Mount TBR #58

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960 - Jeanine Basinger

In mid-November Turner Classic Movies showed the woman’s movie Invitation (1953), giving us veteran movie buffs a chance to run down the melodrama checklist.

• Deception, check: For the very best of reasons, a father and fiancé tell terrible lies to a wistful vulnerable woman. 
• Setting, check: Upper middle class or lower upper class family, unspecified Northeastern town.
• Check and double-check: No mother, but a doting father
• Love & marriage as central issue, check: Reconciled to being a spinster, Plain Jane blonde – indeed, we should all be as homely as Dorothy McGuire. 
• The bad brunette rival, check: Ruth Roman, of course.
• Point of rivalry, the genial though fickle male, check: boyish Van Johnson, of course.
• Lots of flashbacks, check:  to the point of maddening and pointless, in fact.

Anyway, poor Dorothy McGuire learns the secret why her husband married her. And selflessly accepts the reality of the situation. Melodramatic, but convincing. Our hard-pressed heroine comes to an admirable stoic conclusion, “It is not enough just to survive – at the end of our lives we have to be able to say that we lived.” She echoes Seneca in On the Shortness of Life: ‘Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life’s length, but upon the use we make of it; also, that it is possible, or rather usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little’.

Not Stella Dallas or Imitation of Life or Now, Voyager, but a worthwhile movie, I don’t demand the 90 minutes back again.

But that is only half the story. Critics made the mistake of judging the entire genre by its weakest examples, a standard they never applied to gangster films or westerns, both of which produced mountains of forgettable junk. Basinger persuasively argues that the woman's film was often richer, stranger, and more subversive than its reputation suggests. Beneath the glamour, tears, and occasionally crackpot plots, these movies explored the frustrations and contradictions of women's lives in a way Hollywood rarely acknowledged openly.

Jeanine Basinger's A Woman's View is one of those books that quietly demolishes a prejudice many classic-film fans don't even realize they're carrying around. For decades, the "woman's picture" was treated like the poor relation at Hollywood's family reunion: tolerated, patronized, and mocked. The assumption was that movies about romance, marriage, motherhood, and domestic life were somehow less serious than westerns, gangster pictures, war films, or noir. Basinger argues that this critical neglect was partly earned. Plenty of women's pictures were formulaic. Some were flimsy programmers assembled from recycled plots, overheated emotions, and enough sacrificial mothers to populate a small nation.

Modern scholars sometimes dismiss the genre for appearing to reinforce traditional ideas about women and their "proper" place. Basinger counters that Hollywood was not a social reform movement or a political manifesto. It was a business. The studios wanted tickets sold, not revolutions launched. Their goal was to appeal to the broadest audience possible while offending the fewest people. Yet, almost despite themselves, writers, directors, and performers repeatedly smuggled troubling questions into these supposedly conventional stories. The best woman's pictures hint that marriage can be a trap, motherhood can be exhausting, work can be more fulfilling than domesticity, and romance is often a far messier business than Hollywood's happy endings suggest.

Over more than 500 pages, Basinger marshals an army of plot summaries and examples to support her case. Fortunately, she writes for intelligent movie lovers rather than graduate seminars. The prose is clear, lively, funny, and free of academic fog. You can read a few pages before bed and suddenly discover you've stayed up an extra hour chasing Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, or Irene Dunne through another chapter.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in classic Hollywood, especially those who secretly get misty-eyed when, in Dark Victory, Bette Davis gazes into the bright afternoon sky and murmurs, "Ann, there's a storm coming... it's getting darker by the minute." If that scene doesn't get to you, check your pulse.