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THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN FILM:
HIS GIRL FRIDAY, SEMI-TOUGH
&
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER
The history of women in the cinema can be traced back to the early days of film production, beginning ca. 1896 with films by director Alice Guy Blache, such as "The Cabbage Fairy" and "The Bewitched Fianc?." With the advent and popularity of the so-called "silent era" of film production, women began to be depicted as various stereotypes, such as "damsels in distress," weak-minded, timid city girls and impoverished "white trash," while men played an overwhelming majority of lead roles, usually as heroic figures who rescue these "damsels" from a plethora of dangerous situations. In a study of one hundred films released between 1930 and 1940, part of the "Golden Age" of American cinema, "eighty percent focused on the love/hate of a man with a good/bad girl, while fifty percent had the good/bad girl opposing another bad girl" (Doane 134).
Likewise, another study showed that between 1930 and the 1970's, four types of roles for women were dominant in the American cinema-first, "The Pillar of Virtue," a good example being Hattie McDaniel as the morally stout housemaid in 1939's Gone With The Wind; second, the "Glamour Girl" like the sex goddess Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or the German "bombshell" Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus; third, the usually sexually frustrated "Emotive Woman" such as the sexual vixen Elizabeth Taylor in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and lastly the "Independent Woman," two prime examples being Katherine Hepburn in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and Jane Fonda, the stalwart prostitute in Klute.
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In the 1950's, when cinema began to "reaffirm male dominance and female subservience by showing women as mere sex objects" (Manchel 235), the contempt generated by film producers for showing strong, powerful...
Several important studies have shown that women were restricted to motherly family roles while men were shown to be masters of their own destinies. Ally Acker points out that "men were employed, had careers and were doing something outside of the home" (257) as contrasted with women who were totally dependent on the strengths and abilities of their male partners.
In relation to the three films as examples of old and new roles for women in the cinema, namely His Girl Friday (1940), starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, Semi-Tough (1977) with Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh and Flirting With Disaster (1996), starring Ben Stiller and Patricia Arquette, the movie genre of the "film noir" seems most appropriate as a focal point for this discussion of women in film. This genre was "made up of thrillers produced in the 1940's and 50's, shot in black and white, with female stars who used their attractiveness to manipulate men" (Doane 188). Film noirs like Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck as a manipulative married woman and Sunset Boulevard starring Gloria Swanson as a washed-up, dominating silent film star, are good examples of how leading ladies ensnared leading men via their relentless attempts to…
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4 vols. Rutherford, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990.
Cain (afterward coupled by Mickey Spillane, Horace McCoy, and Jim Thompson) -- whose books were also recurrently tailored in films noir. In the vein of the novels, these films were set apart by a subdued atmosphere and realistic violence, and they presented postwar American cynicism to the extent of nihilism by presuming the total and hopeless corruption of society and of everyone in it. Billy Wilder's acidic Double Indemnity
Film Comparison Almodovar's Prisons Prisons can be more than a place where one is confined for what they have done. A prison can be a great number of things; a prison can be a psychological, social, emotional, or physical construct. Pedro Almodovar explores these four types of prisons in two of his films, Volver and Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother). In both of these films, the characters find themselves
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Film Noir Among the various styles of producing films, it has been observed the noir style is one that has come to be recognized for its uniqueness in characterization, camera work and striking dialogue. Film Noir of the 1940s and 50s were quite well-known for their feminine characters that were the protagonists, the femme fatale. This was most common with the French, later accepted in the United States. There might have