The ultimate Hollywood “women’s picture” was the one that featured no men at all
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Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch moving from July to October, we’re singling out other ensemble comedies to watch instead.
The Women (1939)
There were “women’s pictures” in the 1930s and ’40s—usually a tearjerker featuring someone like Barbara Stanwyck in a sticky romantic entanglement—but there was only one all-women picture. The Women boasted a cast of 135, with not a single man in the bunch; it was rumored that even the onscreen animals (a dog, several horses) were entirely female. It offered a fantastical view of a glittering, splendid, opulent life—full of ladies lunches, fashion pinnacles, and loads of servants—while exploring what happens to social sunbeam Mary Haines (Irving Thalberg’s young widow, Norma Shearer) when her (never seen) husband falls for the conniving Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford, on the crest of becoming the star of several “women’s pictures” of her own).
Women were instrumental behind the scenes, too. The movie was based on the hit play by future congresswoman and ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, with a screenplay by eventual Gentlemen Prefer Blondes scribe Anita Loos. George Cukor, who had just been fired from Gone With The Wind and had already helmed such female-forward films as Little Women and Camille, directed. Expertly guiding the performances, Cukor here justifies his reputation as a preeminent “women’s director.”
Early Oscar winner Shearer still held the public’s sympathy after Hollywood producer Thalberg’s untimely death of a heart attack a few years prior, making her perfect for the role of Mary, a blissfully happy wife and mother who has no idea that her husband is “stepping out.” With Shearer holding up the solid moral center, the rest of the cast was free to roam as broadly as possible, with Crawford displaying a methodical heartlessness, while Paulette Goddard plays the solid best-friend type and Joan Fontaine the kind of ignorant innocent she’d win the Oscar for portraying in 1941’s Suspicion.
No one, however, took more advantage of this liberty than Rosalind Russell, wearing Seussian hats and chattering even faster than she would in His Girl Friday the following year. Russell’s catty Sylvia reveals herself to be the type of “friend” who revels in horrible things happening to her closest confidantes. The movie curiously maintains that any marriage can survive the husband’s infidelity if the wife just lets the affair run its course, but Sylvia not only leads Mary to discover the affair, she pokes and prods her to confront Crystal in a stunning showdown at an exclusive fashion show (complete with a then-futuristic Technicolor segment). The Women delights in its biting dialogue; when Mary tells Crystal, “May I suggest, if you’re dressing to please Stephen, not that one. He doesn’t like such obvious effects,” Crystal replies, “Thanks for the tip. But when anything I wear doesn’t please Stephen, I take it off.”
The Women promised the chance to see the fairer sex “with their hair down and their claws out,” where as men suspected, they were just talking about their relationships anyway. (“The Women—and it’s all about men!” claimed the tagline.) The film pulled back the curtain on how some of those 1930s glamour girls got so beautiful. The opening spa sequence (reportedly styled after Elizabeth Arden) featured a stunning plethora of mud baths, sun lamps, exercise classes, and beauty treatments designed to roll away every wrinkle or line. In its way, The Women was as much an idealized fantasy as the Astaire-Rogers musicals of the same decade; at the end of the Depression, with World War II on the horizon, just how many women, even New York socialites, were able to make grooming their full-time job?
But those sumptuous ladies lounges and even the divorce ranch in Reno are only backdrops for the fizzy banter that whips into a conversational funnel cloud among this disparate crop of women. It’s worth turning the captions on just to catch every syllable of Russell’s 90 mph delivery. (“You remember the awful things they said about what’s-her-name before she jumped out the window? There. You see? I can’t even remember her name so who cares?”) Only Crawford matches her for intensity (“Can you beat that guy? He almost stood me up for his wife!”). Goddard, in the role that helped her break away from husband Charlie Chaplin’s shadow, offers plenty of salt-of-the-earth advice.
Throughout, Shearer’s emotional voyage remains engrossing to witness, as she states to her mother that in this modern age she and Stephen are equals even though from a financial standpoint, they’re anything but. Mary eventually realizes what she needs to do to get her life back on track, and 2020 audiences may wince at her ultimate declaration about the economies present in the relationships of the past, as she calls pride “the one thing a woman in love can’t afford.” Their official power rankings may have been a bit lopsided, but it’s still clear from watching The Women that the female sex is the one in charge, crafting beautiful facades as they pull all the strings that really matter.
Availability: The Women is available to rent or purchase digitally on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, and VUDU.
38 Comments
The Women is funny, outrageous and comes as close to the definition of camp as any film I can think of. But damn is it shrill, after a while the decimal pitch starts to grind and wear on you, it’s like walking into a kennel of yapping bitches (apologies to Crystal.) But when one really steps back, it really shoe-horns women into a box where their entire reason to exist is men, and if the going gets tough, take a powder and a manicure.Maybe the laughs come because of the exaggeration but it is as much a snapshot of women’s status in the 30s and their frequent lack of agency. With so many talented writers involved in the project including F. Scott Fitzgerald, it would have been a better play and film had at least Shearer’s Mary’s arc been more than just reeling back her husband. C’mon Mary, he fucked around with Jungle Red Crawford, you should have lowered the boom on his adulterating ass and made him work to win you back. Now that would have been something.
In the end, I liked the smaller women to women scenes in this movie, than the over-arching plot. As I mentioned above, I really loved the scene between Mary and the brutally-efficient secretary.
One of the best old Hollywood movies. I’ve seen it multiple times, and know almost all the lines (“What are you made up for:the seeing eye?”).
What are the names of the women in the photo underneath the title?
Left to right: Norma Shearer, Joan Fontaine, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and Mary Boland.
Many thanks, my friend!
There’s a scene where Norma Shearer’s character is crying with her mother nearby, and she starts going through her mom’s purse looking for a hankie and it was so natural and real. Also, the scene with Stephen’s secretary as she efficiently goes down the list of matters to be dealt with post-divorce (e.g. “Do you plan to keep the car?”).
And TCM showed The Women today, July 7th.
Love it. Watched it countless times. Russell is brilliant and Crawford is terrific, she really should have done more comedy. Saw the play at Shaw Festival, so good!
I’ve heard this movie has no men, but I’ve also heard that men are almost all the women talk about. Is this true?
Pretty much. It’s about this woman finding out that her husband is cheating, processing it, making a choice about divorce, and then making other choices afterward. It is interesting though because it addresses issues like shared parenting post-divorce (the heroine and her ex have a daughter) and the sort of intimate everyday lives of (wealthy) women.
A movie about a woman getting a divorce? in 1939? Damn.
Shearer had already won the Best Actress Oscar for THE DIVORCEE, nine years earlier.
That wasn’t really that uncommon. His Girl Friday and Philadelphia Story are also about divorces. One of the sad things about post-WWII backlash is that movies from the 1930s and 1940s were often way more empowering for women than the gross stuff from the 1950s and 60s. The heroine in “The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer” is a judge. The eponymous woman in “Laura” in an advertising executive (who gets her fiancé a job). And their professions are not considered weird or unusual within the context of the stories. The movies were often still pretty sexist, but weirdly less so than a lot of movies they came later.
One of the most (if not the most) depressing things about growing old isn’t so much how fast the times change as how fast they can change back.
am reading Nobody’s Girl Friday, which focuses on the role of women in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, and it’s great. The sections on Bette Davis are reason enough, alone, to get the book.
Somehow the name of the book got lost and it sounds interesting.
Post-WWII there was panic that women would try to stay in the jobs they had taken over during the war and a push to make sure they got back in the kitchen and stayed there.
When I was a kid, I read “Jacob Have I Loved,” and I remember being so sad when the heroine is told that, despite her excellent grades and dreams, she’ll never get to go to medical school because those spots are being saved for the men come back from the war. The GI Bill was a wonderful thing, but it’s frustrating that it was seen as needing to come at the cost of others’ dreams and growth.
I remember doing the TCM Summer of Noir course a few years back and I haven’t enjoyed Noir since. All that relentless ‘professional women are bad, good women stay in the kitchen’ messaging got to be too much for me. There are some great films in there, but if you watch too many that insidious message is all you see.
Really? Maybe I saw different Noirs. Like, Laura in “Laura” is extremely professional and it’s considered one of her many virtues. And even Sam Spade’s single, professional secretary is probably the best person in the whole movie (admittedly a low moral bar).
I always read Laura as a borderline femme fatale. I don’t feel the film entirely approved of her or her job. As for Maltese Falcon, as it was made in 1941, the post war anxiety about women in the workplace doesn’t effect it. It’s more the late Forties and Fifties ones that have that narrative.
I mean, Laura doesn’t seem like a femme fatale at all to me. The conceit of the movie is that she is this glorious, accomplished woman, who is surrounded by leeches who take advantage of her kindness and generosity. Her charming fiancé who takes her money and is sleeping with her aunt, her aunt who sleeps with her fiancé, her mentor who resents her attempts to be independent and is running off any man she connects with. It literally has the line, “I must say, for a charming, intelligent girl, you certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes.”
I think we read her relationship with Shelby entirely differently. I see it as her hooking up with a gigolo, who had an existing relationship with her aunt. She tries to put him on track to an actual career, but by getting him a job working for her, she is keeping him in an inferior, dependent position. And I think she’s attracted to him, in a large part, because he will never be a threat to her superiority or have any power over her. I don’t think Laura wants an equal, she just gives a sheen of respectability to having a kept man by doing it through her business rather than directly.Edited to add: I admit my opinion may be colored by how compellingly Tierney plays the villain in Leave Her to Heaven. Or by how deeply and sincerely I covet her hairstyle.
I don’t think that reading makes sense at all to me. Laura is passionately defensive of Shelby and how he’s a person who needs a chance. She views giving him the job as similar to the chance she got too when she was desperate and ambitious. And it made sense that Shelby’s easy going personality is appealing to Laura. Her other close male relationship is with a man who picks her clothes for her and runs off anyone she tries to date. Laura is a classic woman who has been under the control of an emotionally abusive man. It seemed very nuanced that her first real attempt to escape him is with a man who isn’t interested in controlling her. Shelby’s faithlessness is less important to Laura than the fact that he’s not going to dictate how she does her hair.And, in the end, she doesn’t pick Shelby. She picks the detective who is her intellectual and moral equal.
But Brigitte O’Shaunessy is probably the worst, if still riveting thanks to Mary Astor.
Oh definitely. But it’s not because she’s a “professional woman.” She’s just a bad person, like the other bad people in the story. The story doesn’t frame married women as better. It’s not like Mrs. Archer is framed as virtuous and wonderful. The nicest person in the story is the unmarried woman with a steady job.
would not pass the Bechdel test, but it’s still an amazing film. The performances are arch.
Bechdel Test is overrated. Technically, Jurassic Park barely passes the test, if it passes at all, because Ellie Sattler and Lex Murphy don’t really say anything to each other. But you had to choose between Jurassic Park and say almost every other movie “aimed” at girls or women, which would you choose?
calm down. I was being a bit facetious.
And the point of the test isn’t really to evaluate individual movies—it’s to get us to look at systems, and the Hollywood system, since the mid 1950s, has been organized around telling (white) men’s stories.
I was calm.
nothin’ but babes huh?i’m listenin
never seen this one but i love “stage door.”
On the whole, I think STAGE DOOR is the better film. But between these two you’ve got peak performances from just about every major actress of the 1930s.
eve arden!!!!
“You must have heard of Hamlet.” “Well, I meet so many people.”
I LOVE Stage Door, but if you like that, you’ll probably also like this a lot. It’s like the rich people version of that movie.
“The Women—and it’s all about men!” How does a movie with no men fail the Bechdel test?