From from Reverence to Rape Female Stars of the 1940S

MOLLY HASKELL IIIIIIIIHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIHIIRIIIIII"Itlltottllllllnlta�rt111111111111J1HIIIIIIIIII1IIIIIl&IMWIIIIIIII1k.ll-611111lll"lltltiiiiii111111111111HHIIIIIIHIIIIIIIIII1niiiiiiiiii1Uit111111111HIIUIHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIJ111UIIIIIIIIUUIII&IIIIII,.IIIIatlllll From From Reverence to Rape 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(<! Sleep), the prolifer ation of women-broads, dames, and ladies in as many shapes and Aavors, hard and soft centers as a Whitman's sampler-was a way of not having to concentrate on a single woman, and again, of reducing woman's stature by siphoning her qualities off into separate women. 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.

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