Hollywood's Second Sex

Steve Kurtz from the March 2002 issue

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In recent years, these long-forgotten pre-Code films have been turning up on cable and in festivals, giving us a glimpse of a lost world. Many of them hold up quite well, and it can be an education to watch old films do new tricks -- though the era also featured a lot of formula weepies in which actresses embody clichés. In any event, the films LaSalle admires were on their way out -- and screwball comedy was on its way in -- even before Breen took over. Two new comedies that pointed the way, The Thin Man and It Happened One Night, were released in the first half of 1934.

It's not as if Hollywood stopped making good movies after 1934. The Code may have been a heavy burden, but many moviemakers were ingenious enough to adapt.

Ann Harding would fade in the Code's shadow, but a lot of the female stars of the early 1930s -- Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck -- flourished. Enter Maria DiBattista's Fast-Talking Dames. Since there couldn't be much sex on the screen, or even much talk about it, frenetic screwball comedy filled the gap. DiBattista, a professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton, writes with great understanding of and appreciation for the women of these films, despite her sometimes arid academic language and her unnecessary forays into Freudian interpretation. Screwball's been well mined by such writers as James Harvey, Elizabeth Kendall, and Jeanine Basinger. Still, DiBattista extracts new and provocative material from it.

According to DiBattista, the "fast-talking dame" of the 1930s and 1940s is "singularly American" and "one of the most impressive and influential creations of the talkies." The general type may go back at least to Shakespeare's Beatrice and Congreve's Millamant, but there's something distinctly American about this character's brashness, her head-on readiness to deal with life. Nor were these dames pushovers -- they were often, as DiBattista calls them, female Pygmalions, molding their men even as they fall in love with them. Jean Arthur would do it to Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and again to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). What does the dame teach her soft-spoken man? What else but how to do a little fast-talking himself. Even when they're on the ditzy side, these women still know what to do. In My Man Godfrey (1936), ditz Carole Lombard pulls William Powell out of the city dump and teaches him self-respect.

DiBattista devotes whole chapters to the greatest dames in fast-talking history, from classy Irene Dunne talking her way out of and back into marriage with Cary Grant in The Awful Truth (1937) to breathless Katharine Hepburn weaving garlands of words around a befuddled Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938) to con-woman Barbara Stanwyck convincing a dumbfounded Henry Fonda to fall in love with her in two separate incarnations in The Lady Eve (1941). The fastest-talking dame of all was "newspaperman" Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday (1940), who dueled with her editor (and screwball's indispensable man) Cary Grant while beating the boys to the scoop. Quite a sisterhood. (DiBattista errs when she invites slow-talking Greta Garbo into the sorority on the basis of her 1939 comedy Ninotchka.)

DiBattista justifiably bemoans what happened in comedies by the mid-1940s. The "quick and good women who seemingly had and could do everything" were suddenly an "endangered species." Claudette Colbert, one of the founding dames of screwball in It Happened One Night, was now submitting to men like the laconic John Wayne in Without Reservations (1946).

Smart women started disappearing. A romantic comedy might now star a "dumb blonde" like Judy Holliday or Marilyn Monroe. In the 1930s, even the "dumb" blondes such as Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard were wised up enough to know the score. But Marilyn Monroe in her greatest comedy, Some Like It Hot (1959), is the character who's not in on the joke. Reversing what Stanwyck did to Fonda, Tony Curtis fools Monroe in two separate disguises. Comedy queen Doris Day spent a lot of screen time acting outraged at the advances she imagined men were making toward her -- something pretty rare before the war, when women either were the ones making the advances or knew how to get rid of a man with a snappy line.

A new type of film became possible, perhaps even necessary: film noir. Noir was the perfect response to the censors -- the Code demanded that people be punished for their sins, and in film noir everyone pays. Noir offers a dark world where even the innocent can be destroyed. There, danger lurks and happiness recedes into the ubiquitous shadows. And there's always a woman, the femme fatale who will drag a man down before he realizes that it's too late. In Out of the Past (1947), somebody tells Robert Mitchum that nobody's all bad. Thinking of the movie's siren, Jane Greer, he answers, "She comes the closest." That's noir.

Eddie Muller, in his charming and well-researched book Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir, paints portraits of six such women: Jane Greer, Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, Evelyn Keyes, Coleen Gray, and Ann Savage. These actresses might not be as famous as Katharine Hepburn or Ginger Rogers, but they did play some of the screen's most memorably bad women. Perhaps the reason they aren't so well-remembered is that film noir is mostly told from the point of view of its male characters -- we rarely get to know what makes its women tick. Furthermore, the film noir woman is in many ways a throwback to the vamps of the 1920s. But vampishness was a notably visual attribute, and worked much better in silents than it did later in talkies. While such characters might have been fun to play, they were often one-dimensional.

Muller is a journalist as well as a movie historian. His book is not an analysis of the films but a look behind noir. (The story of Marie Windsor crouching as she approaches John Garfield is Muller's.) He has a chapter on each actress, discussing how she came to Los Angeles and established her career, all while keeping the Hollywood wolves at bay, or sometimes inviting the wolves in. Each gets a second chapter about what they've done more recently, after noir died out in the late '50s. All the portraits are sympathetic and fascinating.

Dark City Dames is a follow-up to an earlier Muller book, the well-regarded Dark City: The Lost World Of Film Noir. The new work lets the women get their chance, since the men, like Bogart and Mitchum, are so often the focus. Muller is less analytical than many critics, more into the fun of film (and, hence, often more enjoyable to read). To him, noir represents the darker side of America, a dimension that postwar Hollywood couldn't obscure. Still, as dangerous as it is, it's also an exciting -- even enticing -- world. The femme fatale he writes about is a central part of that enticement.

The late '50s and '60s brought an opening up of permissible onscreen subject matter. One effect was to help slay film noir. The sex and violence that previously had to be implied could now be met head-on. Politics -- not just regarding the government, but in everyday life -- could now be openly discussed. Misdirection in these areas was no longer necessary, and would seem quaint. As glorious as its plotting and dialogue could be, noir started to seem too artificial. In the 1950s, the Code was seen increasingly as old-fashioned. (In 1968, it was superseded by the ratings system that, with minor changes, still exists.) With more ways to explore the human character, film noir wasn't needed any longer. Noir thrived on shadows, the threat of what's hiding out there; the newer type of personal filmmaking that followed believed in shining lights into those dark corners.

This was the ultimate revenge on Joseph Breen. He and his successors had kept the lid on the "new woman" for 34 years. Now she was back with a vengeance. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw scores of Hollywood films that explored relationships with more openness than ever before. Not everyone was thrilled; many wanted to return to the films of the 1950s, films that reflected Breen's desire to return to the 1890s. But there was no turning back.

Or was there? Screwball still lives. Arthur (1981) was an attempt at it, though the old genre choice of love or money was thrown out the window when Arthur gets both. My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) and Runaway Bride (1999), a pair of Julia Roberts movies, are both attempted throwbacks to screwball, but the former subverts the form by having Julia fail to get her man, while the latter plays on the stereotype of the woman who can't make up her mind at the altar. A third Roberts film, Notting Hill (1999), suggests that the Code may still have its fans, too: Roberts plays a star who has to humble herself to get her man, even if she no longer has to renounce her career.

Fast-talking dames are still talking; their last stand is TV. Like old movies, TV programs are shot quickly and are full of dialogue. They actually synthesize both pre-and post-Code women of the 1930s. The women of Friends and Sex and the City all have jobs, but their main concern is still men. However, there's one obvious way in which the "new" woman has emerged: These women have sex, and they're not ashamed of it. Conflicted, yes, but not ashamed. Comedy's old bad girl who must be punished for her dalliances, the centerpiece of the Code, no longer exists.