A Woman's View
Basinger, Jeanine
A WOMAN'S VIEW: HOW HOLLYWOOD SPOKE TO WOMEN, 1930-1960 Jeanine Basinger Alfred A. Knopf/528 pages /$30 reviewed by FLORENCE KING E very woman of a certain age has a bone to pick with the...
...Society didn't feel threatened...
...Natural disasters like earthquakes and cholera epidemics are defined by miscarriages and dying children...
...She is a regular columnist for National Review...
...especially so, and unusually well-written to boot...
...Movies have made fools of us all at some point in our lives, usually—but not always—in adolescence...
...If movies have been good for women and women have been good for movies, what is there to complain about...
...Maybe the heroine does give up her career in the last five minutes of the film, but for the first eighty-five the audience saw her running the world...
...Basinger nails the closet elitism of feminists who are forever touting Katharine Hepburn's strength...
...Basinger asks...
...No woman who grew up in the heyday of American movies is quite right in the head...
...An evil woman who destroys all she touches...
...Of course Hollywood preached an anti-feminist message, Basinger says patiently, but look how they did it...
...Were we a nation of goons forty years ago, who never noticed any subtexts...
...Especially Crawford, who flopped in heiress roles because supposedly unsophisticated audiences "sniffed out the common clay in her": streets...
...Olivia de Havilland in Dark Mirror or A Stolen Life with Bette Davis gave women a chance to be Good Sister, Bad Sister, Bad Sister impersonating Good Sister, and Good Sister mistaken for Bad Sister...
...Everything is couched in terms of what are presumed to be the major events of a woman's life...
...Well, almost...
...Frisby, you're a machine," but they also absorbed a liberating view of female success and independence that stayed in their minds like orgy scenes in religious epics...
...True, it contains a few dippy sentiments and theories, but that's the whole point, you see...
...The news increasingly consists of "soft" features and "people stories," economics is about the two-career family, and foreign policy is driven by pictures of dying children...
...Her old friend, portrayed by Miriam Hopkins, is a married woman with a child who tries to Have It All, only to learn the hard way that a career always interferes with family life...
...screamed the poster, heralding a frenzy of having-it-all in which Bad Sister sleeps around and wears great clothes until she drowns, whereupon Good Sister inherits her husThe two women toast each other with champagne as the camera moves back to reveal what will happen to women who don't accept love or their natural female roles in life...
...They threw us off track, made us guilty enough about something or other to try to become what we were not and never could be, and we harbor a compulsion to explain how it happened...
...Feminists, bone-pickers par excellence, naturally do the lioness's share of it, but no woman is immune...
...Both women become best-selling authors and both end up alone, but the audience knows that Davis is used to being alone, and they see Hopkins getting used to it with remarkable resiliency...
...They might not be able to find a Clark Gable of their own," writes Basinger, "but they certainly could get a guy with no undershirt...
...There were no articles written on the subject of "What Is Gold Lame Doing to Our Mothers...
...Even funnier was the title card producers used for warning women away from really execrable behavior: "This is a story of evil...
...One reason for society's blasé attitude was that women, lacking the Walter Mitty syndrome, tailor their fantasies to fit their real-life situations, as they did when they saw the Depression-era hit, It Happened One Night...
...Basinger gives us a hint: In movies about women, all important historical and natural events are translated into the terms of a woman's daily life...
...Here was "choice" beyond feminism's wildest dreams...
...Bette Davis, of course, was the queen of the title card...
...We may have been distracted by inchoate romantic yearning, but we also came away from the Bijou with ideas we were not supposed to have...
...A WOMAN'S VIEW: HOW HOLLYWOOD SPOKE TO WOMEN, 1930-1960 Jeanine Basinger Alfred A. Knopf/528 pages /$30 reviewed by FLORENCE KING E very woman of a certain age has a bone to pick with the movies...
...She also takes our vaunted Age of Information to task...
...In the final scene,love her, but because she flirts her way into the Japanese army kitchen, they get so exercised over her use of "woman's wiles" to get into a "woman's place" that they fail to give female viewers credit for understanding that she succeeded in poisoning the entire regiment...
...Naturally the movies did a lot of paternalistic preaching about good girls vs...
...The Depression is not about an economic collapse...
...n general, Basinger believes, femi- nist movie criticism is skewed by too much attention to the film noir...
...In other words, you didn't have to fall for it...
...Women like Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck, and Rogers, on the other hand, had no one to rely on but themselves...
...How To Marry a Millionaire is about a good girl, a smart girl, and a bad girl...
...What started at the Bijou is now public policy...
...She was rich...
...They will be alone—but, of course, they will also be extremely wealthy, well dressed, sought after, successful, and they will be drinking champagne...
...representing love and marriage, career, and the primrose path, or as Basinger puts it: "doing it the right way for a living, doing it the wrong way for a living, and just doing it for a living...
...bad girls, but shrewd viewers saw through the hackneyed props—e.g., "gum chewing becomes an effective shorthand for: she does something physical with great enthusiasm...
...This passage supports her thesis that movies have made women feel their lives are important and exciting, but to this reviewer it also describes the current feminization of American life...
...A Woman's View is Florence King's first book, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), was reissued recently by St...
...I identified with the Gene Tierney character in Leave Her to Heaven and she didn't, but she asked her mother why Mildred Pierce went back to her dopey husband instead of getting a new boyfriend, so in our separate ways we prove the theme of her book: Female moviegoers in Hollywood's golden age were not the passive, obedient zombies that feminists like to claim...
...In Old Acquaintance, Bette Davis is a spinster careerist who accepts society's view that a woman cannot serve two masters, and resigns herself to the single life for the sake of her work...
...Film scholarship has a way of making current analysts out to be geniuses, with the audiences of former times cast as idiots...
...In Hollywood, they had their own money and their own clout, and not all of them went down the drain...
...Movie heroines not only ran the world, they occasionally destroyed it, or at least that part of it that threatened them...
...She had a family to back her up...
...They might have absorbed a traditionalist mes60 The American Spectator January 1994 sage when the leading man chided, "You're not a woman, Dr...
...CI Much has been written about how Hollywood exploited women, but most of these women would have had miserable lives without their stardom...
...What was even more wonderful, no one cared...
...When morality has to dramatize its own opposite to make its point, the opposite takes on a life of its own...
...This showed female addiences a woman of importance...
...Martin's Press...
...It's about runs in stockings, no money for carfare, and being forced out onto the The American Spectator January 1994...
...she must have enough to make the sacrifice interesting—i.e., something to lose...
...Taking issue with feminist film critics who pin the blanket label of "self-sacrifice" on anti-career movies, Basinger offers a testy reminder: As I have repeated often enough, a woman's film, in order to tell its story, has to present a central character of great importance who is out in the world doing something...
...There is absolutely no need for another book about women 'n' movies, but they're fun to read...
...The trio plot boiled choices down to real basics...
...when too many over-educated and over-analytical people start combing through old movies, they over-complicate what was actually very simple when Basinger was going to the picture show back in South Dakota: Women could ruin their lives—get free of everything—down at the movie house for twenty-five cents with butter on their popcorn...
...Jeanine Basinger, a film studies professor at Wesleyan University, is about the same vintage as your reviewer, and therefore just as warped...
...Basinger is at her wittiest when she analyzes the wildly popular twin-sister movies in which the same actress played both parts...
...World War I is not about the Allies versus the Kaiser...
...or "Will George Brent Destroy Civilization...
...The stars who play the American woman made her strong and capable both on and off the screen...
...Since movies encouraged audiences to identify with characters or dream about having the same experiences as were shown on the screen, women were inevitably going to project themselves into situations in which they got out and did something...
...In Dragon Seed, Katharine Hepburn as Jade is the ultimate nonconformist, a Chinese feminist, a figure more at odds with her society than an American feminist could possibly be...
...Feminist film critics ought to The American Spectator January 1994 61 band and her dog, only one of whom is smart enough to tell the difference...
...There's two of her...
...It's about how unmarried women become pregnant when they have sex...
...To sacrifice herself...
...Hepburn could afford her strength...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
