Audient Classics: The Women

This is the fifth in my monthly 2023 series rewatching movies from before I was born that I love, but that I've seen only once.

How can a movie that doesn't feature a single man in its cast fail to pass the Bechdel Test?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Women.

If you need to brush up on your Bechdel Test, here's a reminder of it boiled down to its basics on Wikipedia:

"The test asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man."

As you can see in the tagline on the poster itself, "It's all about men!"

Yes, that was certainly a 1939 bet hedge by MGM, who surely didn't want to limit the film's audience to only the fairer sex. But it's actually true.

This movie features about 20 women in speaking roles, and probably about six main characters -- but never are they not speaking about the men in their lives.

I had remembered that George Cukor's film was essentially an ensemble piece, and I thought for sure that among the characters an array of different story arcs were featured. One would be dealing with infidelity, to be sure, but another was trying to push her career forward, one was struggling with motherhood, etc. That's how they'd make it today. (And I'm sure how they did make it when the movie was remade in 2008, though I don't remember the details of that particular film.)

Nope. It's all just about men, how they tend to be unfaithful to their wives, and whether it is a good idea to forgive them and take them back, or keep your pride by pushing for a divorce. 

And in the process, what presents on the surface like it could be a sort of proto feminism is actually pitting the women against each other for much of the time -- even to the point of showcasing the members of the animal kingdom they most closely resemble in a memorable opening credits in which the characters are first introduced.

That's the harsh view of The Women. The more generous view -- and the one I certainly adopted when I saw it for the first time more than 20 years ago, the date of that viewing falling prior to when I started keep track of viewings in early 2002 -- is that it's a very clever, often very funny movie that is about as progressive as a movie made in 1939 was capable of being.

That these women -- primarily the lead character Mary Haines, played by Norma Shearer -- would even consider divorce was probably a big deal at that time. I see that The Gay Divorcee predates this by five years, but I generally think of this as being a more conservative time when women were encouraged to accept their lot in life. Of course, that isn't a true portrait of that era, particularly that era on film -- the Hays Code was brought in in 1934 precisely because movies were getting too racy -- but perhaps it's a true portrait of what a certain segment of powerful people thought reality should be, at least as reflected by our popular entertainment.

And women who are characterized as cats and display incredibly catty behavior throughout? Embodied by the film's two other biggest stars, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell, the latter of whom is more gossipy and thoughtless while the former is truly pernicious? Well, if you don't have any men in your film, someone's gotta fulfill the role of antagonist, doesn't she?

Let's talk about that gimmick. Not only is a male character never visible on screen, but neither is there a male voice even heard. I thought I had remembered that some male children were seen at one point, but that wasn't the case either. No, Cukor et al stick to their concept throughout, and it's a fun one indeed. While it is not strictly speaking "realistic," it does uncover a truth about well-to-do society in New York at the time, and likely society in general: the genders operated in very different spheres, with the men working in male-dominated worlds and the women moving through female-dominated spheres like the spa and the high-end fashion shop. Women could move from a high tea to an early sort of calisthenics back to the apartment almost without encountering a man, who were slaving behind their desks -- and stepping out on their wives with other women who sometimes moved through these same female spheres.

You do have to adjust your expectations when watching The Women. If you want it to stand up to a 21st century version of women's rights and Hollywood morals, it won't. Without spoiling too much, I'll just say that the possibility of a woman getting back together with her philandering husband, after he regrets his philandering, is treated as a hypothetical happy ending (remembering I'm trying not to spoil too much). Today, that man is kicked to the curb, no two ways about it.

But there is a lot to like here, a lot I really did like in probably 2001 or so when I saw first saw it, and a lot I liked only a bit less now. For one it's the performance of Shearer in the central role, her heartbreaking work as she learns about her husband's affair through salacious gossip and is forced to occupy the same social settings as the very woman with whom he's cheating, not even knowing which one she is, even though all her catty friends know it. There's a very complicated version of female loyalties painted here, with some characters appearing loyal to Mary but then engaging in their own awful behavior, and others considering loyalty a possibility, but not if it gets in the way of a good gossip session. Some of this, of course, is a pretty dated and uncharitable view of female interpersonal dynamics, but other bits of it have aged reasonably well. 

I became a little less interested when the film takes a detour to Reno, where people can get a quickie divorce. (I suppose Vegas would have also worked, it being within the state of Nevada.) Some of the film's more slapstick moments occur here, and there are rather too many coincidences. However, this is when Mary meets some of her most loyal friends, who seem especially so contrasted with some of those who purport to be her friends in New York, but are really just opportunistic bottom-feeding gossips. 

I did also enjoy Crawford's performance as Crystal Allen, this I suppose being one of the films that helped establish her reputation as a bad girl. (Or maybe that reputation grew due to her later life exploits, captured in Mommie Dearest.) It's a bit over the top at points, but The Women never said it was going for subtlety. 

As for Russell, who I have seen plenty of times but about whom I don't have a fixed notion of her personality, she reminded me a lot of Lucille Ball, in a good way. I would have said Russell came first, but they were more or less contemporaneous, with Russell only four years older than Ball. In fact, two years earlier Ball was in a film that on the surface seems somewhat similar to The Women, 1937's Stage Door, which I saw earlier this year but actually didn't like all that much. 

Overall the two hours and 15 minutes of The Women passed faster than it might have. I'm not smitten with the film like I was when I awarded it five stars on Letterboxd -- after the fact, of course, since Letterboxd wasn't around in 2001 -- but it still makes for a fitting entry in this series.

Which will continue in June.