MOLLY HASKELL
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Female Stars of the 1940s
Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women m the MoVIes (197311S a p oneenng examination of the roles p ayed by women n film and what these ro es tell us about the place of women 1n society, changmg gender dynam ics, and shiftmg def1mt1ons of love and fam1ly Haskell argues that women were berng tncreas ngly ob1ecttf1ed and v1hfled tn the films of the 1960s and 1970s. Tttrs femrntst perspective informs a I of Haskell's work, whtch takes a nuanced vtew of the complex relation of men and women to ftlm and power. Holdmg My Own m No Man's Land Women and Men. Ftlm and Femimsts (1997) includes essays and mtervrews on femimst issues surroundmg ftlm and literature. Haskell prov'des analyses and apprec1at1ons of proto-femimst f1lms of the th1rtres, fortres, and frfttes, celebrating actresses hke Mae West and Doris Day for the1r umque forms of empowerment. She continues to write rev1ews for Town and Country and The Vlllage Votce.
The preoccupation of most movies of the fo rties, particularly the "masculine" genres, is with man's soul and salvation, rather than with woman's. It is man's prerogative to fo llow the path from blindness to discovery, which is the principal movement of fiction. In the bad-girl films like Gilda and Om cifthe Past, it is the man who is being corrupted, his soul which is in jeopardy. Women are not fit to be the battleground fo r Lucifer and the angels; they are something already de cided, simple, of a piece. Donna Reed finally refused to make any more movies with Alan Ladd because he always had a scene (it was in his contract) in which he would leave the little woman in the outer office, or some equivalent, while he went off to deal with the Big Problem that only a man could handle. Even the musicals of the fo rties-the Donen-Kelly collaborations-concentrate on man's quest, on his rather than her story. In the penumbral world of the detective story, based on the virile and existen tially skeptical work of writers like Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and David Goodis (which fo und its way into crime films like Dark PasSOJ/C. Tire Blue Dalllia, Farewell My Lo11cl)', Double l11demllit)', I Wake Up Scrc ami11g, and Tile B(
424 FEMALE STARS OF THE 1940s 425
Although Howard Hawks would seem to fa ll into this tradition with Tile B(� Sleep. in which he actually increases the number of women fr om the Chandler novel, there is something in the women and in Hawks' conception of them that suggests a real, if not entirely articulated, sense of a woman's point of view (or at least an antisexist point of view) that will become increasingly apparent in the work of this supposed "man's director." In contrast to most crime melodramas, . where plot and its unraveling are all, the plot of The Bi._� Sleep is next to incom prehensible, and the women are what it is all about: Lauren Bacall's sleek fe line kad, Martha Vickers' spoiled, strung-out younger sister, Dorothy Malone's de ceptively dignified bookstore clerk, Peggy Knudsen's petulant gangster's moll, and an unbilled woman taxi driver. Their lechery is as playful as the plot, and they are not stock figures of good and evil but surprisingly mixed and vivid, some of them in roles lasting only a fe w moments. By including women in traditionally male settings {the newspaper office in His Girl Friday, the trapping party in Tltc B(� Sky, the big-game hunters in Htltari!), Hawks reveals the tension that other directors conceal or avoid by omitting women or by relegating them to the home. Many of Ford's thirties' and fo rties' films have no women in them at all, whereas even in Hawks' most rough-and tumble, male oriented films,the men are generally seen in relation to women, and women are the point of reference and exposition. Hawks is both a product of sexual puritanism and male supremacy, and, in the evolution of his filmsand the alternation-compensation between tragedy and comedy, a critic of it. In the group experience of filmmaking, he lives out the homoerotic themes of American life, literature, and his own films. Thus, the John Wayne older-man figure in Rio Bravo and its companion westerns seems finallyto have developed into a "complete" man, to the point where he is able to go it alone, to find hisself -esteem within himself rather than fr om the admiration of his fr iends, and to greet a "complete" woman on her own terms. Like most American men, Hawks and Ford and their protagonists become more at ease with women as they grow older. In his early adventure films, in which the women repeatedly break up male friendships and the men do little to resist what film writer Robin Wood has called the "lure of irresponsibility," Hawks betrays the sensibility of an arrested adolescent. His fe ar of woman is twofold: (1) as the emotional and "unmanly" side ofhuman nature, and (2) as its progenitor. He is like the young boy who, in recoiling from his mother's kiss, refuses to acknowl edge his debt of birth to her and who simultaneously fe ars revealing his own fe elings of love and dependency. In Ou/y Angels Have Wings, Jean Arthur provides an alternative to the all-male world of stoical camaraderie on the one hand, and to the destructive fe mininity represented by Rita Hayworth on the other, but what an alternative! A man dies trying to land a plane in a storm in time for a date with her, she breaks down in defianceof the prevailing stiff-upper-lip ethic, and thereafter she hangs around like a puppy dog waiting for Cary Grant to fa ll in love with her. For fe male Hawksians, this is the film most difficultto accept, more difficultchan the early filmsin which women figure only as devils ex maclliua. Although the relationship Jean Arthur 426 THE FILM ARTIST
offers Grant seems to have been conceived a� something "different but equal," women fe d it (as Hawks seems to have fe lt it) as second be�t. In the all-male com munity of civil aviators Grant h�.:.1ds up, the central rdationship is the tacit, mutual devotion between Grant and Thomas Mitchell. In a milieu of constant, physical danger and sublimated fe ding�. Arthur's emotionalism is a threat-but it is als�. or it is meant to be, a release. The trouble h that Arthur, deprived of the ·pepperincss and sen�e of purpose she has in her other thirties' and fo rties' films (or the sweetly misplaced glamour of Errsy Lil'ill,\!}, becomes a sobbing stone around the collective nc:ck of civil aviation; and she docm't have the easy comc:-easy go sexual confi dence with which Lauren Bacall and Angie Dickimon invest Slim and Feathers, Hawks' most sensually aggressive, European-�tyle heroines. Still, technically, Only An c/s Hm1c J.lliii.I!S ,(! is a transition film. When Mitchell dies, Arthur takes his place, marking the progression of woman from �econd to fir�t string. Brrlf c!fFi re is a perfect fu sion of Hawks' dialectics and those of Brackett and Wilder, who wrote the screenplay. When Barbara Stanwyck as a f.1 st-tJiking gang ster's moll invades the sanctuary of a group ofl�.:xicogr.1phers head�.:dby Gary Cooper, it is as if Hawks had recognized the �clerot1c danger of male camaraderie-and was rcsi�ting it. Uut Sugarpuss O'Sh�.:.1 is as much a Wilder-Brackett creation, a worldly, romantic sensuali�t who shakes up a group of typically Am�.:ricanfu ddy-duddies and "regenerates" them. Stanwyck 1s .1 � emotionally re�pomive a� Jean Arthur, but tougher; she brings her own world ofjive and stre�.:t talk with her, and manages to "corrupt" the ivory-tower purity of the �cholars-and expand their vision. Her hu manizing influence paves th�.: way fo r the rapprochement of the ��.:xes that occurs in Hawks' subsequ�.:nt films, particularly in the Uogart-Uacall mc:lodr:unas, and in the John Wayne-Angi�.: Dickimon rdatiomhip in Rio Bm11o. If the highest tribute Hawks can pay a woman is to tell her she ha� p�.:rfornlt!d like a man (Bogey's "You're good, you're awful good"), im't that, at least partly, what the American woman has always wanted to be told? Hasn't she always wanted to join the action, to be appreciated fo r her achievements rather than fo r her sex? But one often seems to have been gained at the expense of the other, the performing excdl�.:nce at the cost of the "womanly" awareness. Hawks' sensitivity to the American girl's anxiety, to her shame at "being a girl," expresses itself later in such fifties' characters as Charlene Holt in Red Line 7000, and Paula Prentiss in Mrr u'sFcworitc SpMt? As actn.-sses, and as characters, they lack the usual coordinates of"sex appeal"; both their athletic ability and their anxiety bespeak a lack of sexual confidence that is disturbingly real. In Mrrn 's Fm 1,,ritc Sport? it is Paula Prentiss who mak�.:s Rock Hudson take: the plunge into the sport (fishing, or, on an allegorical level, sex} on which he is supposed to be an authority. He has writtc:n a "how to"book without ever having gotten his fe et wet. In Hawks' best films, there is a sense of playacting fo r real, of men and women thrusting themselves ironically at each other, auditioning fo r acceptance but find ing out in the process who they really arc. In Ji, Hm•c mul H.wc Not, Uacall com bines intellig�.:nce and sensuality, pride and submission. She holds her own. She is a singer and is as surrounded by her "musical world" as Bogart is by his underground one, and she combines with him to create one of the great perfectly balanced cou ples, as highly definedby f.1ntasy and wit as Milbmant and Mirabell in TIIC Wt1 y of FEMALE STARS OF THE 1940s 427
the H 'ilr/d, or as Emma Woodhouse: :Hid Mr. Knightlcy in Em11111. For the Hawks' . hc:roinc, the vocal quality, tlw f1cial and bodily gc�turcs arc the equivalent of the htcrary heroine's words, and with these she cngagt:sin a thrust-and-parry as highly infh:ctcd and intricate:as the great love duds oflitcraturt:. The f.1blc of 1(, Ha11e mrd Hwe N(lt, like so many of the action melodramas during the fo rties (for example, Ctrsah/mwr) is that of the tough guy who "doc:sn't - believe in" patriotic action or sticking his neck out, and who eventually sticks his neck out f.trthcr and more heroically than .111yone else. In Ti1 Hm1e ami Have Not, it is Bogart's willingness to risk dt:ath. p�hawing all tht: while:, to bring a French Resistance fighter into Martinique, under the eyes of the Vichy government. Uut chert: is an additional, and even more important, meaning to the idea of involve ment in Hawks, the involvement of a man with a womnn, a scarier and deeper risk of oneself, pt:rhnps, than death. Typically, a man (in Only An.twls Have Wings , Ti1 HfllfC mul Have NM, and Rit1 Br,wo) is avoiding women like the plague. Ht: hasbeen badly burned and ht: dot:sn't want to get involved. Uut he, we arc .:ntitled to think, doth prott:st too much. Like the womnn's child obst:ssion in the woman's film, wluch conceals n secret dt!sirl:! to bt: ridof her ofEpring, the single man's retreat from marriage conct:als a contrary dcsirc. Otherwise, why would he leave so many strings fo r her to st:ize upon? (Th�:re arc wry fc: w such "strings," and litth: sense:: of heterosexual nl:!ed, in the action films of the sixties nnd seventies, which is one of the dilft:rcnct:s bctwct:n then and now, and between Hawks ;md his collt:agut:s and succt:ssors.) But it is the woman who has to bring the mnn around to seeing and claiming the invisible tics (in To Hal'e mrd HCII'C M1t, Uacall a�ks Uogey to walk around her, and then says, "Sec? No �trings," wl�ilt: he is tripping over them without realizing it). Thc mnn backs off, using as a pn:tcxt or real motive hi� di�approval of tht: woman's past. They cxchnngc rolc:s: The woman "proves ht!rsclf" by playing it his way, by show ing hc:rphysical courage or competence. And through a respect fo r her, first on his own terms, thep on hers, he IS brought around to a more "feminine" point ofvicw. Uccause proving themselves to each other is so fu ndnmentally important fo r the action here, nnd fo r Hawk�' men, a woman who IS (behaves, thinks} likt! a man IS the transitional step to heterosexual love. In mme ways this tribute to love means more conung fr om a "man's director" thnn if it had come from a "womnn's director." Ti1 Hm'c allll Haf!c Ntlt is so f.u from the machismo mold of the Hemingway original that the Resistance Frenchman's courage is not in being wdhng to die, but in having brought along the woman whose presence "weakened" him, by making him concerned fo r hcr safety. His heroism, fo r wl11ch he will win no medals. 1s to have accepted tit!! const:quences of hetero sexual love. And sht:, a� a spoiled, destrucuvc girl, redeems herself when she undcntands this. Ti1 Hm'e a111f Htwc N('' ultimately contradicts the mystique of those fo rties' filmsthat, in pretending to deprecate heroics, are most inf.1tuated with them as judged by and performed fo r m�:n themselves. In thc end of Casti /Jinuttl, it is with Claude Rams that Uogart walks off into the Moroccan mist, the equivalcm of the lovers' sunset; in 1i1 Ha11c mul Hm1c N(1t, it is with Laurt:nUacall. Crs,JIJ/mrftl reaps the: conwntional glory fo r an act-reJection-that is easiest; 428 THE FILM ARTIST
1(, Htll't' ,,rf Hllt't' M,t, opting fu r th� love that is l�ast honor�d in th� virility ethic, is mor� truly gloriom. Und�r Hawks' sup�rvision (being fo rc�d. the story goes, to yell at th� top of her lungs on a mountaintop, to deepen her voice}, Lauren Bacall's Slim is one of fihn's richly superior heroines and .t ra re example of a woman holding her own in a man's world. H�r char.tcters in Tin· B�l! Sh·p and 71., Hwt• ami Htwc NcJt ar� romaittic para gons, wom�n who have been conceived in what remains, essentially, a "man's world." But in the fo rti��. cert.tin movie stars emerged with distinctive, highly intdlig�nt point� of vi�w (strong women like Davis, Crawford, Hepburn, and Russdl}, which thcy imposed openly or surreptitiously on the filmsthey made. In this, dth�r a� st.tr� or in the parts thcy playcd, they corrcspond�d to c�rtain kinds of women that liter.ttur� had abstracted, ov�r the years, from life. B�cause socit:ty dic tated th� proper, and ��verdy r�strkt�d. domain fo r women, thos� who didn't "fit"-the "�xtraordinary women"-were tortured and frustrated; h�nce, th� "neu rotic woman." Fmding no outlet fo r her brains or talent �xcept as wife and mother, sh� dis�ipates hcr energies, diverts them, or got:s outsid� society. Of such women, literature gives u� two basic types, onc European, the oth�r Anglo-Saxon. The fir�t. and ba�ically European model, is the "superfemale"-a woman who, while exceedingly "feminine" and flirtatious, is too ambitious and intelligent fo r the docile role soctety has decreed she play. She is uncomfortable, but not uncom fo rtable �nough to r�bcl completely; her circumstances arc too pleasurable. Sh� remain� wtthin traditional society, but having no worthwhile proj�ct fo r her cr� ative �nergies, turns them onto thc only available material-the people around her-with demonic r�sults. Hedda Gabler, Emma llovary, and Emma Woodhouse: arc litcr.try �uperfemalc\ of the first order. Thc oth�r rype i� the "sup�rwoman"-a woman who, like the "superfemale," has a high degre� of intelligence or imagin.ttion, but instead of exploiting her f� m ininity, adopts male characteristics in order to enjoy male pr�rogatives, or merely to survive. In this category arc the transscxual impersonators (Shakespeare's Rosalind and Vio!J) who arrog.tt� male fn :edoms along with thcir doth�s. a� well as the Shavian heroines who assume "male logic" and ideology to influence peopl�-and who lose fr icnds and, most triumphantly, make encmies in the process. Scarlett and Jczc:bd, Vivien Lcigh and Bette Davis, arc mpcrfemales. Sylvia Scarlett and Vi�nna, Joan Crawford and (often) Katharin� Hepburn, arc supcr womcn. The south�rn h�roine, b�caus� of her conditioning .utd background, is a natural sup�rfemal�. Like the Europ�:m woman, �h� is treat�d by m�n and h�r society with something dose to veneration, a position she i� not entirely willing to abandon fo r the:barricades. Rather than rebel and lose h�r status, she plays on her ass�ts, becomes a �elf-exploiter, us�s her s�x (without cv�r surr�ndering it) to gain powcr over m�n. Romantically attractiv�. even magnctic, she is not sexual (though more so than her northern count�rpart, hence the mcongruity, even neuro�is, in the New England D.tvis' southern belle perform.tnccs); �he is repressed more from Victorianism than puntanism, and imtinctivcly resists any situation in wluch she might los� her �elf control. (The di�tmction between North and South obtains in the lit�rary "supt.·rf�males" as well; th� "Northern FEMALE STARS OF THE 1940s 429
European" types, Hedda Gabler and Emma Woodhouse, -� uggest respectively sexual fr igidity and ap.lthy; Mme Bovary, being more Mediterranean, is more likely to have fo und sexual satisfaction.} Bette Davis, superfemale and �ometime southern belle, was not born in the South at all, but in Lowell, Mass.tchmetts, of an old, respectable Protestant fa mily. The only due in her background to the seething polarities of toughness and vul nerability expressed in her role� was the trauma (glos�cd ovcr in her autobiography) . ofher f1ther\ dc�ertion of the f.1mily when she was only a child. She was supported in her theatrical career by her mother, Ruthie, who wa-; al�o her lifelong fr iend, even as she progressed (or rcgrc\scd} from the guardian of her struggling daughter to the spoiled charge of her succes�ful one. All this might or might not explain the conflictingimpuls es of the Davi� persona (in tandcm or fr om film to film): the quicksilver shifts between di�trust and loyalty, the darting, fe arful eyes, and the bravura, the quick wit of the :tbruptly termin:tted sentences, the defcnsivene�s. and the throttled passion. She was the wicked girl who sometimes was, sometimes wasn't, so bad under neath, while Crawford was the self-made gracious lady with icc water fo r blood. At some point (Crawford in Raiu and A W.mum's Face) each of them was biscctcd by the puritan ethic into two mutually exclusive extremes of good and evil. Uut even in her double role in A Sto!t·u Lifr, when �he played Katy, the sweet-and-p:mive sister and her bitch twin, Pat, Davis did not really draw a radical distinction be tween the two (as de Haviland did in Tire Dark Mim>r), thus mggcsting the inter dependence of the two halves. In the beginning of her career, Davi� was just plain Katy ("the cake," as Glenn Ford describes her, in contrast to Pat, "without the frosting"}. In her first picture, Bml Sister, reportedly one of the wor�t filmsever made, Davis was not the eponymous hellion (that wa� Zasu Pitt�} but her simpering, virtuous sibling. "Embarrassment always made me have a one-sided smile," she recounts in her autobiography, "and since I was constantly embarrassed in fr ont of a camera, I constantly smiled in a one-sided manner." She was universally considered unsexy, not to say unusable: still, when her contract expired she managed to hang on until she was taken up by Warners. Her lack of success or star statu� became an asset, as she was able to take parts-like Mildred in Of Human Bomi�I!L.__that nobody else would touch. This was her first villainess, and her enthusiasm extended to the makeup, which she persuaded di rector John Cromwell to let her apply herself. In so doing, she thus gained the upper hand, which she would usc whenever she could (and not always to her own advantage}, and demonstrated that fe eling fo r greasepaint grotesque that only she could get away with, and sometimes even she could not. She determined to make it very clear "that Mildred was not going to die of a dread disease looking as if a deb had missed her noon nap. The last stages of con sumption, poverty and neglect arc not pretty and I intended to be convincing looking. We pulled no punches and Mildred emerged as a reality-a� immediate as a newsreel and as starkly real as a pestilence." (Actually, Davis' notions of fe m inine vanity and excesses, daring as they often arc, have led her into those parodies 430 THE FILM ARTIST
of wom.mhood that arc clmt:r to Grand Guignol than ncwsrcd, and that have surrounded her w1th camp fo llower� who�e image of her oblitt:rates her real strength�.) From then on, she was one of the few actresses willing-even eagcr-t.o play against amhence sympathy. In her southern belle pha�e. �he managed to combine the v.mity of the "deb" with the venality of Mildred. Even in her supcrfemale roles, the charm ha� a cutting edge-the taunting Julie Marsden of j£•::cbd {the consola tion role for missing out on Scarlett); the "jinx" actre�s. Joyce Heath, patterned on Jeanne Eagd�. Ill Dm��enms (f or which she won the copsolation Academy Award denied her for Of J-lruwm Bmuft!�c-); the mortally ill �ociahte, Judith Trahcrne, m D11rk I 'icwy; and the frivolom Fanny Trclh� of Mr. Sk�tfin.�tllll. The superfemale is an actress by nature; what i� flirtation, after all, but role-playing? Coquetry i� an art, and Davis exulted in the arti�try. lnj£•::d,cf, �he captivates her beaux but with les� natural effervescence than Scarlett. Dav1� Is more neurotic than Vivien Le1gh, le�s cool. When coolness i� called for, Davis give� us a cold chill: when warmth, a barely suppres�ed passion. Her charm, likt: ht:r beauty, i� something willed mto being. It is not a question of whetht:r �he is i1mde or out�ide the p.trt (for cunomly she is both) but of the intemity of her conviction, a sense of character in the old-f.1shioned �t:nse of "moral fiber." Through sheer, driving guts �he turns herself into a Rower of the Old South, ;md in that one determined gesture reveals the bedrock toughness of the superfemale that we d1�cover only by degrees in Scarlett. Davis' reputation i� bJ�ed on a career composed of equal parts art, three-�tar trash, .md garbage, sometimes all in the same film-which makes fine critical dJs tinctlom difficult. W. trner� gave her a hard time, and she reciprocated. (She even brought a lawsuit agaimt them once, wl11ch she lost, but in �o doing, she paved the way for future <1ction on <1ctors' behalf.) William Wyler was her toughe�t and best din.·ctor-onjc::£'/ld, Tlrl' Letter, and Tire Little Foxes-but �he broke with him over The Little F!JXL'S. She was in an invisible competition w1th Tallulah 13ankhead, who had played Regina brilliantly on 13roadway, and from whom she also inhented (and probably improved upon) JL·::c/ld and Dnrk Victory. Surely none of these films was a "betrayal" of the original �tagc play, and a� to who outshone whom, only those who have witnessed both can decide-and even they, given the fierce, par tis
makes a deal with A�tor fo r the baby when they think l3rcnt is dead. Their rela tionship during Astor's delivery alternate.� between tendcrne�� and spite, love and . hate, as Davis plays the "f1ther" (in JOdhpurs, pacing the ftoor) to Astor's mother. Part ofDavis' greatness lies in the sheer, galv:mic fo rce she brought to the most outrageous and unlikely roles, giving an intensity that s:IVed them, usually, from camp. Even when she is "outside" a part (through its, or her, unsuitability), she is dynamic. As the harridan housewife of Be)'ond tiiC F1m·st, she �urveys her de�pised domestic kingdom and says "What a dump!" and we are with her. By the time M:mha in Wlro 's Afraid 1if Vu :_� iuia W{l(llf? says the same line, it has already been consecrated as camp. In spite of the f.1ct that the only way we can think of Davis as a fe mme fa tale is if she contemplates murder or literally kills somebody (Tire Letter, Tlte Little Foxes), she makes us accept her as a girl men fight duds over and die fo r. She is const:mtly being cast agamst type a� a hcartbrc.1kcr, and then made to pick up the pieces when fo olish hearts �hatter. As the actre�s "witch" (Dau.l!crons) whose stage presence Ita� caused suicides and impired epiphanies, �he is made to do penance, fo r the rest of her life, with her Milquetoast hmband. But 1f we look closely, here and elsewhere, it is not �he but other� who imi�t on her supernatural evil, who throw up a smoke screen of illusions, who invoke my�tical catchword� to explain her "magic" or her "jinx," why she is "d1tferent" fr om other women. In her film career, Davis casts a cold eye, and not a fe w dampening remarks, on st!ntimentality. When Claudt! Rains, as the doting Mr. Skeffington, tells her "A woman is bcauuful only whc:n she is in love," Davis, miserable over the dis covery of her pregnancy, replies, "A woman is beautiful if she has eight hours of sleep and goes to the beauty parlor every day. And bone structure has a lot to do with it." In King Vidor's Bc)'olld tl1e Fo rest, her wildest and most uncompromising film, one she herself dislikes, she play� the evil Rosa Moline, married to Joseph Cotton's small-town doctor. He i� seen as "good" because he goes without, and makes his wife go without, so his impecunious patient� won't have to pay their bills-and will "love" the good doctor. His "virtue" succeeds in driving his wife into further malice. One of the earliest discontented housewives on record, Rosa sashays around wearing a long black wig. like her surly housekeeper, Dona Drake, who is a dark-skinned lower-class parody of her. Davis' obsession is to go to Chicago, and to this end she wrecks everyone's lives. In one of the film's most modern, angst-ridden scenes, she wanders the back streets of Chicago, stagger ing through the rain (having been turned out of a bar where women "without escorts" arc not allowed), looking like another star who would later claim her influence-Jeanne Moreau in La N1111c. "I don't want people to love me," Rosa says-one of the most difficultthi ngs fo r a woman to bring herself to say, ever, and one of the most important. It is something Davis the actre�s must have said. Thus, docs the supcrfemale become the superwoman, by taking life into her own hands, her own way. Davis' performance in Bey1md the F11rt•st, as a kind of fe male W. C. Fields, and Vidor's commitment to her, are astonish mg. Even though she is contrasted with a "good woman" {Ruth Roman) to show that she is the exception, that all women 432 THE FILM ARTIST arc not like that (a moralistic pressure that Hollywood is not the only one to exercise-the French government made Godard change the title of Tile iHarricd . J Jfomau to A Married J+'ll/111111}, the Ruth Roman character has little moral weight or value. As Rosa Moline, Davis creates her own norms, and is driven by motives not likely to appeal to the awrage audience. She is ready and eager to give up husband, position, security, children (most easily, children), even love"r; fo r what? Not fo r anything so noble as "independence" in terms of a job, profession, or higher calling, but to be rich and fa ncy in Chicago! And here is Davis, not beau tiful, not sexy, not even young, convincing us that she is all these things-by the vividness of her own self-image, by the vision of herself she projects so fiercely that we have no choice but to accept it. She is smart, though, smarter than every one around her. She says it fo r all smart dames when David Brian tells her he no longer loves her, that he's fo und the "pure" woman ofhis dreams. "She's a book with none of the pages cut," he says. "Yeah," Davis replies, "and nothing on them!" Since she began as a belle and emerged as a tough (in BC)'oud the Forest she is a crack shot and huntress), Davis' evolution from superfemale to superwoman was the most dramatic, but she was by no means the only actress in the fo rties to un dergo such a transfornution.1 Perhaps reflectingthe increased number of working women during the war and their heightened career inclinations, other stars made the transition from figurative hoop skirts to fu nctional shoulder pads, and gained authority without necessarily losing their fe mininity. The war was tlrt• niajor turning point in the pattern and attitudes of (and toward} working women. From 1900 to 1940, women in the labor fo rce had been mostly young, unmarried women in their early twenties who were biding their time until marriage. Suddenly, to fill men's places and aid in the expanded war industries, older, married women were recruited, and from that time to the pres ent (when the typical working woman is fo rty and married) the median age rose with the percentage of women in the labor fo rce. A poll of working women taken during the war came up with the startling f.1ct that 80 percent wanted to keep their jobs after it was over. After a sharp drop-offfo llowing the end of the war when women were fired with no regard fo r seniority-married women did go back to work, although as late as 1949 it was still frowned upon. This, of course, is the source of the tremendous tension in filmsof the time, which tried, by ridi cule, intimidation, or persuasion, to get women out of the office and back to the home, to get rid of the superwoman and bring back the superfemale. Rosalind Russell came out of the supcrfemale closet into superwoman roles f.1 irly early in her career. But in Cra(1(s Wife , an adaptation of the George Kelly play,
11n 3 char�cteristically pervers•· fa shion, Ida Lupino went in the opposite direction, from the •uperwom3n matriarch of The· M1111 I Lc>t•t and The H<1r�f ll'.t)' (19-12), in which she channels all of her ambitions into promoting her younger sister, 10 Tltc D(t:•tmist (1953), which she heudf directed. and 111 which she: plays Edmond O'Brien's mousy, submissive mistress against Joan Fonuine's ag gressive career woman. Although Lupino takes the standard anti-career woman position in her treatment of Fontaine, the film presents a positive case for bigamy, or 3t least suggesu that the bmary system-one 111311, one woman, married for life without loopholes-is not the most flexible or rcalistk arungcnu:nt. FEMALE STARS OF THE 1940s 433 she is not only a superfcmale but the definitive superfemale, the housewife who becomes obse�sive about her home, the perfectionist housekeeper fo r whom, fi nally, nothing else exists. It would be comforting to look upon this film,directed by Dorothy Arzner, as a protest against the mindlessness of housewifery, but, like Tile J.Vomeu, of which the same claim has been made, it is not so much a satire as an extension, in high relief. of the tics and intellectual tremors of a fa miliar American type. In The Wo meu, as the malicious (and funny and stylish) Mrs. Fowler, Russell is the superfemale par excellence; but in His Girl Frida)', as the newspaper reporter, in My Sister Eileeu, as the short-story writer, and in Ta ke 11 Letter, Darling, as the business executive, she begins pulling her own weight in a man's world, risks making enemies and losing lovers, becomes, that is, a superwoman. In Ta ke 11 Letter, D11rfiug, she is the partner in an advertising firm where she began as a secretary. She runs the operation while Robert Benchley, the titular head of the firm,plays miniature golf in his office. He is, to Russell, the kind ofbenign fa ther figure that Charles Coburn was to Jean Arthur and Irene Dunne. Not in the least bitter at Russell's success, he is quite happy to have been "kicked upstairs" and gives her support and advice whenever she comes to him. At one point, he com plains that her competitors-all men, of course-don't understand her:
"They don't know the difference between a woman and a . . ." "A what?" Russell asks. "I don't know," Ucnchley replies, "there's no name for you."
In My Sister Eilccu, Russell plays the writer-sister trying to sell her stones to a prestigious national magazine. Although the stories concern the escapades of her pretty and popular sister, Russell steals the show as the cerebral one, and gets editor Brian Aherne, too. (The difference in attitudes between the fo rties and fifties can be seen in the shift of emphasis in the musical remake of My Sister Eifceu in 1955, in which Betty Garrett retatns little dignity as the intellectual �ister, but is overshadowed-and shamed-by the popularity of the sister played by Janet Leigh.)� Katharine Hepburn made the transition from superfemale to superwoman most easily and most successfully of all-perhaps because she was already halfway there to begin with. In her second film, Dorothy Arzner's Cltristoplrcr Strm1g, she played an aviatrix torn between her profession and her man. Flying presents an appropriately extreme metaphor fo r the freedom of the smgle woman that has to . be surrendered once the idea of a f1mily becomes a concrete reality. Torn apart by these conflictingpulls, Hepburn finallydies in a plane crash-that is, she propels herself, like the dancer in Tile R,·tf Shii,'S, into the abyss between low and career. In both cases, the ending is not just a cautionary warning to deflect women from careers, but a true reflection of the dynanucs of the situation: A woman has only so much energy, so much "self" to give; is there enough fo r profession {especially
�lfColuml>1� had used the Uernstc:in musit·al, w1th ltm.llual Russell ret:unmg her stage role, the move n11ght haw been better but no k-ss �exut, With its rousmg poim-hy-pmm denunciation of r� IIIIIIISIII: "IOU Ways to lme a Man." 434 THE FILM ARTIST
if it is a dangerous or demanding one), lover, and children? Christopher Stroll,!! raises these questions, but doesn't really pur�ue them, and as a comequence it is a le�s interesting filmthan it should be, less interesting than Arzner's more "feminist" film, Dnucc, Girl, Daucc. But, fo r all its weaknesses, Christ
Adam's Ri/1, that rara avi�, a commercial "feminist" film, was many years ahead of its time when It appeared in I!J4lJ, and, alas, still is. Even the slightly coy happy ending tesufies to the f.1ct that the film strikes deeper into the question of sexual roles than its comic surf.1ce would indicate and raises more questions than it can possibly answer. Tracy and Hepburn pby a couple of married lawyers who find themselves on opposite sides of a case: he is the prosecutmg attorney, and she, seizing upon the crime and its 1mphcations, take� it upon herself to defend the accused. A dopey young wife-Judy Holliday, in her first m
duplicity-posses�ed by Hepburn; and (2) that l'.u:h tan, and must, exchange these qualities like trading cards. It IS important fo r Hepburn to be ethical, just as it is im portant fo r Tracy to be able to concede defeat gracefully, and if she can be a bastard, he can fa ke tears. Ifeach can do everything the other can do, just where, we begin to wonder, arc the boundaric� between m;1le and fe male? The question mark is estab lished most pointedly and uncomfort.lbly when, dunng the courtroom session, the fa ces of Holliday and Ewell arc transposed, each becoming the other. But Hepburn and Tracy .tre not quite �o mterchangeable, and the success of their union derive� from the pre�ervation of their individuality, not rigidly but through a fluctuatingbalance of conce-;sion and assertion. Tracy can be humili:tted and still rebound without (too much) lms of ego. Hepburn occasionally can defer to him and still not lose her identity. A purdy political-fem inist logic would demand that she be giwn Tracy's head, in unqualified triumph (an ending that some small part of us would like to sec), rather than make an equivocal, "feminine" concession to his masculinity. Uut marriage and love do not flourish according to such logic. Their love is the admis�ion of their incompleteness, of their need :m d willingness to listen to each other, and their marriagl' i.<; the certification-indeed, the celebration-of that compromi�e. This finallyis the greatnes<;of Hepburn\superwoman, and Davis' and Russell's too-that she is able to achieve her ends in a man\ world, to insist on her intelli gence, to insist on using it, and yet be able to "dwindle," like Millamant in The Wa y ciftlle Wo rld, "into marriage," but only after an equal b.1rgain has been struck of conditions mutually agreed on. It is with jmt �uch a bargam, and a contract, that Cukor's great Tracy-Hepburn filmof the fifties, Pat ,,d Mike, is conccrnc:d. For the most part, the superwoman, with her angular personality and acute, even abrasive, intelligence, begins to disappear in the fifties. The bad-girl is whitt!washed, or blown up into some pneumatic techmcolor parody of herself. Breast fe tishism, a wartime fixation of the G.J.\, came in in the fifties. (Its screen vogue was possibly retarded by the delay 111 rdeasmg Howard Hughes' The Outlaw, introducingJane Russell's pair to the world.) l3ut even amidst the mostly vulgar fu mblings toward sensualaty, Cukor was there-with Ava Gardner in Blwwani junctim1 and Sophia Loren an J·lcllcr i11 Pink T(�hts-to give some dignity to the sex goddesses and, in films like The Actress and Bc1m Yt•stcnlay, to pay tribute to the t!nterprising woman.
1974