Outspoken Women

The trick to her talk was not just the verbal wit (and she wrote most of those lines herself) but the ease with which she had become the sexual aggressor in small talk. She acted on the intuition that men (poor babies) were often shy and tongue-tied, whereas women were steeped in the language of flirting, teasing and provoking. She had some good company: Cary Grant's was one of the lewd faces who knew exactly what she meant and intended. But West's novelty also depended on making pompous men blush, look away or steam with outrage that a woman should be so...forward! Marlene Dietrich had a lot of the same insolent confidence: It's there in Morocco in the way (dressed in a tuxedo as she sings at a cafe) she considers the matter-- and then kisses a young girl in the audience. Nothing is said? I think plenty is said with a wit and brevity that makes today's films seem rather ponderous.

That Dietrich attitude runs down into film noir as well as comedy--but that only shows what a fine line there is between the way Barbara Stanwyck needles Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve. Sure, she's a tramp in the former and only a confidence trickster in the latter. She'll die in one while serving as a model of romantic maturity in the other. But it's the same dame.

And there's the real point, I think. When women talked well in movies, it was as a sign of their greater emotional experience and insight. In their best films, they were always steering their foolish men towards the light (as if they were slightly drunk). They were characters who still light up the screen and seem utterly modern. As well as those mentioned already, I mean Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night or Midnight); Irene Dunne (The Awful Truth); Carole Lombard (My Man Godfrey, Swing High, Swing Low or Twentieth Century); Margaret Sullavan (The Shop Around the Corner); Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday); and Katharine Hepburn in just about everything she did.

Of course, on many occasions, those women had a few men at least who could keep up--so you would get the superb dueling matches that are The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday. But I stick to my point that that repartee was radical and dangerous. It alarmed a lot of people in the audiences, especially those who guessed that women might have an inside track on feelings--but men wanted to own those tricky things, if only to cover up their own insecurities. Conversations now are seldom as brisk--or as touching. If you doubt that, go back to Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, in love with each other to be sure, but both of them crazy about talk.

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