IN a spasm of regret about its careless soul Hollywood is suddenly

saluting the artistic worth of women. Naturally we should be grateful,

although the whiff of expediency hangs in the air. Battered by the

moralists, scorned by the liberals, Hollywood frantically needs to hang

its hat on an estimable peg just now and the subject of women provides

the means.

So, next Monday's Oscars ceremony will attempt to interlace gravitas

with glamour when Women and the Movies becomes the motif of the awards.

The fact is, though, that it has taken almost 65 years for the Academy

of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to acknowledge women generally as

serious artists and in that time many of Hollywood's best female

practitioners have often felt like giving up and going home.

But as public opinion grows more edgy over cinematic gore, there is a

feeling within the industry that the days of fast money for gruesome

trash are ending. Equally, the increase in crimes of the most ferocious

sort is causing the more intelligent box office women to question studio

motives for putting such violence on screen.

Last year Sharon Stone was selected for the Basic Instinct role only

after better known actresses like Geena Davis, Michelle Pfieffer, Kim

Basinger, and Ellen Barkin had emphatically turned it down. Their

problem with the film was that it worked on the same ethically dubious

formula as Fatal Attraction, parading as a morality play when it was

nothing more than a pack-'em-in, high-gloss, sex-and-slasher movie.

It is unlikely, of course, that Oscar night will dwell on troublesome

matters. Unlikely, too, that it will explore why thwarted achievement

has for so long been the fate of many women working within the industry.

Nevertheless since 1929, when the awards began, 159 women have won

Oscars not just for on-camera excellence but for direction, costume and

set design, film editing, make-up, and musical scores. Even before the

Oscars began Dorothy Arzner gained outstanding praise as a director

working with Katharine Hepburn in Christopher Strong, directing Clara

Bow's first film, and also the celebrated Nana for Sam Goldwyn.

But for all its star billing and cooing, the movie world was rarely at

ease with women. At least not with women who demanded to be more than

prize accessories to the overlit egos of men. Brutally competitive, the

industry is still among the last bunkers of bull-necked prejudice, and

the reason is survival more than anything else. The cinema was founded

by men whose remarkable originality and brilliance rode on noisy,

cliquish excitement which made them possessive in the manner of men's

clubs. Thus, the structure of influence was set firm against women, the

outsiders.

Even so the great women actors fought their corner to appear as

something other than the doomed or the daft. Those like Joan Crawford,

Rosalind Russell, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck had few fears about

playing unsympathetic female leads. If anything they seized them with

relish, but this was the era when a good script with wit and narrative

drive was still regarded as essential to Hollywood's profit. Today every

other person in Los Angeles is a writer with a screenplay in his pocket,

but he will also be a writer who never reads a book.

The careers of those vintage stars prompts the question of what has

happened since to female roles. For the most part they have formed a

tower of cliches, and the scriptwriter's fall in status is probably the

reason. Because of the complexity of contemporary women's issues, their

credible screen presentation requires a certain apprenticeship and

insight. Significantly, it was a woman, Nora Ephron, who wrote the

marvellous When Harry Met Sally, but screenplays of that calibre and

smarting humour are rare. Accountants now not only control the budgets

but also the creative juices and invariably this means relying on that

hack of hacks, the rewrite/rewrite man to turn in the impossible: a

sensitive, modern treatment of recognisable womanhood.

Occasionally there is a quiver of improvement with films like Thelma

and Louise, Camille Claudel, and now Lorenzo's Oil, all movies where

women are pivotal to the plot rather than merely drifting through. As

for screen hostility between the sexes that is nothing new. Half a

century ago James Cagney was ramming that infamous grapefruit into the

face of Mae Clarke, and today's gangster movies continue to affirm our

misogynist culture. The Mafia boss is remembered as a courteous,

old-fashioned padrone, caring of his own and a generous tipper to small

people. However, his women, be they molls or madonnas, still fulfil the

need for sacrificial victims. If not killed in cross-fire, they are

terrorised into submissiveness by mental abuse.

But as Hollywood temporarily repents of violence, there are signs that

the old-fashioned love story may be in the ascendant. So, does this mean

we are re-entering the age of happy endings? Hardly, unless Hollywood,

on good behaviour, dares to tell us that the happy ending is now

inseparable from life.