Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!wuarchive!mit-eddie!thakur From: arris!rshapiro@uunet.UU.NET (Richard Shapiro) Newsgroups: rec.arts.cinema Subject: Re: women's movies - definition Message-ID: <1990Aug29.212934.8215@arris.com> Date: 30 Aug 90 15:56:37 GMT References: <4626@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <1990Aug20.155905.2725@eddie.mit.edu> <1990Aug27.172004.1166@eddie.mit.edu> Sender: thakur@eddie.mit.edu (Manavendra K. Thakur) Reply-To: arris!rshapiro@uunet.UU.NET (Richard Shapiro) Followup-To: rec.arts.cinema Organization: ARRIS Pharmaceutical, Cambridge, MA Lines: 43 Approved: thakur@zerkalo.harvard.edu In the history of American cinema, the term "woman's picture" means something quite different than the feminist films we've been discussing here recently. If you see this phrase in the literature, it's likely to have the Hollywood meaning rather than the feminist one. A woman's picture was essentially any Hollywood movie which was marketed specifically towards the adult female audience. These movies tended toward family melodrama and typically involved the lead female character making enormous, unappreciated sacrifices for the family's benefit. A classic of the genre is "Stella Dallas". Here's the Variety review of it (courtesy of Halliwell): A tear jerker of A ranking. There are things about this story that will not appeal to some men, but no one will be annoyed or offended by it. And the wallop is inescapably there for femmes. Barbara Stanwyck plays the martyr Mom in this one. Not surprisingly, many feminist film critics who are interested in popular culture have been studying these films, for much the same reason that feminists have been studying pulp romances. Enlightened or not, this kind of entertainment was, and is, consumed by enormous numbers or women. So the obvious question for feminists is: why should movies like this appeal to women more than men (we can take Variety's word on this, I think -- when it came to the movie marketplace of this era, Variety knew better than anyone what the situation was). How are preferences like this formed? One simple suggestion is that the sacrifices made by the women in these movies accurately reflected the kind of sacrifices female movie goers made in their own lives. If a woman as strong as Barbara Stanwyck (who was well known at the time as an actress who played strong parts) could suffer in this way, any woman might. And of course martyrdom brings nobility. In "Stella Dallas", a mother destroys her own life for the benefit of her daughter. What could be more noble than this? Clearly there are some important issues of subject formation involved here. Movies like this didn't just appeal to women; they helped form women into a particular kind of movie goer. Of course there were men's pictures as well, of several kinds: gangster films (and its descendant, film noir) in particular had almost the opposite preference profile to women's pictures. No doubt there are significant gender issues to be discovered here as well.