Leading Ladies in Hollywood

In those days, the diversity among the female stars was extraordinary, and writers had a chance to imagine every conceivable kind of woman's role. There were the down-to-earth comediennes like Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, and Rosalind Russell; the patrician Katharine Hepburn and the ethereal Audrey Hepburn; the sexy tarts like Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, and Marilyn Monroe; the tough career women Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck; the exotic imports Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich; the versatile musical performers Ginger Rogers and Judy Garland, just to name a few.

We can't boast of the same variety today. Michelle Pfeiffer, Kim Basinger, and Julia Roberts are all variations on the same type--sexy-but-vulnerable kittens, with an endearing pout but without a lot of brainpower. Of course there are many gifted actresses with different qualities, but they haven't had the opportunity to create a memorable persona in film after film. It's a chicken-and-egg question as to which comes first, the actresses or the roles. But the stable of stars today is not remotely comparable to the dazzling galaxy that graced the movies 40 or 50 years ago.

It was in the '70s that women virtually disappeared from the screen. The great teams of the era were couples like Newman and Redford, Hoffman and McQueen, Sutherland and Gould. For several years during the 70s, it was difficult to find five women to nominate as best actress. Women who essentially had supporting roles, like Valerie Perrine in Lenny, were nominated as best actress because there was no other way to fill the category. In 1975 Louise Fletcher won an Oscar for a relatively small part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest because the competition was so slim. To fill out the roster, the Academy had to travel abroad. The other nominees of 1975 included Isabelle Adjani in The Story of Adele H and Glenda Jackson in a film version of her stage performance in Hedda. There were more European actresses nominated in the 70s than at any time in film history, and it wasn't because Hollywood had suddenly become cosmopolitan in its outlook.

The '70s represented a turning point on several counts. That was the era of The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars, when studios realized that huge action pictures could deliver grosses never before imagined possible. That discovery coincided with the rise of the women's movement. Probably the male executives were fearful of the growing militancy of women, but they were also genuinely confused about what kinds of female characters to create. If they presented a heroine who wasn't a suitable role model, they might find themselves under attack by angry women's groups. Feeling besieged, many producers decided that the path of least resistance was simply to eliminate women altogether. As Molly Haskell wrote in her book From Reverence to Rape, "The growing strength and demands of women in real life, spearheaded by women's liberation, obviously provoked a backlash in commercial film: a redoubling of Godfather-like machismo to beef up man's eroding virility or, alternately, an escape into the all-male world of the buddy films from Easy Rider to Scarecrow."

In a way Hollywood never recovered from that decade of silence and evasion. The situation is slightly less dire today. It isn't quite so hard to come up with five American nominees for best actress (though ten would be a serious challenge). But Hollywood still seems baffled by the changing roles of women in society and continues to waste some of its most gifted actresses. After the success of When Harry Met Sally..., Meg Ryan was given her own production company to develop movies. Not one of her own projects has yet made it to the screen, and Ryan's last appearance was little better than a walk-on--the embarrassing role of Jim Morrison's mindless, masochistic common-law wife in The Doors.

Some producers have decided that one way to improve the lot of women in film is to cast women in roles that traditionally have gone to men. Thus Sigourney Weaver has scored a considerable success playing a machine-gun-toting superhero in the Alien series, and Jodie Foster is an FBI agent matching wits with a psychopath in The Silence of the Lambs. Goldie Hawn has practically built her career in the last decade by playing a woman in a man's world--the army (Private Benjamin), an aircraft factory (Swing Shift), Washington power politics (Protocol), and high school football (Wildcats).

These movies are often engaging as novelty items, but the solution to the problem of women in film is not to cast more women in genre pieces that have typically been all-male. Women can be involved in many of the same conflicts as men, but they also have unique concerns about family and romantic relationships that simply aren't being addressed in contemporary movies. Shirley MacLaine raised a pertinent criticism when she said recently that the goal of actresses should not be to strive to beat the men on their own turf of action-adventure movies. "Who in her right mind is interested in going out and killing 30 million people in the first two minutes?" MacLaine asked. "The problem is less the number of roles available to women than the film industry's discomfort with projects involving relationships, feelings, communication--the kind of things women are more likely to go into than men."

Hollywood does occasionally try remaking an old-fashioned "woman's picture" like Stella Dallas, but the filmmakers have trouble updating these stories. That doesn't mean, however, that the genre has lost its relevance. Television finds variations on these classic women's movies that do have a contemporary urgency. For example, a recent television film called Our Sons featured Julie Andrews as a highly successful businesswoman whose life comes apart when she learns that her son's lover is dying of AIDS. She must come to terms with her own unresolved feelings about her son's homosexuality as well as her fears for his life. Andrews, who has spent most of her career as a movie star, went to television for the first time because she couldn't find any role of comparable depth on the big screen.

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