***You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby-George Cukor’s The Women

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Women, starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell   and many of the leading film ladies of the late 1930s, directed by George Cukor, 1939  

It is hard to know what second and third wave feminists today would make of the film under review, George Cukor’s The Women. On the one hand this vehicle for a look at then, 1930s then, married life, haute bourgeois married life, in the first wave post-suffragette period has an all women cast made up of many of the up and coming leading women stars of the day. On the other, despite the comedic look at that life, the “elephant in the room” is the male of the species. All the conversation, or almost all of the conversation, revolves around getting a husband (serial husbands in some cases), keeping a husband, getting rid of a husband or, in the main case, getting a husband back. That narrow view of life, while not unusual for the time is hardly the stuff of liberation. I know I had mixed feelings about the film on that score and I am sure plenty of today’s women would also.        

The plotline is rather simplicity itself since the film runs on the comedic element mentioned above, runs on spoofs about women’s gossip among themselves, about life and scandal at the beauty parlor, at the gym, at the ladies’ luncheons and the like. Runs ons as well about the various types of women, especially the catty, back-biting ones. One New York socialite (played by Norma Shearer) and part of the horsey set as well who had been living in a dream world finds out through much indirection, courtesy of a busy-body matron (played by Rosalind Russell) that her high-end Wall Street husband had been having an affair with a shop girl, somebody from the perfume counter at Macy’s or some such place (isn’t that always the case in these things, that or a secretary, or for doctors a nurse, in any case usually some female slightly below the wife’s class, but in any case younger and sympathetic, very sympathetic, to his plight that his wife no longer understands him), a conniving gold-digger shop girl (played by Joan Crawford) who winds up grabbing the guy, the husband, to the chagrin of our socialite who decides to soldier on with her daughter, her heart-broken daughter, despite her continuing love for her man.

If that is what he wants well then she, true heart, will not stand in the way. So she grants his wish for a divorce, although not in tough to get New York then but heads west for an easy Reno divorce (just like the better known, better publicized anyway, easy Reno marriage complete with replica chapel all for twenty-nine, ninety-nine or something like that) and takes their young daughter with her. In the aftermath of the divorce proceedings and once ensconced in to her upscale New York apartment digs our gold-digger shop girl shows her real colors by fooling around with another guy and before long our socialite is back in the fight to get hubby back. And succeeds in the melodramatic end.        

Along the way in this one there are a lot of gags, some that seem anachronistic now like the goof gym sessions, the high-blown dress up charity balls and the like, but also a lot of ways that woman looked at marriage very differently then, seeing it as “for keeps” like it said in the wedding vows. We get their “take” on the institution from our stellar true-blue soldier on socialite, from a much married countess whose serial marriages don not blight her thrill at being married, married until the other shoe drops anyway, from a young married who got skittish about divorce, and from to a been around the block woman, a “from hunger” woman trying to keep a roof over her head just trying to break even in the love game. Of course, we also have the high-end easy meal ticket gals like our catty matron and that gold-digger shop girl to throw water on the whole idea of blessed marriage. But there it is, a slice of comedic marriage life from the first third of the 20^th century.