Buffalo News
My, how far we’ve come: ’30s film gets a major update
By Charity Vogel
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: 09/07/08 8:20 AM
The original 1939 film by George Cukor featured Hollywood power players, from left, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell.
The stick of butter tells you everything you need to know. It appears in a scene halfway through Buffaloborn Diane English’s new movie, “The Women.” In the scene, Meg Ryan, playing betrayed wife Mary Haines, battles her wealthy husband Stephen over his adultery with a perfume-counter spritzer girl. They decide to divorce, and Stephen roars off in the family car.
But Mary, fueled by rage, does what some women do.
She goes to the kitchen, rips open the fridge, and yells in frustration that there’s only fat-free healthy stuff inside. Assuage agony with fruit?
“Where’s the JUNK!” she shrieks.
Then she grabs a stick of butter, a can of Hershey’s cocoa, and a bottle of heavy cream. Dunk, in goes the butter to the cocoa and cream, and Mary takes an enormous bite. Ahhh.
That scene – raw emotion paired with rawer butter – tells you the two essential facts you need to know about “The Women,” which is English’s bold remake of the 1939 original.
Ӣ One: It updates the original in surprising, clever ways Рways that reflect the different roles women occupy in modern life.
”¢ And two: It’s pretty darn funny.
In making a new film based on a much-loved classic of vintage Hollywood, director English took an admitted risk. But the results make for engaging, thought-provoking viewing, according to experts on film and popular culture.
“It’s stereotyped, it’s cliched – but it’s playing with it,” said Diane Christian, a distinguished teaching professor
of English at the University at Buffalo whose courses include film seminars. “It’s just as good as the original. It’s very cleverly done, about how women in a sense are always playing roles – even to themselves.”
The 1939 film featured women who were “gargantuan stars in their day,” said Mick LaSalle, author of the book “Complicated Women,” an analysis of actresses and their roles in Hollywood films before 1934, a time known as the pre-Code, or pre-censorship, era. “Norma Shearer was the second-biggest star at the biggest studio in Hollywood. Joan Crawford had been the biggest star at the biggest studio. These women were mammoth.”
In the 1939 original, Mary Haines – who is called by her husband’s name, “Mrs. Stephen Haines,” throughout – is a suffering saint who loses her status and her source of income and influence when she splits from her husband over his affair.
That made the film both shocking and true-to-life at the time, said pop culture expert Elayne Rapping. “In the 1930s,” says Rapping, who teaches American Studies at UB, “divorce was a big deal. It meant you had failed. Women’s business was marriage – if you failed in that, it was like failing in business. And if you didn’t hold on to your man, you lost your job.”
In the new version, Ryan’s character has a job – albeit at her father’s fashion house, where her opinions are disregarded – but is also pulled in different directions as a mother, a committee chairwoman, and a social do-gooder who opens her Connecticut home for fundraisers.
Most important, there’s a big change in the female friendships that fill the film.
“The Women” is just that: a fable of female friendship, and what those relationships can do to make your life heaven, as Milton might have put it, or hell.
That storyline about husbandly infidelity? It’s important, as the prime motivator for the action of the film. Mary Haines, as a wife and mother, reacts to her betrayal in strong ways; her friends do too.
But here’s a key difference: In the original, marriage to a socially prominent man was the most important thing in a woman’s life, the thing that women practically killed themselves to attain, protect and preserve.
Not so, some cultural critics argue, in 2008. And that’s reflected in English’s movie.
In the new version, the friendships of the four women at the heart of the tale are of paramount importance – even more so than the relationships they have with men.
“You said betrayal is inevitable in every relationship,” Mary Haines tells a girlfriend, at one point, when she feels stung by rejection. “I thought you were just talking about marriage.”
Primary roles in the movie – which, like the 1939 version, includes no male actors at all – include: Sylvie Fowler, played by Annette Bening, a magazine editor and college friend of Mary’s; Edie Cohen, played by Debra Messing, the artsy mom of four children; and Alex Fisher, played by Jada Pinkett Smith, a glamorous writer. Cloris Leachman, Candice Bergen, Carrie Fisher and Bette Midler have smaller roles in the movie.
The central dynamic of a fourfold female group may seem familiar by now – after all, American culture has been fed a steady diet of “Sex and the City” references ever since that TV series appeared in the late 1990s, and then culminated in a movie earlier this year.
And there are traces of that Carrie Bradshaw-tinged culture in “The Women”: montages of upscale shopping and spa visits (“Nobody hates Saks,” one of the women tells a child at one point) and a runway fashion show that serves as the film’s culmination.
“Fashion is the energy,” said Christian. “They’re all in that world here.”
But “The Women” has been on the drawing board since well before any “SATC” phenomenon. And the tone of those friendships in “The Women” is, in the end, what makes this movie so different than its predecessor.
In the earlier version, the women characters used gossip as a weapon among their social equals. Here, they counsel each other and offer advice.
That alone reflects a more modern reality, experts said.
“Today, women value their friends more than they use to. Marriages are very fragile,” said Rapping. “You don’t know where [marriage] relationships are going to go; the divorce rate is so high.
“But you can assume a good friend will be there.”
