I watched too much Turner Classic Movies at an early age. It can be a burden: all my celebrity crushes have been dead for at least twenty years, and to this day I think that marcelled hair looks normal. But my obsession with films of the 1930s and 1940s can also instill another bias in a contemporary movie nut: I have no doubt that the depiction of women in Hollywood films has never been as good – that is, as rich, as varied, as focused, as human – as it was during the height of the studio system. The fortunes of women in real life may have gone up, but the fortunes of women in movies have gone down. This is, admittedly, non-obvious: this has been a banner year for movies by, for, and about women. There are more female writers and directors working now than at any point in the past century (more on this later). Modern movie women can pursue careers instead of relationships; they are allowed to talk about racism or raise kids out of wedlock. So what’s missing? Hollywood, for one thing. Women’s pictures in the new ‘10s and ‘20s are mostly produced outside the major studios, and their audience is limited to the kinds of people with a high tolerance for indie movies. At best, this can produce sharp, sincere character studies which would have been impossible a hundred years ago; at worst, there is a self-conscious, artsy unfunness to the whole endeavor: entertainment is for children and comics fans, but we’re here to watch a miscarriage or a rape. A quick look at any top-ten grossing list of the past shows a market dominated by big-budget action movies and pre-existing intellectual property. Almost all of them have male leads, excepting the occasional action heroine or Disney princess. The blockbuster model is hardly only a woman’s issue –I have it from reliable sources that men also like interiority and nuance in their motion pictures – but the marginalization of female roles is one of its more noticeable side effects. The present situation makes it easy to write off the scarcity of women on the big screen as a necessary consequence of commercial, profit-driven Hollywood-style cinema. But this is not so. Molly Haskell first described the problem in 1975, in her classic study From Reverence to Rape: “Women, in the early and middle ages of film, dominated. It is only recently that men have come to monopolize the popularity polls, the credits, and the romantic spotlight … back in the twenties and thirties, and to a lesser extent the forties, women were at the center.” Haskell was writing in response to the New Hollywood movement — a brief, brilliant blip in movie history when major studios let young European-inspired directors make movies about anything they wanted. Most often, they wanted to make movies about themselves, or their alter egos — at any rate, about men. I’m not knocking it. The artist-driven approach produced many great films, which also happened to be overwhelmingly male. Hollywood has changed since then, but the balance has not changed with it. The ironic truth is that it was at the height of the studio system — the great American movie factory — when women ruled the screen. The really important thing to understand about the cinema landscape of the 1930s is how much bigger it was: major studios such as Paramount and MGM would start and finish a new movie every week. Before television and the internet and $15 tickets, people watched more movies. Not only that, but the movies they watched were more varied — and, frankly, much girlier. If modern Hollywood is selling a certain kind of escapism, rooted in the heroic fantasy that a single exceptional individual can save the world, depression-era studios specialized in aspirational elegance and glamour. The super-powered heroes and global stakes that are so universal in today’s blockbusters were unheard of in the 1930s. Instead, the most popular films of the decade include weepy female-led melodramas, musicals (whether the Astaire/ Rogers vehicles at RKO, the scrappy, down-to-earth stage door movies at Warner Brothers, or Lubitsch’s pseudo-European operettas at Paramount), romantic comedies, and literary adaptations from Little Women to The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind. Even the most swashbuckling boys’ adventure films had major roles for their female co-stars – what would Errol Flynn have been without Olivia de Havilland? Since the studios of the 1930s produced many times more movies than their modern equivalents, the range of problems they manage to depict is correspondingly broader. While navigating a stricter set of taboos than their modern counterparts, studio-era filmmakers evinced a much wider curiosity about women’s lives. A list of major dramas would touch on, among other subjects, mothers forced to relinquish their children to give them a better life (Stella Dallas, Lady For A Day, That Certain Woman), elderly couples separated by financial necessity (Make Way For Tomorrow), prostitutes with tuberculosis (Camille), womens’ prisons (Ladies They Talk About, Condemned Women, Ladies Of The Big House), religious chicanery (The Miracle Woman), violent gangster ex-boyfriends (Midnight Mary, The Purchase Price), and romances between upper-class men and working-class women, whether as Cinderella story (Alice Adams) or tragedy (Three Wise Girls, Forbidden). By placing women at their center, these movies were able to analyze an entire society — they were what the Indian cinema of the same era called “social films.” These varied films share some common characteristics. More often than not, economic issues are front and center. This was the great depression: poverty was the background radiation of everyday life. Hard times produced a smart, scrappy, unsentimental breed of heroine. It is impossible to 235 imagine a bimbo in a ‘30s movie; the type simply does not exist. If a woman uses her sex appeal, it is always with intention and purpose. The overwhelming emphasis of these films is what their leading ladies want and what they will do to get it. Consider Gone With
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