Women's Roles in Film: His Girl Friday to Flirting With Disaster

Women in Early Cinema: Stereotypes and Silent-Era Roles

The history of women in the cinema can be traced back to the early days of film production, beginning around 1896 with films by director Alice Guy Blaché, such as The Cabbage Fairy and The Bewitched Fiancé. With the advent and popularity of the so-called "silent era" of film production, women began to be depicted as various stereotypes — "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).

Female Archetypes in the Golden Age of Hollywood

Another study showed that between 1930 and the 1970s, four types of roles for women were dominant in American cinema. First was "The Pillar of Virtue," a good example being Hattie McDaniel as the morally steadfast housemaid in 1939's Gone with the Wind. Second was the "Glamour Girl," such as sex goddess Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or the German "bombshell" Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus. Third was the usually sexually frustrated "Emotive Woman," exemplified by the volatile Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Finally, the "Independent Woman" category included notable figures such as Katharine Hepburn in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Jane Fonda as the stalwart prostitute in Klute.

In the 1950s, 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 women was at its peak. By the mid-1970s, this had evolved into pure sensationalism, subverting women into sexual objects with a focus on their sexual appetites and physical attributes.

By contrast, beginning in the mid-1960s, the feminist movement in America had grown greatly concerned with how women were being portrayed in the cinema. Several important studies showed that women were restricted to motherly family roles while men were depicted as masters of their own destinies. Ally Acker points out that "men were employed, had careers and were doing something outside of the home" (257), in stark contrast to women who were shown as totally dependent on the strengths and abilities of their male partners.

The Rise of Film Noir and Feminist Critique

In relation to the three films examined here as examples of old and new roles for women in the cinema — 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 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 1940s and 50s, shot in black and white, with female stars who used their attractiveness to manipulate men" (Doane 188). Film noirs such as Double Indemnity, featuring Barbara Stanwyck as a manipulative married woman, and Sunset Boulevard, starring Gloria Swanson as a dominating, washed-up silent film star, are good examples of how leading ladies ensnared leading men via their relentless attempts to "satisfy their own desires which often threatened the stable roles of marriage, family and female submissiveness" (Manchel 174).

Recent feminist views have maintained that the women in these film noirs exist outside the standard acceptance of femininity. By using their sexuality to overwhelm their male counterparts, these women gained power and used it to "get what they want" — usually in the form of revenge, money, or sexual satisfaction. These traits of the strong, powerful woman also influenced the audience through what is referred to as a gender blind construct: a dynamic that blinds dominant cultural definitions of pleasure and desire so as to demonstrate that women, too, are sexual predators.

His Girl Friday: The Independent Screwball Heroine

In the role of Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday, a screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks, Rosalind Russell portrays a star newspaper reporter whose great desire is to quit the newspaper business. Her amoral and manipulative editor Walter Burns — played to the hilt by Cary Grant, who happens to be her ex-husband — does everything in his power to thwart her. Hildy's fiancé, played by Ralph Bellamy, is thrown into the mix as a bumbling insurance man. The film noir traits associated with Hildy are easily understood: she is a sexually repressed woman with needs and desires of her own who will stop at nothing to attain her goal, all the while juggling the men in her life with practiced ease.

Conclusion: Ever-Changing Dimensions of Women on Screen

As shown by these three examples, the roles of women in the cinema — starting back in the early silent days and continuing into the present — are ever changing and constantly presenting new dimensions that need to be explored, especially in the ways women develop cinematic relationships and interact with one another. From the stereotyped damsels of the silent era to the assertive, desire-driven heroines of film noir and screwball comedy, women's representation in film reflects and refracts the broader cultural struggles over gender, power, and identity that have defined American society across the twentieth century and beyond.

Sources Cited

Acker, Ally. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1991.

Doane, Mary Ann, et al. Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984.

Manchel, Frank. "The Feminist Approach." Film Study: An Analytical Bibliography. 4 vols. Rutherford, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990.