Dorothy Arzner. A Woman Working when Women REALLY didn’t work the top industry jobs.
August 31, 2014 § 1 Comment
courtesy cinema.ucla.edu
“When I was a graduate student, I had a wonderful teacher I admired – a woman director, in fact, the only Hollywood director. Her name was Dorothy Arzner. She was very encouraging to me at a time when I needed encouragement. So I remember her very favorably.”[i] Francis Ford Coppola.
Dorothy Arzner, teaching at UCLA in the early 1960’s in her own late sixties, knew the barely twenty-year-old Francis Ford Coppola. She had been in the industry since its early days. She had kept her job when studios shed female employees like lint in the thirties. She had, presumably, seen it all. She must have sensed that ability in her young student which defines him as an artist now. He is “Coppola,” one of the most influential figures in modern American cinema.
And he, with his vast experience in the industry today, remembers her favorably. Who was Dorothy Arzner and why is she worth remembering in the context of the history of cinema?
She was a woman. David Thomson, a British writer and film critic, tersely states, in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, that Arzner “was a professional director of American movies who worked regularly for over a decade, and was a woman.”[ii] He essentially credits her success, the little he acknowledges her, to that. And she had a long-term female companion and thus is considered a lesbian. These two things- femaleness and lesbianism- immediately lead to feminist and queer critical reviews of her work in the film business, an industry where the former still lags behind as an attribute and the latter was once grounds for dismissal. Studying her work in only these two contexts or dismissing its import minimizes Arzner before the truly interesting research begins.
Dorothy was born in San Francisco in 1897 and grew up in Los Angeles around actors and film industry pioneers who frequented her father’s restaurant, a popular spot near a theatre. She entered the University of Southern California to study medicine but dropped out, served as an ambulance driver in World War I, then returned home to take a job as a script typist for William C. deMille, Cecille’s brother, at the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, later Paramount. She quickly moved up to cutter and editor for a subsidiary of Paramount, Realart Studio, where she honed her skills working on fifty-two films.
Then in 1922 came Blood and Sand, starring Hollywood’s swarthy Italian heart-throb, Rudolph Valentino. Arzner, by now known as one of the best cutters in the business, was called back to Paramount to help with the editing. Her use of stock footage in Spanish bullfight crowd scenes and actual in-the-ring moments was revolutionary from an editing standpoint and created the critical illusion of Valentino on the sand with the bull. When he stabs the bull the final blow in a one-shot, and then immediately there’s a cut to real footage of a mortally wounded, crumbling bull, Valentino’s heroism as a matador is cemented in the audience’s mind.
Valentino had been promised there would be on-sight shoots. He and conceivably many others involved in production were disappointed when none of the film was shot in Spain. The film’s success hinged upon offering the audience a sense of the bullfight’s immediacy, reality. Blood and Sand is based on a novel which condemns bullfighting’s bloodlust. Arzner’s cut convinces.
Director Francine Parker, who knew Arzner, produced a retrospective for the Director’s Guild in 1979 featuring Arzner’s work. She emphasized the importance of her editing and cutting skills. “As an editor, her close-ups to create the bullfighting scene… were stunning- no one had ever intercut a scene like that.”[iii]
Arzner’s skillful editing saves the film from becoming just another romantic story starring Hollywood’s pretty boy. It is essential to the meat of meaning in the story. It places the audience literally on the sand with the matador and the bull. Her technique was revolutionary in 1922.
Blood and Sand is also the first film for which Arzner did some filming, evidence that her career track was expanding. In the twenties, a woman’s career in film COULD expand. It was the silent-era, an era of experimentation and invention within a new industry, informed by what had come immediately before it. Louis Lumiere and Thomas Alva Edison had been busy developing motion picture equipment in the 1890’s, and by 1896 Alice Guy Blache had directed and premiered the first fiction film, her La Fee aux choux, at the International Exhibition in Paris. Back in Hollywood, by 1915 Julia Crawford Ivers had become general manager at Bosworth, Inc., and by 1916 Lois Weber, a mentor of Arzner’s, was breaking records as Universal Studio’s highest paid director. In 1919, Mary Pickford, one of the era’s great actresses, co-founded a film studio, United Artists, with D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Charlie Chaplin.
Hollywood’s pre-code, pre-studio period was well established as the twenties rolled around, and women played an integral part. Paramount let Arzner write their shooting script, and also cut and edit, for Old Ironsides in 1926. Her reputation was such, by then, that Paramount almost lost her to a project at Columbia Pictures but wooed her back with promises that she could direct some of their “A” films. In 1927, as the decade closed, film turned into big business, and studios began to hire men over women for increasingly remunerative work, reflecting societal strictures that supported the idea that women did not belong in the workforce and should not hold jobs which might prove lucrative for men. But Arzner fortunately was well on her way. She quickly directed three silent feature films in 1927- Fashions for Women, Ten Modern Commandments, and Get Your Man. Then in 1928, she directed Manhattan Cocktail.
Manhattan Cocktail is one of Hollywood’s “lost” films. Only a one-minute montage sequence remains. That sequence alone, however, testifies to the skill of the crew assembled by Arzner and also her involvement in what could possibly be considered early auteur film style.
Her Famous Players-Lasky Corporation colleagues, Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor, produced Manhattan Cocktail, and Lasky is credited with the montage sequence. It is a fast paced minute which begins with a high focus, very literal few seconds of a band director waving his wand at his unseen band, effectively the audience, and behind him an impromptu line-up of dancing revelers in a bar. The way attention is drawn first to stage left and the band director’s wand, and then beyond the wand, on the beat of diegetic band music (although is it the movie’s audience playing the instruments?) to the dancers, is arguably deliberate mise-en-scene directorial style before its time. Lasky, or Arzner herself, then cuts directly to silhouetted dancing girls who zigzag across the screen to frenetic, non-diegetic music, sometimes jumping over the camera and out of shot. The shots then are superimposed, canted, double-framed, geometrically interesting. The effect foreshadows nineteen-seventies kaleidoscopic special effects, approaches the style of nineteen-eighties music video, and has an organically anxious prohibition-era mood. The montage plays like a political statement. Is it possible that much film work in the early days of cinema was, to a degree, auteur? There was rampant political and social unrest during the pre-World War II period, plenty to express through media such as film. And the big machine of the Hollywood studios was just settling in, assigning its own literal and aesthetic value to the artform. It hadn’t yet squashed experimentation.
Arzner with Clara Bow, dga.org
Arzner also solved a huge technical difficulty that arose with the advent of talking pictures. From a biographical standpoint, she completely “auteured” her own film by making the sound work for her directorial purposes. She found herself dealing with an understandably nervous silent-film actress, the already famous Clara Bow. Clara apparently didn’t “get” how to work with mics, and she was Paramount’s star in their first sound film, one that Arzner was directing, The Wild Party, 1929. As a director faced with an expanded palette of audio and storytelling possibilities, specifically the opportunity to record the speaking voices of her actors and thus expand the audience’s cinematic experience, Arzner conceivably was both excited and near frustration frequently. She needed to get it right.
Clara’s voice proved childlike. And it frequently got lost in the action of a scene. Arzner suggested that a mic be hung from a simple fishing pole and kept in range of Bow as she moved. Whether this was the first use of a boom mic is up for debate, but Arzner definitely used the technique and revolutionized sound in the early talking picture era.
She also gave several major female stars their start in the early days of what quickly became a classical, stereotype-driven Hollywood cinematic machine, the “studio system.” Beginning with the formation of MGM in 1924, out went the experimenter, the independent film and the women working as creative artists alongside men. In came big business, women relegated to costume departments or as script girls, and the Hollywood studio staple- the sex symbol. Arzner admitted that “she stifled her criticism of other filmmaker’s studio projects…(and) felt she ‘ought not complain’, and yet she carefully maintained that no obstacles were put in her way by men in the business.”[iv] This may have made partial reference to the sex-symbol craze. Feminist criticism could easily view Arzner’s portrayals of her own leading ladies, soon-to-be stars like Esther Ralston, Rosalind Russell and Lucille Ball, against the aggressive pimping of starlets in then-contemporary films, and discuss the care with which Arzner both glamorized and dignified her female leads.
A simple example of this is seen in her Paramount film, Merrily We Go To Hell, from 1932. Its leading lady is Sylvia Sidney, cast as Joan, a naïve rich girl who falls for an alcoholic, philandering playwright. She could so easily have been directed as the silly fool- simpering, crying too much, spoiled. But, starting with Sylvia’s first close-up, the audience are treated to frequent, elegant one shots of a lovely young woman who is also a good actress. Arzner does not direct her to cry like a girl, pucker for sexual effect, as happens in many films of the day, or avoid direct eye contact with the camera. Instead, she has Sidney guile-lessly communicate with the lens against a backdrop of perfectly soft focused skin and coiffed hair. Arzner also judiciously allows a sudden sparkle of sequin or diamond earring in certain scenes- to highlight Joan’s status, or at a particularly upbeat or angst-ridden moment, or simply to play up the joyful cinematic experience of involving oneself in a woman’s story. Arzner clearly understands how to show the depths of female beauty. Her Sidney is filmed with great care, even when the movie plunges into a pat ending, wherein the philandering alcoholic rushes to Joan’s hospital bedside and all is right with the world because her man has returned. The overall result of Arzner’s directing her leading lady is the creation of cinematic female beauty, not just a female image meant to “make bank” in theatres and turn on the audience.
During her tenure with Paramount, Arzner directed eleven features. She left them in 1932.
And then she worked with Katherine Hepburn. Arzner directed her in her second major role, the 1933 RKO movie, Christopher Strong. Both Arzner and Hepburn were opinionated, strong women on a similar career trajectory. Up. By the time Hepburn starred in Christopher Strong, she was turning into not just a superfemale actress but a superwoman one. These adjectives, as applied to both Hepburn and Arzner, women in the same industry but on opposite sides of the lens, are worth noting.
Molly Haskell, in discussing female stars of the 1940’s, defines the former as, “a woman who, while exceedingly ‘feminine’ and flirtatious, is too ambitious and intelligent for the docile role society has decreed she play. She is uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to rebel completely; her circumstances are too pleasurable.”[v] And the latter she defines as, “a woman who, like the ‘superfemale,’ has a high degree of intelligence or imagination, but instead of exploiting her femininity, adopts male characteristics in order to enjoy male prerogatives, or merely to survive.”[vi] As superwoman, Arzner actively adopted male attributes to survive in a male dominated industry and ultimately to succeed. But during her tenure making films for big studios, what does Arzner say, through her films, about a woman’s survival and success?
In Christopher Strong, Hepburn plays a character who is an aviatrix but also a woman in love. She must choose between her high stakes career and the man in her life. Christopher Strong is criticized by Feminist scholars for raising the question of whether women can have it both ways- career and love- and then not fully answering the question. Arzner lets them down, essentially. Hepburn’s character dies in a plane crash. If anything, they posit, the film can be read as ultimately reflecting cautionary views of the day which held that the freedom of single women was best “surrendered once the idea of a family becomes a concrete reality.”[vii]
Or is a plane crash akin to the Thelma and Louise car flight into a canyon? Is Arzner’s intent misread by overzealous Feminists? Does Arzner’s Christopher Strong more than adequately address the question by showing that extremes were woman’s only way out in 1933? She, after all, directed but did not write the screenplay. Another woman, Zoe Akins, did. Akins was a playwright and author who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1935 for dramatizing The Old Maid, by Edith Wharton. With Arzner directing a script written by Akins, it is likely that gender issues in Christopher Strong sensitively reflected their day.
Film critic Pauline Kael goes straight to the point over “one of the rare movies told from a woman’s sexual point of view,”[viii] and discusses the “intelligent woman’s primal post-coital scene”[ix] in Christopher Strong when Hepburn’s love interest beds her then insists she not fly in the next day’s contest. Kael notes that “In movies up to the 70s, this primal scene was never played out satisfactorily; the woman always gave in, either in the paste-up screwball style that provided the fake resolutions of the 40s, or, as in this picture, fatally.”[x] Hepburn nose dives her plane. The woman gives in. That tracks for Arzner and Akins, as evidenced in their directing and scripting. And the fact that it tracks, in 1933 in the hands of a gifted director and writer, speaks loudly to irony.
Critic Pam Cook uses Arzner’s work to discuss Hollywood’s already highly articulated patriarchal ideology, thus high-focusing the years when Arzner was the only female studio director in Hollywood, the period of 1927 to 1943. For instance, by 1936 Arzner had joined the newly formed Director’s Guild of America as its only female member, a distinction, if it can be called that, which she held throughout her career. She was undeniably uniquely situated to comment on the entire Hollywood system. Cook hopes to find in Arzner’s films, “some ideas which will open out the problem of the place of women within that (highly articulated) system.”[xi]
Arzner directed RKO’s Dance, Girl, Dance, in 1940. It features Maureen O’Hara as Judy O’Brien and Lucille Ball as Bubbles, two faces of the feminine- the wanna-be, virtuous ballet dancer and the realistic, low-brow vamp. Both must make a living by dancing.
Cook suggests that, overall, Arzner’s films show woman as stereo-typed and static, due to the era in which they are made and also to Hollywood’s dictates that man, the hero, be able to find his place in relation to the static woman, and thus arc within the confines of the story. Cook goes further to suggest that Arzner’s films walk a fine line and attempt, in complying with classical structure, to actually show that structure as what it is, a false placement of women in emotionless, objectified roles. Arzner’s heroines may not break through those strictures and into active roles, Cook suggests, but, as in Dance, Girl, Dance, “When Judy O’Brien finally turns on her audience in fury and in her long speech fixes them in relation to her critical look at them it does indeed have the force of a ‘pregnant moment’. The place of the audience in the film and the audience of the film is disturbed, creating a break between them and the ideology of woman as spectacle, object of their desire.”[xii]
Even if Dance, Girl, Dance, were the only film Arzner ever directed, it’s the perfect one to prove Cook’s points and, further, to show Arzner’s ability to capture societal ironies on film, work within them as scripted, and carefully leave an audience thinking there’s something that needs to be changed.
Dance, Girl, Dance ends with our heroine, O’Hara’s Judy, nestling into the bosom of the man who represents the world where she belongs. Her mentor, an aging Russian ballet star- who incidentally looks quite lesbian- had planned to introduce her to the professional ballet early in act one. By fits, starts and complications motivated by Judy’s innocence or pride, it takes ‘til the end of the movie for her to get there. Instead of crying with relief as she nestles, Judy gently laughs and is questioned for it. She responds that she just finds it funny how it could all have been so much easier.
And the movie ends.
Towards the end of Dance, Girl, Dance, a movie about a woman pursuing her dreams in spite of societal and financial realities, the professional ballet director and his middle-aged assistant attend the low-brow theatre where Judy dances as foil to Bubbles’ gaudy act. Throughout the film, the assistant has appeared as a nicely dressed bit-part extra. But at the theatre, after Judy directly addresses her rude audience, the camera centers the assistant in a movie crowd scene, and she starts the applause. She is dressed very like Arzner herself. Is this character’s strong cinematic statement, the brave first clap, the exhortation that an audience should respect a woman who is struggling to achieve her own dreams, actually Arzner breaking the fourth wall and entering her own film?
Did Arzner frequently laugh over how much easier things might have been if only…?
Dorothy Arzner left Hollywood filmmaking in 1943 but remained involved with local theater, commercials, private projects and teaching at UCLA until her death in early October, 1979.
What did she, approaching her seventieth year, notice about her UCLA film students as the world of Hollywood faced competition from television and the first wave of film-school educated writers and directors who would, by the late 1960’s, change the face of big studio productions forever? What of herself- her desires, the things she could not or did not accomplish but perhaps imagined as possible- might have evidenced itself in students like Francis Ford Coppola, causing her to encourage him when he needed it most?
Surely she, as a lone woman in a man’s industry, frequently needed encouragement. Hopefully her body of work exists as encouragement and example for future artists to emulate. Definitely she influenced those who followed her, including one whom the industry openly considers truly great.
As Katherine Hepburn put it in a telegram read during a Director’s Guild tribute to Arzner in 1975, “Isn’t it wonderful that you’ve had such a great career, when you had no right to have a career at all?”[xiii]
Arzner on set, vascopress.com
[i] Academy of Achievement interview, Francis Ford Coppola. (Washington, DC: Museum of Natural History, June 17, 1994), August 1, 2014.
[ii] David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 37.
[iii] Linda Seger, When Women Call the Shots: The Developing Power and Influence of Women in Television and Film. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), p. 14.
[iv] Amy L. Unterburger, Women Filmmakers and Their Films. (Detroit, New York, London: St. James Press, 1998), p. xvii.
[v] Molly Haskell, “From Reverence to Rape: Female Stars of the 1940’s,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 505.
[vi] Haskell, “From Reverence to Rape,” p. 505.
[vii] Haskell, “From Reverence to Rape,” p. 510.
[viii] Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), p. 108.
[ix] Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies, p. 108.
[x] Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies, p. 108.
[xi] Pam Cook, “Approaching the Work of Dorothy Arzner,” in Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women in Film, ed. Patricia Erens. (New York: Horizon Press, 1979), p. 224.
[xii] Cook, “Approaching the Work of Dorothy Arzner,” p 225-226.
[xiii] John Hopewell, “Dorothy Arzner to Receive a San Sebastian Retrospective: Honoree a Distaff Direct Pioneer,” in Variety, http://www.variety.com, April 3, 2014.
THE WORLD is ROUND, people. CATE BLANCHETT points that out to a room full of glamorous Oscar blinded industry big whigs. And to those of us watching.
March 4, 2014 § 1 Comment
fr. athenacinema.com
“(There are those) who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the center are niche experiences. They are not. Audiences want to see them, and in fact, they earn money….The world is round people.’
DID THE INDUSTRY HEAR HER?
WHERE ARE THE WOMEN WRITERS?
March 4, 2014 § Leave a comment
Here’s a question for screenplay writers Julie Delpy and Melisa Wallack-
Is there something different about the way men write scripts?
Have a look at this list, from the Oscars official website, www.oscars.org. Nominees for the 86th Oscars:
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
- “Before Midnight” Written by Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke
- “Captain Phillips” Screenplay by Billy Ray
- “Philomena” Screenplay by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope
- “12 Years a Slave” Screenplay by John Ridley
- “The Wolf of Wall Street” Screenplay by Terence Winter
Writing (Original Screenplay)
- “American Hustle” Written by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell
- “Blue Jasmine” Written by Woody Allen
- “Dallas Buyers Club” Written by Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack
- “Her” Written by Spike Jonze
- “Nebraska” Written by Bob Nelson
Of the fifteen writers involved in these scripts, two are women. Neither of the two is a script’s only writer.
Hey, I like writing. Thank goodness folks write stuff. Like books. I read not for gender of author but for subject matter, style, quality.
I watch movies. Thank goodness folks write movies. I watch movies for subject matter, style, quality, and, hmmm. Sensitivity to issues which are close to my heart, or to issues which teach me something.
More so than with books, and probably because
two quick hours- movie time- is a harder hit on the brain housing group than a leisurely read through pages, the timing of which I control. There’s all that sound and CGI and visuals, and heart racing not from what I’m reading and running through my brain but from what’s literally happening on screen in front of me.
For that reason, I may be more careful of the movies I watch than the books I put on my bedside table and say I’ll get to soon.
My world is small. I’ve been around long enough to know that small is okay, and that when something’s enjoyable I’ve lucked out. Enjoyable yesterday was going with a friend to get her allergy shots because I was already out in traffic with her when the predicted sleet started to fall and the city was literally shutting down and it felt like a holiday suddenly. And allergy shots, well, what an adventure!
The clinic was full of women panicked to get their allergy shots before the whole town slipped into the ocean on an arctic ice floe. In tidewater Virginia, mind you.
We had a blast. That’s my small world.
So, the Oscars is big for me. It’s glam. It’s glitzy. It’s people who mess with my brain housing group on the big screen, when I allow them access.
Like any larger than life thing, it represents “the best.” Right?
I AM NOT stupid. I KNOW it doesn’t. But it does represent what the industry leaders think is best.
One would hope that they haven’t gotten where they are as leaders in their field without some sense.
And I’m not debating whether or not they have sense.
But I WOULD like to know why, in the year 2014, only two out of fifteen screenwriters involved with Oscar contender scripts were women.
I do not think it’s for lack of talented women screenwriters.
I suspect that
TO ACTUALLY GET A STORY from an idea all the way to the SCREEN, with the hype, the popularity driving, the artistry and politics, is SUCH AN ENERGY and ANGST RIDDLED EVENT that THE WAY WOMEN WORK is less than compatible with eventual success.
In the context of current day industry realities.
My question to Julie Delpy and Melissa Wallack is still, is there something different about the way men write scripts?
A larger question could be is the industry and the audience just not yet ready for whatever women bring to the work of writing motion pictures?
The simple answer, chauvanism? No. That just won’t do. Will it?
Scant Progress for Women. Again?
January 16, 2014 § 1 Comment
fr. http://www.celebuzz.com- Julia and Meryl
The GOOD news is that “women of a certain age”- wow, doesn’t that sound like “they have zits but don’t mention it,” ARE being honored, and in record numbers, for their on-screen presence. This from a 12 January article in the LA Times, by Lynn McPherson:
IT looks like a vintage year for film stars as the Golden Globes kick-off the awards season tonight.
The youngest of the five nominees for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama is Brit mum-of-three Kate Winslet, 38, followed by Cate Blanchett, 44, Sandra Bullock, 49, Emma Thompson, 54, and 79-year-old Judi Dench.
The women – nominated for Labor Day, Blue Jasmine, Gravity, Saving Mr Banks and Philomena respectively – are all previous winners of Globes and Oscars and have an average age of 52.
But read this from today’s LA Times:
Celluloid Ceiling Report: Scant progress for women behind film scenes – latimes.com.
Hm. I’m sure it’s not a secret government plot to keep women in their places. But what IS it?
Interestingly, this article mentions the growing percentages of women in charge on TV work.
And, depending on who you listen to, uh, well, ah… there’s some thought that TV’s becoming the audience “go-to” for decent stuff to watch. Actors, writers, the works. Flocking to it. Yep.
Who knew?
Report From London: Women Directors and Screenwriters in Decline According to New BFI Statistics | Women and Hollywood
July 25, 2013 § 1 Comment
A smart article worth reading. Puts out the fires one might immediately start, if one, as I do, cared about women working in the industry. Food for thought. And a great quote from one woman about why she became a director at all:
And Then There’s BOND ca. 1977. OMG.
June 12, 2013 § Leave a comment
Forget the ‘50’s (see earlier blog post.) Things were barely better in 1979. A Bond marathon was on TV last night. We thought, at first, that’d be great fun. Truth? “Moonraker” merited maybe 14 minutes attention. I walked in and out of the room a lot. And I gotta mention the lady love interest’s name: “Goodhead.” Yeah, okay, we know, we know. It’s a Bond.
After Bond raked space with a lot of bad acting, up cues Moonraker’s forerunner, “The Spy Who Loved Me,” 1977.
That’s the one with the Carly Simon theme song, “Nobody does it better….” I admit to humming that one all the way through high-school. What a great song.
But the movie? Holy —-. We switched to HGTV. We watched people nail up prefab kitchen counters. In Minnesota, I think. The movie was that bad. What were they thinking?
Answer: “feed ‘em another Bond. It can’t fail.”
There is NO WAY real human folks watching that pap honestly wanted to watch THAT. But this, remember, the 1970’s, was still the day of watchin’ ‘em once. At the theatre. And taking home only what your mind retained. The boobage, more’n likely.
I wonder if movies today are more true to societal desires and psyches than they used to be simply because they’re instantly available and can be watched a hundred thousand times.
Hm.
Let me leave you with this darling image. Remember, Bond’s serious action adventure, not comedy. Yeah, hit me with that whip there, big guy! You go, baby. I’m hearing Austin Powers somewhere under those skirts!
fr. imdb.com
It Surprised Me That He Hit Her
June 11, 2013 § Leave a comment
from loveisspeed.blogspot.com
“To Catch A Thief” (1955), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, screenplay by John Michael Hayes, from a novel by David Dodge.
I’ve seen Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” several times. Years ago. Maybe never watching closely.
This time, really watching, I jolted when Cary Grant hit Brigitte Auber.
Remember her?
Bet not. She didn’t wear couture or feature in any seductive, glamorous close up shots. Those were reserved for Grace Kelly, Grant’s love interest AND undeniably the most gorgeous thing on set.
Brigitte played Danielle, the young woman who is the true cat burglar in the story.
fr. blu-ray.com
She lights into Grant at her father’s funeral. Basically, her father was fallout from Grant’s struggles to prove he’s innocent of recent burglaries. Danielle got her father killed- one way of looking at it. And she’s understandably overwrought.
She, in her ranting, gives voice to a band of former French Resistance cronies, accusing Grant of putting them all into jeopardy. And there’s probably a fair amount of scorned lover going on, too. Danielle is the ugly duckling who needs to accept her place, leave Grant alone, and we movie watchers know it. Grant and Kelly are the couple. We want that. It’s clear.
And Danielle needs to be “put in her place” at the funeral, too; calmed, quieted.
The story line requires she be quelled. We must (and do) see that Grant is now a hero in spite of his old stealing habit. He’s reformed, he’s penitent. He’s even considered, by none other than the victim of the most recent burglary, Grace Kelly’s character’s mother, to be a rung up from her rascal and self-made millionaire husband. Suitable for her daughter both in spirit and humility. Not perfect. Reformed.
So, here’s why I jolted.
Would we, today, want that character, Grant’s, the spirited, humbled former bad guy, whom we are meant to adore in the end, to flat out slap a young girl in the face and, except for the few seconds of awkwardly choreographed fumbling when some funeral guests jump him, get away with it? Nothing more “said” on screen? Tacit agreement?
Is there movie history about this slap? Was it commonly accepted that leading men slapped problematic women in movies in the 1950’s?
Angelina Jolie, for instance, gets slapped around pretty badly in “Salt.” And she gives as good as she gets. It’s scripted. Many movies script slaps these days. The slapped women do, however, tend to be leading ladies and also tend to get vengeance.
Back to “To Catch a Thief.” There’s something off about a director, producer, and more chillingly, an audience, or all three, letting that weird and unsettling slap happen.
More noble for Grant to have raised his hand, then decided against it, and walked away.
Again, I ask, and in truth, I hope: “Was that just the ‘50’s?”
Hey, maybe I’m too sensitive. But I sure haven’t ever slapped any girls in the face.
WOMEN don’t waste their TIME watching MOVIES
May 18, 2013 § Leave a comment
fr. movies.gearlive.com- Jolie making “Salt”
Here is food for thought- Appendix B from a new study on gender equality in film, from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism .
The study’s findings are, basically, more of the same, if not worse for the most recent year. (thus Appendix B for your perusal, consideration, reality checking…) On the site, USC Annenberg News, a post from May 13, 2013 notes:
“Across five years (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012), 500 top-grossing films at the U.S. box office, and over 21,000 speaking characters, a new study by USC Annenberg found that females represented less than one-third (28.4%) of all speaking characters in 2012 films. When they are on screen, 31% of women in 2012 were shown with at least some exposed skin, and 31.6% were depicted wearing sexually revealing clothing.”
fr. scifi.about.com- one of the “Twilights”
Okay, so I’m not adverse to skin showing. Lust and sex are part of life. And women like to preen sometimes. Flaunt what God gave ya. The study, however, notes that the skin shown tends to be on teenage girl body parts,
adding salt to the wounds of aging female actresses lucky enough to factor within the 28.4% of speaking roles available and calling into question just what “we” intend to do through film. Sell Peter Pan?
And to the lower than 28.4% female representation. Maybe that truly reflects who watches movies and pays for them.
Maybe WOMEN don’t WASTE THEIR TIME WATCHING (teenage skin in) MOVIES?
There’s a “do loop” here? Build Costner’s baseball diamond and the players will show up.
Maybe the better question, in light of all these not so surprising Annenberg study findings, is WHERE ARE THE MOVIES WOMEN WANT TO WATCH?
fr. thephoenix.com “The Jane Austen Book Club” 2007
Hey, I like action and adventure- say, the BOURNE flicks- as much as the rest of us, but, speaking of BOURNE, the female leads in them are among my favorite actresses because I admired them in the BOURNE. They could stand on their own, given a well written role. Like SALT, for instance, where Angelina Jolie plays a bang up, save-the-world, angry female fabulous lead. SALT has cruelly few other female speaking parts.
Did part of SALT’s success depend upon men watching Jolie? Will men stop wanting to watch Jolie now that she’s altered her body? What an interesting thing to check. Was it just Angelina’s real boobs that the guys were watching all the time? Will there be a new superstar beauty goddess now, one men consider real? The men who, apparently, are the audience for whom the 78% male speaking roles are writ? And the directors and writers and producers and decision makers.
The full study is available at:
annenberg.usc.edu/News%20and%20Events/News/~/media/PDFs/Smith_GenderInequality500Films.ash
Appendix B
List of 2012 Films in the Sample
Marvel’s The Avengers The Dark Knight Rises The Hunger Games Skyfall The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 The Amazing Spider-Man Brave Wanted |
Think Like a Man The Campaign Dark Shadows Parental Guidance John Carter This Is 40 Protection Battleship Pitch Perfect The Dictator |
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days Sinister Phantom Menace (3D) Resident Evil: Retribution The Cabin in the Woods What to Expect When You’re Expecting Hunter Lawless The Guilt Trip
|
*Study funded by the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism © 2013 Dr. Stacy L. Smith
Angelina Jolie’s Horrible, Generous Choice
May 17, 2013 § 1 Comment
We were sitting on our back terrace. I am so very bored with the greenspace around us, the fields, the quiet. I was thinking about change, any change. And my husband, reading his cell phone news feed, was chuckling over reported shortages of toilet paper in Venezuela.
He asked if I’d blogged about the wonderful phone chats I had with my children on Mother’s Day. I said, in my bored-with-greenspace voice, “no.”
They are back in my good graces. I feel like Mick Jagger’s proud mother, by the way.
“Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy,” my husband read out loud.
No.
The fields around me flared up hot green. The gnats disappeared. I looked over at him.
“NO WAY.”
Her Op- Ed piece appeared in the New York Times on 14 May: My Medical Choice by Angelina Jolie – NYTimes.com.
In making her choice, given an 87% chance she’d develop breast cancer, she put foremost in her thoughts the death of her mother from breast cancer and the pain a child suffers watching and losing someone that way. Mother and child were the reasons she chose radical surgery.
I took the news as a gut hit. I realized I considered her epic beauty MY possession, MY right, my joy. Meaning that, of all the breasts in the world, the idea that these very public and perfect ones had just been cut off filled MY world with sadness.
And then the sorrow- deep, ache filled- for the woman who’d had to make that choice, overcame me. I stared out at my Disney-esque verdant farm fields without comment.
My husband kept reading. He reached the part where “reconstruction” and “three months of surgeries” suggested Angelina’d been able to maintain her physique, not end up with flat, ripped and scarred, war torn skin over chest bone results typical for women years ago. Thank god, and surgeons.
And her ability to pay. That’s part of the point she makes in her Op-Ed piece. The test alone for a cancer-likely gene costs $3000.
We are not guaranteed perfect health as humans experiencing life. Neither are we guaranteed access to perfect health care. “Health” and “perfect” themselves take on varying meanings for each of us, worldwide, I’d bet.
But pain is guaranteed us all in some form or other. And all women know the pleasure, the pride, perhaps the affirmation of identity itself which their breasts offer them. To lose them; to lose your source of pleasure, your pride, your identity, to fear the onslaught of death; this, unfortunately, is part of human life. But so, too, is change.
Read Ms. Jolie’s Op-Ed piece.
Feel the power brewing, the potential for better and more options for women hissing like steam as an engine starts, the world of medicine and philanthropy suddenly listening, simply because such a superstar as ANGELINA JOLIE, actress, director, wife and mother, has suffered.
And decided to go public with her own story.
She is now in my prayers, as a friend.
All women suffering are.
The Rolling Stones – Charlie Is My Darling – Ireland 1965
May 12, 2013 § Leave a comment
fr. lesliejanson.com, but all over google. Mick and his mom, Eva.
I worry that I’ve not raised my children to understand love. I, of course, want proof that they do – that they know how to give it, or at least remember its first source, the gooey pulsing womb waters- and wait for them to acknowledge that memory with a phone call on Mother’s Day.
Hello! Me, I’m the mother. And I’m proud of you, like it or not. But I swear I’ll tear your throats out if you haven’t learned love, or better, and perhaps less overwhelming, and here’s the mother giving you a break again, at least human kindness.
Seque to the most stirring documentary I’ve seen since Tiffany Shlain’s “Connected”:
Andrew Loog Oldman’s 1965 film by Peter Whitehead, “Charlie is my Darling- Ireland 1965.”
It’s about the Rolling Stones.
I always thought Mick Jagger was the guy I’d not take home to mother, and probably not the first pick I’d make for a friend to my sons. He’s the genius whose band’s music I’ve adored and, as a sweet dull Southern girl, felt paranoid to emulate. In any way. I mean, my god, drugs and sex and rock and roll? I was a toddling Republican in the sixties and a prig of a good student through the eighties. Then a wife.
And then a mother.
A mother and a woman suddenly, very seriously, respecting Mick Jagger, who chats for the camera in this first documentary film made not as that, exactly, but to acclimate the freshly famous band to being filmed and also to check which of its members the camera loved best.
Spoiler alert! It’s Charlie they claim the camera loved.
Notice almost humorous cameraman misses when he pans off Mick or Keith, not aware that fifty years down the road we’d kill to see nothing but Mick right then, vintage learning-his-act moments, or just Keith’s hands. For a LONG time… jeezus, pan out, give us Mick’s whole body, he’s patenting that stiff leg thing… it’s like filming your baby’s birth and cutting away to the nurse.
But who knew?
At any rate, here’s what the website, www.charlieismydarling.com has to say about the film:
The Rolling Stones Charlie is my Darling – Ireland 1965 was shot on a quick weekend tour of Ireland just weeks after “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” hit # 1 on the charts and became the international anthem for an entire generation. Charlie is my Darling is an intimate, behind-the-scenes diary of life on the road with the young Rolling Stones featuring the first professionally filmed concert performances of the band’s long and storied touring career, documenting the early frenzy of their fans and the riots their live performances incited
Yep. Stampede to the video store, cue up Netflix, whatever. Hurry. No Kidding. It’s that good.
But why promote “Charlie is my Darling” on a woman’s blog on Mother’s Day?
Watch the documentary. My heart went out to Mick. He is freakin’ genuine. And almost evasive of the limelight. Until, as he bluntly states, it’s time for him to become the egomaniacal actor for the audience. From such an at-that-point promising performer, such clarity and understanding. Such humanity.
I was stunned when my own heart raced as I watched the “boys” hang out and sing whatever Keith happened to start playing on his acoustic. In a crummy hotel room in Ireland.
The sheer ineffable talent. The beginning. Of what’s now as much a part of my own brain scape as the Doxology chanted in church and the silver pattern my grandmother left me.
Stones music.
A boy who became bigger than human but apparently, and again I say watch “Charlie is my Darling,” is a simple, compassionate guy. Or at least started out that way- proof’s on film. Mick Jagger. Go figure.
Okay, so if the “spectre” of sex and drugs and rock stars being evil deep down can pop like a zit in the mirror of documentary watching for the cynical likes of me, Grendel’s mother, I feel safe that even my kids, who might overlook Mother’s Day because they’re going about a happy day of their own, and for that I’m glad; I feel safe that they, too, whose lives likely won’t have the fabulous public trajectory and overwhelming pressure Mick’s does, probably learned love and human kindness, too.
But a phone call would be nice. I’ll report back. HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, all, with love.
so, I Gratuitously posted… Who is Jennifer Siebel Newsom?
May 7, 2013 § Leave a comment
She’s a “filmmaker, speaker, actress, and advocate for women, girls and their families,” according to her home page, found at Jennifer Siebel Newsom – Home.
I needed a positive image with which to end my blog post last night, having used a shot of the fabulous Annette Benning, in character, pruning the devil out of red roses. What a portrayal of woman-as-flower-gone-wrong; and wow, what a movie! Bravo, AMERICAN BEAUTY.
But, I couldn’t end last night’s post, meant to offer readers visions of goodness and light and the flood of women now coming into my life, with the image of her vicious little snippers and the warped world of a gruesomely doomed marriage.
So I googled “women directors” and found the heart stopping, sweet shot I used to end my post. A mother reaching out for the little girl bounding her way.
I’ve been there. I’ve felt that. I wish there were pictures of me, just like that.
They’d sum up exactly how I feel, even as my children grow up and leave. Like an ecstatic bug held still forever in warm, delicious amber, eternally anticipating, reaching out, for the pulsing, rushing, freely given love of my child.
I admit I didn’t do my research on Jennifer Siebel Newsom. If you’re reading this, Jennifer, please accept both my apologies and my thanks. What a great photo.
Today, I’m high from an inspiring event, just attended, about Women, for Women, a grassroots-community-and-college-based success story wherein some Tidewater, Virginia ladies twenty years ago realized that educating women, particularly those who otherwise had no higher education opportunities, would pay off exponentially through their children, their extended families and their willingness to give back ten fold themselves.
Those ladies twenty years ago established a Women’s Center on the community college level and today celebrated success stories far beyond their twenty years ago dream. Check out http://www.tcc.edu/students/specialized/womenscenter, just for inspiration.
But back to, “Thanks, Jenifer Siebel Newsom,” for her picture. There. I don’t feel so guilty now.
WOMEN comin’ out of the WOODWORK, and thank goodness!
May 6, 2013 § 1 Comment
Winter, for me, was truly dreadful this year. I now know it because I’m living a comparison: Spring has picked up pace, my moods have lightened exponentially, and WOMEN friends are coming out of the proverbial woodwork, vibrant with wonderful ideas, plans, schemes, suggestions, and simply support, all around me now. Like buds breaking open, blooming. 
Okay, yes. I did it. Women-as-flower metaphor. Please don’t gag. Look in the face of the next newborn baby girl you see and tell me we aren’t sent to earth just that. Blooming flowers.
I tell my sons to treat me as a flower. It infuriates them. They know I’m more thorn than petunia, more oak tree than Lily-of -the -Valley.
Gosh, I love Lily-of-the-Valley. It’s been a long time since I was so delicate. Becoming woman takes the delicate out of you.
But it also forces the beauty into full flower. For, instance:
Invited by one of these woodwork women, I’m actually driving an hour tomorrow morning, before human organisms should be required even to walk straight, much less operate heavy equipment, at zero-dark-thirty aka 6-ish, to attend a breakfast (as if my coffee right here at home isn’t good enough, and my warm bathrobe, and my bleary eyed, not a morning person ruse.)
It’s a NETWORK FOR EMPOWERING WOMEN STUDENTS event, plated breakfast served at 8am. I can’t wait. I feel included, and intrigued.
I type this as if I know anything about the event. I’m not fully empowered myself. I think that’s why the friend, herself a powerhouse, now retired, formerly Deputy Director of a renown Museum, invited me to bask in the reflected morning light of leading and leading-women-in-training.
And I’m excited.
Another woodwork, friend, a determined, amazing “cuss,” as my grandmother would say, meaning a real independent woman, constantly sends me great links online, like this:
Top Women’s Film Festivals | Raindance Film Festival.
Irritatingly, she’s also a gorgeous, blonde and vibrant yoga goddess. Twist leg around head and touch toe to thigh, extend torso to sky. Hold. Don’t move. Namaste. That’s Stephanie.
I met her in France, during a seminar at a chateau, where I swear the ghosts of guillotined owners still sat, watching, from long undusted corners, and plumbing leaks leant atmosphere, and the air was crisp, and croissant appeared magically (there’s an early rising, attention deficit, willing-to-drive-to-the-bakery Californian in every crowd) each morning, plated by 8am. So, hey, who’s complaining, really.
This “amazing cuss” of a woman knows more about the exhausting world of social media
yep, you guessed it- from MEAN GIRLS http://www.thenews.org
and how to work it than a lunchroom full of teenage girls.
And then another woodwork woman, a writing coach with whom I’m working, we skype, she teaches, I bask in the excitement of her budding, self-driven, clear sighted, promising career. Her smile, the outward proof of a sincere and positive light blooming inside her, says it all. She’ll succeed.
She’s about to learn social media the quick and swift way, and it’ll probably spin her head big time, leave her overly-organized self breathless, when she bravely dons her producer hat this month at Cannes and takes her ideas, and the company she runs with a friend, SPARKLIGHT, viral on Twitter… reporting on a movie she’s repping; on one in post production she hopes film festivals will pick up; on a project idea for which she needs backers; and even on a SPARKLIGHT film to be shown in the Cannes Short Film Corner, “Get Low.”
So back to me. It’s May. Winter’s long forgotten. I could go on and on about the women converging near me now, about this flood of springtime excitement. I’ll instead point directly to the link, above, and suggest, 
“Ain’t it great there’s festivals and sich fer ladies to stretch their muscles, since if there weren’t, they’d shore be rustling’ some up right fast and probably creating quite the stir. Woman underutilized, left below the surface, scorned, as it were, ‘n all…”
Or, more sedately said, “Let’s open our cumulative eyes to what’s around us and realize there’s so much of value being offered by women, as they bloom, and bloom, are encouraged to bloom.”
director Jennifer Siebel Newsom, from http://www.reacttofilm.com
LADIES, and gents, MEET SCOTT MYERS!
April 12, 2013 § Leave a comment
fr. twitter.com, hope okay, Scott-
Here is a blog post from a friendly industry insider which discusses questions that came up last night during a tweet fest he sponsored. In clear, objective English, Scott outlines how he thinks the question of women in screenwriting should “go” in his live twitter conversation among strangers. Please have a read.
This article is enlightening regarding women in the industry beyond the immediate date and event to which it refers. Also, it is very revealing of Mr. Myers.
What’s my take-away? Scott Myers is okay to feature on a woman-centric blog.
He’s been extremely “tweet-kind” when I’ve interacted with him on the basically blind format of Twitter. And he is right on top of topics even before they actually get hot. Hm. A hotness predictor? Useful sorta guy.
Hey, shout-out to all of you who did enter the Nicholl contest, sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to “identify and encourage talented new screenwriters.”
One in four of the entrants this year was a woman. Have a read:
Under-Representation of Women in Screenwriting | Go Into The Story.
THE BIG LEBOWSKI and MY HUSBAND HE
April 8, 2013 § 1 Comment
fr. film.umw.org
Okay, so MyHusbandHe thought it’d be hysterical if I actually posted something on this woman centric blog about the testosterone ridden, overweight actors legs splayed, psycho-bowling, viscerally disgusting, hysterical movie from the auspicious year anno domini 1998, THE BIG LEBOWSKI. God help us. Here goes.
I love it. And it passes the “okay to promote on a women’s issues blog” with one simple line. Jeff Bridges tells the Malibu cop, who just berated him for being, well, himself, “the Dude” (yes, that’s his name), that:
“They treat objects like women here, man.”
He’s hung over. He’s just been knocked out of his chair. He really means what we want him to mean (“treat women like objects.”) Just lots of times he can’t get things out right at first. Even a loser like the Dude gets that women are an important 51%. Bravo, you Coen brother writer guys who wrote him (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen.) “They” in the quote, btw, is the cop’s constituency, high rent Malibu bad guys he protects.
Um, before I go on, fair warning. DON’T watch the movie if you DON’T like THE “F” WORD.
But if you can handle it, that staple and creatively overused expletive in some men’s vocabularies- you know, like saying “like” if you’re under eighteen, like ad nauseum, like even when, like your parents beg you not to- what the f—k, go ahead. Pull up your big girl panties and enjoy the f–king film. It’s THE F—KING BEST of guys poking fun at guyness; a great thing to study from a safe, female perspective; a convulsively humorous thing to watch. It’s all so WRONG, and, to rip off from the Eagles, whom the Dude, incidentally, hates, “it feels so right.” That’s the Eagles, isn’t it?
He prefers Credence. And cars with bungie cords holding up the front bumpers. And puts out burning roaches with bad beer. And really only wants his oriental rug back. When the bad guys take it.
This movie does not demean women, by thuh way. REALLY. No kidding. It’s just a guy flick that would go well mixed with John Wayne re-runs and ANCHORMAN. It lumbers along like a bunch of cattle on the range, steady, deliberately, aimlessly, lots of “what the f—k” moments, male bonding over a buddie’s ashes, and ends as it should, reaffirming manhood’s grassroots status quo. A belly at the bar, a cold sasparilla, a great cowboy hat and, in Dude’s case, a rug on his extremely disgusting bachelor pad floor. Presto, life’s as good as it gets.
God I love that.
And the best part? Julianne Moore.
Whose word of choice is “vagina”! She pays for a full physical on the Dude before she studs him out- to herself. She’s the only character in the movie with any sense. She plays Maude (as if ANYONE would really name her Maude), an heiress artist with attitude, blue blood so thin she can barely comprehend Dude’s slang, and a lusty relationship with exhibitionism. She’s that girl nobody’s mom wants brought home and the one all of us would enjoy being at least once.
Plus, she’s just cool. I’m biased.
But not about the f—king movie. It’s great.
Watch it. And get back to me if you honestly find, honestly now, ladies, remember your senses of humor, if you honestly find anything so offensive in THE BIG LEBOWSKI’s portrayals of women (the few in the flick) that aren’t WAAAAAAY outweighed by the fun the Coens poke at dudes.
fr. fanart.com
WHY SHE DIDN’T WANT A GIRL
April 4, 2013 § Leave a comment
Chillingly following up on my last post- I heard, from the dear young woman who manages our small town’s gosh honest right-on-Main-street family friendly ice-cream parlor, and who expects her first child in the fall, why she’d have preferred today’s ultrasound prove her little “grape” a boy child.
fr. bentnorthrup.org
She manages a bunch of women and teenagers. They’re like family to one another. They work together beautifully behind the counter serving up sandwiches, ice-cream cones, gossip and a feeling of home for anyone who needs it. Even homeless people stop by for a rest, a drink of water, a sandwich on the house. Very like Mayberry RFD, come to think. Any child she has will be coddled beyond reason and raised up happy behind that counter. She knows this. Yet her eyes sorta bugged at the thought of a girl. Why? I asked. It’s wonderful news, honey.
It was not easy for me,
growing up as a girl, she said.
I wanted a boy.
I wanted his life to be better.
Now, this woman is not yet thirty. Last I checked, this is 2013. Can I express to you how far my heart sank, looking into her eyes and understanding she was dead serious? What, I am left to wonder, in hell happened to that a young woman? Damn. It’s not for me to know, or ask. I’ll just keep visiting her there and appreciating her sandwiches as always.
I feel obliged to mention a movie here, though; to justify this post on this blog. Okay, comes to mind THE WAITRESS. Who’d not want to be that little girl…
Or maybe there’s no justification needed. Just a question. What can we in the world of friends, mothers, sisters, employees, influencers, heroes, media giants, writers, directors and women in film, DO through the written-spoken-filmed and marketed word so that young mothers trust the world they’re bringing their baby girls into, know that that world more’n likely will treat those sweet ones just fine?
This young woman’s not from a third world country, a background of awfulness, anything that might have clearly driven her fears for the girl child. But something got to her. Something real. To the degree that we can “spin” positive information to and about women for women, by god, I think we’d best get behind that effort.
It’s too far into the new century for a young woman to have these fears.
lightscameraWOMEN 
