Melodrama
Almost all movies nowadays are about men and their tasks. Some movies are about women and romance, but those movies tend not to be complex or honest, and they very often leave out the question of the female as a sexual creature with her own primal needs. She is just like a man, only sappier and less in control of her feelings. She is often mediocre and scared, and she needs a man to “fill” her in the worst way. She is not a creature of power and creativity.
If one were to make a study of great moments in film that were satisfying to women, one would have to look no further than the 1940s or 1950s melodrama. This form reached its zenith around 1960, then quickly withered away after that. These movies form a complex picture of women’s psychological needs and fears, and cover such preoccupations as aging, beauty, motherhood, betrayed love, dangerous love, money and sex, women who will do anything for a man, women gone bad for men, women used by men for profit, women who are bad seeds, nymphomaniacs, adultery, shame; basically, all of the most basic emotional concerns of women.
Some of the most interesting from my point of view are those that pose philosophic questions about aging or beauty, such as Mr. Skeffington, A Woman’s Face, Torch Song, Sunset Boulevard, Female on the Beach; those that are about a woman’s ability to be destroyed by wanting love, such as Madame X, Vertigo, Duel in the Sun, Letter to an Unknown Woman, Leave Her to Heaven, The Red Shoes; those that are about woman’s own destructive or otherwise transformative sexual power, such as The Strange Woman, Double Indemnity, Niagara, Gilda, The Killing, The Birds; those that have to do with a woman’s lot in life, such as Aventurera, Madame Bovary, Mildred Pierce, The Hard Way, The Postman Always Rings Twice; and comedies that paint a positive picture of the power of female sexuality, such as all musicals and “comic blonde” farces.
The powerhouses of women’s cinema—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyk, Ida Lupino, Olivia de Haviland, Jennifer Jones, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Irene Dunne, Vivienne Leigh, Myrna Loy, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, Hedy Lamarr, Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, Jean Simmons, and a whole host of others too numerous to name—were required to play a double standard in all of their roles which was first of all intended to be powerfully sexy, and second, virtuous. Any painted lady, however crass, was required to have a heart of gold if she was to survive the narrative. Actresses had replaced the holy virgin in Hollywood’s new pantheon of cinema gods and goddesses, and they needed to have that touch of the wholesome to drive men mad with desire and also to produce strong identification in women. The result was a cinema world populated by impossibly sexy, beautiful, well-dressed, glamorous, and internally virtuous women, with dulcet voices, the posture and movements of a dancer, and always with the right thing to say.
How I long for those glamorous screen sirens today, looming in shimmering nitrate silver or Technicolor in hand-beaded gowns. I also long for their problems, for the way in which those problems are rooted in social reality, and for the seemingly universal concern that people had for their problems. Their sexuality was of a powerful and seething nature, and they were always fascinating. The screenwriters, directors, producers, the whole Hollywood machine, knew how to maximize a woman’s luring power to the utmost, so much so that if nudity were added to it, it would have been an unbearable cocktail. One only has to try to imagine Duel in the Sun with a nude Jennifer Jones to understand what I mean by that.
