Leavis wasn't
fond of either, but his favouring of Austen, Lawrence, and honourary
English novelist helped to put heroines at the centre of the English
lit canon. But this is the English novel. American Romanticism
and the odd “novel” that it produced is, as Leslie Fiedler
pointed out, often conspicuously and purposefully devoid of women,
although one must also contend with Hawthorne and that cultural
misfit, his admirer, James.
I am not so much
pleading for criticism of American films to adopt a more gynocentric
approach as I am pointing out the arbitrary elements of canon
formation, which in this case reflected the way that both American
and French male critics (and Pauline Kael) thought about what it
means to be “American.” Likewise, the gynocentric slant of
criticism of the English novel reflects what critics came to think
the novel should be about, namely interiority; although with
Modernism an even more highly developed interiority is instead
attached to the autobiographical protagonist, who will now be male when the author is male
(as he usually is).
Given the present state
of the American film canon, however, a corrective may be in order.
With the field divided between a macho auteurism that favours movies
in which women, if present at all to a significance degree, are
relegated to the sidelines and traditional roles (however feisty they
may be in them, as in the Ford and Hawks Westerns), and the seemingly
endless fascination with film noir, a genre in which women are
represented by the femme fatale, it can't hurt to bring more
attention to the woman's picture and to the many interesting
directors (such as Frank Borzage, William Dieterle, and frequent
woman's picture director King Vidor) who have never become
fashionable auteurs perhaps in part because they were not especially
interested in masculinity as a subject.
A film critic friend of
mine once told me that noir was the only genre of which it can be
said that every member was interesting, and while I agree with him
about the inherent interest of noir, I think the same can be said for
the woman's picture if it can be considered a genre. Does a
Hollywood movie become a woman's picture just because it stars a
woman – meaning that women will watch movies starring men but not
vice versa? It can sometimes seem so, although women can also be the
stars of horror films (or, today, action films*) and the co-stars of
romantic comedies and dramas. In the woman's picture, however, men
are usually love interests or secondary characters. A woman's picture
can star a man, however, like Sirk's There's Always
Tomorrow, which puts Fred MacMurray in the same trapped
middle-class position as Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows;
just as a woman can be the protagonist of a noir (e.g. Ophuls's The
Reckless Moment), although noirs with female protagonists are
usually considered noir/woman's picture hybrids, which by rights
should be the most interesting genre of all – and it's true. There
is also a sub-genre of woman's picture, or woman's picture/noir, in
which the male protagonist falls in love with a woman he's never seen
in the flesh, who does not appear for the first stretch of the film
(e.g. Preminger's 1944 Laura and Dieterle's 1945 Love
Letters), which shows the
influence of the Gothic on both genres and serves as a bridge between
Wilkie Collins's 1859 The Woman in White
and Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo.
I was prompted to
reflect on these things after seeing a couple of interesting
forgotten classical Hollywood, Nicholas Ray's A Woman's Secret
(1949), with a screenplay
by Herman (of Citizen Kane authorship
controversy) Mankiewicz, and People Will Talk (1951),
written for the screen and directed by the other Mankiewicz brother,
Joseph. Joseph Mankiewicz is not a fashionable auteur even though as
a writer-director and sometimes writer-director-producer he is an
auteur a la lettre. Is this because he was so often associated with
woman's pictures, such as his most famous movie, All About Eve?
People Will Talk, released the year after All About Eve (and with its same producer, Darryl F. Zanuck),
is a remarkable comedy-drama in which Cary Grant's eccentric,
progressive, cultured, and magically benevolent Dr. Praetorius
(that's correct) becomes romantically involved with a woman who's
become pregnant out of wedlock (that's correct), for which she is
neither shamed nor punished. It's evident that attacks on 50s
conformism started early in the movies – a lot earlier than Sirk's
1956 All That Heaven Allows (a movie kindred in spirit), maybe
as early as the great Mildred Pierce (1945). The tension
between conformism and individualism in American culture is
American culture, of course, and People Will Talk sometimes
reminded me of a Mr. Deeds Goes to Town if the latter were
populated by atheist intellectuals instead of small-town innocents.
Jeanne Craine is not as much of a feminist in this film as she first appears... but Cary Grant is.
As for A Woman's
Secret, it seems to have slipped through the cracks of the canon
because it made no impact at the time and does not fit in with the
auteurist-friendly subject of many of Ray's later films, starting
with the success of Rebel Without a Cause on: aforementioned
masculinity. It's easy to see why A Woman's Secret did not set the world on fire at the time of release, and it's for the same reasons that
it's so delightfully charming now. It is absolutely a screenwriter's
picture, and Mankiewicz has no interest in any of the genres that it
dabbles in, from woman's picture to murder mystery. The murder plot
in fact makes no sense psychologically, and the two women it involves
(played by Maureen O'Hara and Gloria Grahame) are shoved into the
background and flashbacks while Melvyn Douglas takes centre stage as
a world-weary author avatar.
Drat... I just had that rug cleaned!
The Svengali melodrama
in which O'Hara and Grahame are embroiled could be a lot of fun, as
it is in the Cukor-directed Gothic melodrama A Woman's Face
(1945), starring Douglas, Joan Crawford, and Conrad Veidt.
Mankiewicz, however, gives it perfunctory treatment, instead
developing the comedic characters of the long-suffering elderly
police inspector and his exceedingly eccentric, mystery
novel-reading, amateur-detective wife, who finally,
semi-inadvertently, provides the key (literally) to the mystery. The
sharp-edged interaction between these characters, played by Mary
Philips and Jay C. Flippen, is delightful; while Philips's character
is a patented “batty woman,” it's evident that she chafes at her
husband's mild/gruff, but withal complacent, patriarchal authority,
and Philips gives her line readings just the right note of off-kilter
menace to be laugh-out-loud funny, especially when she seizes an
opportunity to declare, “I could have you committed, you know,”
soon after missing his coffee cup and dumping a spoonful of sugar
into his lap.
As an ill-educated but
strong-willed floozy, Gloria Grahame also delivers line readings that
tease out the absurdism in Mankiewicz's literate and whimsical
dialogue. Douglas is the flippant playboy from Ninotchka, but
even more dissipated ten years on, with a touch of Oscar Levant about
his piano-playing wisecracker – if Levant could ever be imagined as
conducting an affair with a woman or as giving up his bachelor ways
in the final moments. The Douglas-O'Hara extra-wedlock affair is
another one slipped past the censors, suggested by a reference to her
jealousy of Grahame and confirmed by his louche body language with
her in a later scene. Blink and you'll spend most of the movie
thinking he's her gay best friend.
Speaking of American
non-conformists, it struck me on a recent viewing of the 1934 Anne
of Green Gables that one of the greatest of them in literature
isn't a citizen of the United States at all. In Canada, beginning
with my generation it's been a rite of passage to grow up with the
mid-80s made-for-TV movie starring Megan Follows, and it seems evident that
the later adaptation's casting of Marilla and Matthew and especially
Anne herself owe a lot to the 30s film. The latter, however, adds a
romantic plot to the episodic novel, focusing in fan fiction style on
Anne's relationship with Gilbert Blyth. The movie's Gilbert Blyth
himself departs from the studious young man of the book with whom
Anne intellectually competes to become a sort of teenage proto-John
Garfield type; especially hilarious if one was a fan of the 80s movie's daringly effeminate Gilbert.
Jonathan Crombie's "daringly effeminate" Gilbert Blythe... Candrogyny strikes again?
But although the 30s
movie doesn't stick to Montgomery's vision of the clash between
Anne's imaginative and impulsive ways and the town's demand for
decorum and propriety (brokered by Marilla, who appreciates both
Anne's ways and the town's), there's an early scene in which Anne
elaborates on her preferred way of praying, as opposed to the way
she's been taught, that's shocking in its frank portrayal of the
young adolescent's “pagan” animism and antidoctrinalism. Exalted
by her Romantic imagination (Elinor Dashwood would never approve),
Anne is in some ways more of a Transcendentalist even than Jo March,
in a line of Protestant heroines that descends from Jane Austen and
ends up in two superb woman's pictures that explicitly grapple with
philosophical subjects in a Transcendentalist context, the great
Bette Davis vehicle Now, Voyager and Douglas Sirks's All
That Heaven Allows.
The Anglo-American
noncomformist spirit has often been represented by heroines
presumably because women have traditionally had to do so little to
not conform to their social role**; because being female is already
to not conform to the male-determined “norm” (hence the emphasis
in the initial chapters of Anne of Green Gables on the mistake
of ordering her instead of a boy); because women are encouraged to
develop their imaginations and middle-class women traditionally had
the (double-edged, as the non-Anglo-American example of Madame
Bovary emphasizes) leisure in which to do so; because women are
not encouraged to challenge their circumstances or environment, which
makes it all the more dramatic when they do. See also the heroines of
Theodor Dreyer, an auteur very much concerned with both spirituality
and nonconformism. Another good example from cinematic history is
Powell and Pressburger's Gone to Earth (1950),
in which Jennifer Jones plays a peasant woman who identifies with her
dead mother's paganism, who cannot find happiness with either the
Baptist minister who thinks she's an innocent child of nature or the
swaggering squire who satisfies her body but threatens her soul, and
who scandalizes her community in her attempt to achieve fulfilment
(compare Dreyer's Day of Wrath).
Since seeing Paul
Thomas Anderson's The Master I've wanted to compare it to Now,
Voyager: both are “therapy”
movies that use sea voyages as metaphors for spiritual journeys, and
in both cases the protagonist must work out their relationship to
male authority, represented by a guru/mentor. Since Now,
Voyager, with its overt
reference to Whitman, is about the process of becoming an individual
(and shows how Transcendentalism might have special application for
women, who historically have not been encouraged to think their own
thoughts and lead their own lives), Davis resolves her relationship
with male authority with relative ease (her mommy issues are another
matter); in contrast, in The Master,
Joaquin Phoenix seems to be offered charismatic authority as a
solution to his “male” anger and alienation, and a finally
unacceptable one. (His mommy issues, too, are another story, and one that, along with the central performances by brothers who ape James Dean's persona in remarkably different ways, makes The Master a fascinating companion to Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, which, come to think about it, is also about the search for/escape from a problematic male guru as much as about longing for the mother.)
*I can't comment on
“chick flicks,” the contemporary equivalent to the studio-era
“woman's picture,” since I have seen very few of them. They do
often appear to indulge in gender essentialism, but whether that's
also true of studio-era woman's pictures and I simply overlook it
because of their cultural context, or whether the few hundred woman's
pictures that have any reputation are exceptions that challenged that
context, is something I haven't studied. I know that some feminist
film critics have embraced blockbusters with female appeal like James
Cameron's Titanic, but that's further than I'm capable of
going even though I'm willing to admit that theoretically Cameron's
dopey, historically dodgy, and impeccably pop-feminist blockbuster
could be the true heir to Gone With the Wind.
**Nowadays, on the
other hand, it's probably easier for a boy or man to fail to conform
to his gender role than it is for a girl or woman. This kind of
nonconformism, however, has not yet been absorbed into our narrative
consciousness. At the same time, it's hardly the case that women have
total freedom to ignore conventional gender self-presentation.
It's interesting to see self-declared feminist Janelle Monae –
sporting Bette Davis's pompadour from Now, Voyager – bring
female androgyny to a pop arena in which female bodily display and
conventional attractiveness remain mandatory (hence the abuse Amy
Winehouse took). Even in indie, where conventional sexiness is met
with disapproval (hence the abuse that Lana Del Rey gets), there's a
weird emphasis on long, flowing Pre-Raphaelite hair (Kate Bush, Neko
Case, Florence Welch... heck, even Courtney Love in
recent years... that's totally enough for a thing). Camille Paglia may have been right that Madonna was
the most important feminist of the 1980s because she proved that
sexiness and power were not mutual contradictory, but once the lesson
of Madonna was absorbed by a new generation of women in pop that
message became muddled: no one doubts that Beyonce, for example, is
powerful (i.e. she's famous, wealthy, and in charge of her career),
but unlike Madonna, she does not project an image of power (not even
when she specifically manufactures one in the form of Sasha Fierce). Should she?
What were the goals of feminism again? For women to be
self-determining and financially successful or for women to be a
threat to the status quo, a.k.a. scare the bejesus out of
heterosexual men? And what do we make of the fact that despite the
continued insistence on women's sexual self-display in pop music,
most of Madonna and Beyonce's male fans are gay? It's a crazy world
out there, kids....
"Mother... I'm not afraid!"
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