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.
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