I’m a person of strong, at times exaggerated likes and dislikes, and, unlike William F. Buckley, who adored her, I have always detested Claire Boothe Luce. She is the principal reason for my reservations about The Women, George Cukor’s hastily made film version of Boothe’s famous 1930s, pre-Henry R. Luce comedic play. (Boothe/Luce was also a journalist, a right-wing Republican congresswoman, and a U.S. ambassador.) The play is, of course, intermittently hilarious, and so is the film, whose script, a fairly close match despite some sanitization and “opening up,” was worked on by Anita Loos, Jane Murfin and two uncredited gents, Donald Ogden Stewart and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The film retains the play’s gimmick of an all-female roster of characters, but the delight inherent in this, as with the play, is offset by the fact that these females—with few exceptions, they can hardly be called women—gossip endlessly and cruelly about one another, especially with reference to who is cheating on whom with what. There is a nasty tone to the whole enterprise that perfectly suits Boothe/Luce’s repellent personality. “I know my sex,” the central character’s presumably shrewd mother (Lucile Watson, insufferable) at one point says, tipping the play’s sanctimonious, misogynistic hand. Whatever her gender, Boothe/Luce’s play is disparaging of women—or at least of the upper-crust Manhattanites with whom it primarily deals.
All that said, one can enjoy the film around the edges of Boothe/Luce’s core (ob)noxiousness. There isn’t much in the way of good filmmaking here (at one point, reflections in a triple mirror do visually convey the interior state—one of discombobulation—of the character facing it), but some of the acting is close to being essential viewing. This doesn’t include Norma Shearer’s arch, theatrical turn in the sympathetic lead role, Mary Haines, whose husband, Stephen, is stepping out on her with a department-store perfume-counter salesgirl. Nor does the imperative that Boothe/Luce’s Roman Catholicism imposes on the plot help her performance; Mary is required to reconcile with her cheating spouse, declaring something like, “Pride is something that a woman in love can’t afford”—a final line that Shearer embarrassingly gushes before, widely smiling, she rushes to Stephen with open arms. Shearer is almost always too sophisticated, too grand for my taste.
But three of the other performances make up for Shearer’s hamminess. These are the ones given by Paulette Goddard as Miriam Aarons, the warmest, (in both senses) brightest, sexiest, most decent and most “together” of the film’s characters; a sparkling Joan Crawford, as Stephen’s (ultimately) oddly admirable working-class squeeze, Crystal Allen; and Rosalind Russell, viciously funny as Sylvia Fowler—a role that revels in physical comedy. Joan Fontaine is lovely and finely satirical as Peggy, the youngest of the marrieds, until a big dramatic telephone scene of marital reconciliation that the actress badly overplays.
The next year Goddard would give an even more wonderful performance, as Hannah, whom we follow from Ghetto to concentration camp, in Charles Chaplin’s brilliant The Great Dictator (1940)—a film twenty times funnier than The Women, and one that is humane and heartrending to boot.
Tags: Joan Fontaine
