We've come from "His Girl Friday" to "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"

One of the most pernicious fantasies in which modern filmgoes, critics, and theorist persist is the “look how far we’ve come” mentality. While I cannot deny that Hollywood’s portrayal of ethnic minorities has improved over the course of the century (though apparently Eddie Murphy can still play an owner of a Chinese restaurant with the same stereotyped ticks which Mickey Rooney affected in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), when this mentality is applied to the portrayal of women it hits a serious snag. So by all means let us discuss how far we’ve come.

I have just completed watching Louis Feuillade’s eight-hour silent crime opus, “Les Vampires.” The chief criminal mastermind of the serial, shown throughout 1915 and 1916, was Irma Vep, whose cunning plots stayed always an inch (and often times miles) ahead of our intrepid, and rather boring, hero the newspaper reporter Philippe Guérande. Irma Vep, played by Musidora, is the right-hand woman to the Grand Vampire, the nominal head of the gang, but while Grand Vampires come and go (there are three of them), Irma Vep is forever. She wriggles in and out of each episode clad in black cat-suits and voluminous fur coats, captivating, immoral, and sharply intelligent. She is far more intriguing than say the “villainess” of a recent week’s number one movie who, like so many, doesn’t even have the decency to be human. A female villain today can be omnipotent only so long as she is safely circuits and switches not flesh and blood. “Les Vampires” perhaps is not a revolutionary feminist statement, but it was made five years before women could even vote in the US, and thirty years before that became a possibility in its native France. The advances made in the subsequent generations aren’t necessarily reflected on celluloid. By the time the final episode of “Les Vampires” was shown Musidora was a star, and she went on to write, direct, produce, and act in several features of her own.

Still Irma Vep was a villain and as such was not held to the same standards as the cinematic “good girls” of the same era. People like to make the point that the liberated woman was demonized in these early days of cinema and was always punished for her disregard for social norms. But then where does this place the “serial queens” of the early silent era. “The Hazards of Helen” was a long-running American serial which began a few years before “Les Vampires” reached screens. It’s heroine, Helen, repeatedly had to prove herself in a male dominated world, and her job as a railroad telegraph operator gave her plenty of opportunities to. She is intelligent, athletic and resourceful, and though she is rescued by a handsome hero from time to time (there were over a hundred episodes, they had to change up the formula occasionally), the vast majority of the episodes had her leaping from moving vehicles, or racing a motorcycle over a rising drawbridge. These days, as Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, women just get in the way of the action, they’re rarely asked to participate in it. The last act of an action movie has become the province of the hero, and no matter how active the heroine she is sidelined for the dénouement not wanting threaten the masculinity of the Adonis who will win her in the end. We like to think that it has always been that way, and that these days with action heroines like The Bride, Trinity, and Fox (“Kill Bill”, “The Matrix”, and “Wanted” for the uninitiated) things are getting better for our amazons, but back in 1934 when Hitchcock made his first version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” it is Leslie Banks, the hero of the piece, who is taken out of commission in the final act, and Edna Best is the only one capable of saving her husband and daughter.

Hitchcock’s heroines, especially his early ones, have a resourcefulness and intelligence that you don’t often find in movies today. While James Stewart is confined to a wheelchair in “Rear Window” it is left to Grace Kelly to be the active half the relationship, climbing fire escapes and shadowing the villain. In “Shadow of a Doubt” it’s Theresa Wright’s young Charlie who has the brains to see her charming uncle for what he really is, and the heroine of “Notorious” goes into the lion’s den to spy, unlike the heroine of “Notorious Redux” AKA “Mission Impossible II” where the heroine goes into the lions den so that the men can spy using a microphone implanted on her body. In fact these days the importance of a female character lands more and more on her body. Hollywood seems to be reluctant to have a female lead, and only seems to give in when it is obvious that it is absolutely necessary for the character to be female… namely she needs to get pregnant at some point in the film (they tried once still keeping the character male, but Schwarzenegger’s “Junior” left a little to be desired). People accuse Hayes Code many times as being a measure used to keep women in their place, but I actually think it did more for women than people realize. It allowed them to be more than bodies, since their bodies became taboo it was their minds that made them desirable. Sure, Claudette Colbert’s legs are praised, but watching her in “Palm Beach Story” or “It Happened One Night” it’s her wit that makes her sexy. In Hayes Code era women often were able to seduce their men through dialogue, rather than anatomy, and far from silencing women it was a time when women’s voices were heard most strongly both on screen, and on the page. Perhaps later I’ll go into the female screenwriters in Hollywood during the 30s and 40s, but that's a whole other article in itself.

"On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it.” – Anthony Lane