My
husband’s favorite movies are the black and white “B” movies from the
fifties—the ones that never quite made the rounds, but are shown on certain
stations between lots of commercial breaks. I think it’s because he works
nights and his hours are all turned around so the movies help him sleep.
(Although Tarantula is a special favorite and he can even tell
you the plot, assuming there is one.)
I’m
with him on the black and white part, though. My favorites are the 1930s and
40s movies with sassy heroines—the reporter played by Rosalind Russell in His
Girl Friday,
Joan Blondell in Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington, and all the characters played by Katherine Hepburn. Women in those films weren’t wimpy like they
were in fifties films. Yeah, some of them fainted from time to time, but never
the heroines. And they weren’t all
plastic-surgeried up like they are today.
As
my friend Jennifer says, they looked like us—in
better clothes.
What
happened to women in the 1950s? It was a decade when men who returned from the
war wanted their jobs back in factories, offices and newsrooms. Women were
expected to leave the jobs they’d taken during World War II and go back home.
Movies and magazines pitched in to romanticize marriage, cooking and keeping
house.
At
the same time, women who became stars in this era were round and full bodied (good)
but sounded like little girls (bad). Marilyn Monroe was the ideal, and
though she looked wonderful, she was constantly pitched as the dumbest blonde
on the block (though she wasn’t). Being dumb was code for being smart, because
you were supposed to use your womanly wiles, not intelligence, to snag a rich
man. What it meant in Hollywood is that the tough, funny, sexy stars of the
thirties and forties didn’t have a chance.
The
first black and white film I fell in love with was To
Have and Have Not,
which I saw with an older boyfriend in college. I had no idea what was
happening from beginning to end; but I was hooked from the first sentence and
by the time it was over, would have done anything I could to become the sly,
angular, impossibly sexy Lauren Bacall. She was alive, for one thing, in every way
possible. Alive and real—not some idealized version of what a woman should be.
None
of this, by the way, means women in 1930s movies couldn’t be dumb or silly. But
few were as one-dimensional as the women in 1950s movies (and I don’t mean to
pick on Monroe, who was extremely talented). Katherine Hepburn in Bringing
up Baby
may have been a ditz, but she was a cool ditz who adopted a pet leopard and got
Cary Grant
to change his
life. And the marriage of Nick and Nora
Charles
in The Thin Man movie is my model of what a marriage
should be.
But
if the films of the 1950s mainly glorified passive females, how did we get the
Beats? Women artists and writers in 1958 were ambitious and adventurous. Of
course, if you try seeing a movie from that period that’s supposed to be about
Beats, good luck finding anyone you’d want to know for five minutes. (If you find one, send it my way—I’d love you
to prove me wrong. If you find two, I’ll sing a song or something.) I think
Hollywood became afraid of smart women until the late sixties—and even then it
took a while to get some lead characters like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.
I
have to say though, I’d still rather watch To
Have and Have Not or The Thin Man
than most of the movies I’m seeing now. Sometimes I feel like the women in
current films are really men in disguise. They fit into hipless jeans, they
fight off bad guys with a single blow and have 30 masters’ degrees from 16
colleges. Do you know any of them?
With
The Beat on Ruby’s Street, I wanted
to create a young girl growing up in an alternate society where pretty was less
important than being cool, because as lead character Ruby’s mother says, pretty
fades but cool does not. I know that my character Ruby’s version of cool is
skewed by her own experience and that of course it’s different for everyone.
But just having an alternate way of looking at life in the 1950s—that doesn’t
call for fainting, bimbo heroines—seems pretty cool to me.
Not
that I wouldn’t mind sitting through Tarantula
with that man of mine. If we could just
get him to work days once in a while.
This
column was originally published at Book
Lover Place.
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