From Jungle Red to White Bread: The Women (1939) to The Women (2008)

"There is a name for you, ladies, but it isn't used in high society... outside of a kennel." - Crystal Allen, The Women (1939)


When Clare Booth Lace wrote The Women in the mid ’30s, she had one main objective: to satirize the hell out of all the rich, petty women surrounding her in high society. Ms. Booth Lace worked for a living, married an intellectual equal, and only joined in on the malicious sewing circle of death out of sheer curiosity and disbelief. She found that the female upper crust managed to avoid mass suicide by stockpiling up on soap opera shenanigans in order to keep life interesting. Tabloid affairs, catfights, and pop fashions added the spice while gossip, lunches, and parties added fuel to the fire. No one really liked each other and yet they were always together, flitting about like ruffled hens in a barnyard. Clare Booth Lace saw the dramatic and comedic potential in satirizing their lives as well as knocking the bourgeois down a peg or two at the height of the economic crisis. Needless to say, the all-female play she ended up writing was a smash hit and MGM quickly nabbed the rights to the story in 1938.

After being fired from Gone with the Wind (despite filming its best scenes) famed woman’s picture director, George Cukor, stepped on the set of The Women and immediately got to work. Jane Murfin and Anita Loos, who penned Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, adapted the play for the screen and “jazzed up its lingerie” with naughty sexual innuendo. Together, Cukor, Loos, and Murfin faithfully brought the story of Mrs. Stephen Haines (Mary), a darling, rich housewife whose life is turned upside down when her husband has an affair with a perfume salesgirl, to life with all of the zest and zing of the original play. The film starred Norma Shearer as Mary, who was finally free of creative restrictions because her husband, producer Irving Thalberg had died that year. It also starred the adorably gawky Rosalind Russell as catty Sylvia Fowler, Joan Crawford as sultry perfume girl Crystal Allen, and Joan Fontaine and Paulette Goddard as two more hens in the hen house. These five ladies headline an entire female cast that delights as well as destructs. All bets were off with this throng. And yet, despite the scrumptious catharsis one feels while watching these dillies do their dallies, Cukor also manages to make us feel empathetic for their plights as well. He was the best woman’s picture director in the business because he, as a gay male working in the industry, understood the feeling of being an outsider housed in polite casings for mass consumption. Though he clearly dislikes most of the women in The Women, he still recognizes their own brand of persecution at the hands of patriarchy. For instance, if the film had been placed in the hands of any other director, I think the character of Crystal Allen would only have hit the “slut” note and backed away. Cukor admires her sexiness and daring for going after what she wants and he and Joan Crawford make her a three-dimensional character. Like Scarlett O’Hara, Crystal Allen isn’t afraid of ambition and hunts for success the only way she knows how: by conniving and clawing her way into a solid, wealthy marriage. I think the real threat she instills in the rich bitches around her isn’t that she’s going after Mary’s husband. No, they hate and tear her down because she uses those jungle red nails to grasp what they did once upon a time, except she’s doing it from a lower social status and succeeding all the same.

All of Cukor’s characters have that gray matter feel to them. The ladies’ start out at one extreme and gradually gravitate toward the middle of the spectrum by the film’s end. Though they’re all terrible people in one way or another, the film still manages to celebrate the camaraderie of the female soul through so many different types of powder puffed trixies. We don’t watch the film to see Mary get her husband back; we watch it to see women interact with one another on an even playing field that usually involves witty banter, fabulous clothes (Adrian is a saint), and equal doses of social backstabbing and friendship. Diane English doesn’t understand that.

With her first feature film, English successfully pecked out all aspects of the original Women that made it so timeless. Now, it’s just Sex and the City with better source material. Before directing, English’s previous claim to fame was writing and producing the somewhat feminist hit show, Murphy Brown, with Candice Bergan. She’s been tinkling around with this remake for over a decade and finally released it last year. And yet, her efforts are no more artistically apparent than your average run-of-the-mill director for hire job. Go figure?

In the updated story, there are fewer female characters and fewer bouts of feminine bravado and brassiere blazing. Mary Haines (Meg Ryan) is a happy-go-lucky rich hippie chick living in NYC’s suburbs with her tween daughter and wall street bound hubby. Her best friends are Sylvia Fowler (Annette Benning), a fashion magazine editor, Edie Cohen (Debra Messing), an artsy stay-at-home mom with four daughters and baby #5 on the way (she wants a boy, of course), and Alex Fisher (Jada Pinkett Smith), a stereotypical lesbian with one published book under her belt. The bland as balls Crystal Allen in this version is played by the insipid Eva Mendes, who has the right look for the part (I guess…), but none of the pizzazz or personality of her originator. Well, that’s kind of unfair because few people could live up to Joan Crawford’s personal laundress, let alone one of the parts she played. But both Mendez and the direction English took with her character are about as interesting as white painted walls. Fortunately, Cloris Leachman, Candice Bergan, Bette Midler, and Carrie Fisher in supporting roles make up for some of the wishy-washy main characters, though they can hardly save the day.

No, the remake fails to live up to the original’s bite because it’s just too nice. Too nice and too phony. While it’s always a pleasure to see women on screen get their groove on in the workplace and bond with one another, there’s just nothing earnest or potent within the film’s narrative to make it worthwhile. These modern women may pursue goals when they’re not around their men, but the male characters are still the driving force of their actions. By taking out the apparent satire of the original to make her version more friendly, Diane English has also taken out the emotional resonance and chemistry of the characters as well. The original film’s tagline may be “It’s all about men,” but it’s really about the women and how we use society’s perceptions of ourselves to manipulate certain situations and ideas. The women in the remake have little to no original thoughts and only pursue life by bouncing off the invisible male characters dealings.

On one of the documentaries included in the DVD, Diane English gives a guided tour through the history of her relationship with the remake and why she wanted to do it in the first place. She thought it was a good story, but “women don’t act that way anymore” and the original’s “camp value” detracted from its social message. How can someone so passionate about a project miss the point so thoroughly? Many terrible remakes have been created by modern Hollywood to eliminate the so-called camp/antique feel of classic cinema. How is the original campy? Just because they wear big hats and yell occasionally? It’s truly ironic and sad that a female director and mostly female crew managed to be just as unfeeling and convoluted about the female role as everyone else in Hollywood these days.

What might have been a golden opportunity to update a classic was truly wasted with English’s The Women.

The Horror...The Horror...Remaking "Rosemary's Baby" for Today's Audiences

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Rosemary-s-Baby-Remake-8042.html

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is my favorite movie of all time. Roman Polanski is my favorite filmmaker. I'm writhing in anger as I write this. To even hear/read the word “remake” come into contact with anything related to either the film or the filmmaker causes both my gag reflexes to kick in and the hair on the back of my neck stand up with utter fright and shock. It also makes me extremely sad.

I’d like to be optimistic, but why should I lie to myself? If track records matter (and they do), then I’m likely to be 100% disappointed and disgusted because all of the harrowing, truthful ideals Polanski instills in his films, especially in Rosemary’s Baby, are going to be long-forgotten and lost in the sugarcoating process of a Hollywood remake.

I feel the need to write about this here because, in all honesty, it sums up the entire reason I’m doing this project in the first place – to make people vastly aware of the poor representations of women in Hollywood films.

There are few films in the history of cinema that articulate internal fear as successfully as Rosemary’s Baby does. There’s a horrific subtlety felt throughout that’s never really apparent, but nonetheless extremely uncomfortable. The only way I can think to describe it is to have you imagine hearing a buzz saw far off in the distance when you’re tied to a chair in a cabin somewhere in the middle of the woods. You can hear it getting closer and closer…day by day you wait, getting more impatient and unsettled as time progresses, until finally, “it” is right outside your doorstep and the buzz saw is louder than ever. No one can hear you scream. That’s what Rosemary’s Baby feels like every time I watch it.

But do you know why I feel so uncomfortable when I watch it? There aren't any blood and guts in the movie, so that's out. It’s not because of the epic chase sequence between Rosemary and her predator through the woods because one doesn’t take place. And, it’s certainly not because of the monsters (at least traditional ones), vampires, or werewolves hunting their victims because there aren’t any of those types in the movie either.


No, Rosemary’s Baby is terrifying to me because it depicts societal female normalcy for what it really is – absurd. Rosemary, played wonderfully by Mia Farrow, is a girl next door type who discovers she’s been impregnated by the devil for two reasons – one, the patriarchy of the underworld needs to be restored and two, Rosemary’s Husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), wants to advance his acting career. In exchange for Rosemary’s body, Guy gets a career boost and the devil gets a male heir for his throne. Though that is a horrifying idea in itself, the best/worst (depends on how you look at it) aspect of the film is the ending – Rosemary, even though she understands the dastardly circumstances, agrees to raise the devil’s child AND stay with her husband because being a mother is the only thing she’s ever wanted to do.

The absurdity of the situation is disguised by the swinging ‘60’s mise-en-scene and mentality – everything is colorful, everyone wears fun summer dresses and bell-bottoms, and, Rosemary herself is radiant with joy at the thought of being a mother, of moving into a new apartment with crisp white walls and raising a perfect, American family with her handsome husband. Oh what a world.

Polanski, of course, delivers the tour-de-force with his trademark chilly aesthetics and the often satirically humorous approach he takes in bringing Rosemary to the screen. No other film or filmmaker in my mind has so articulately expressed the horrors of the female role as honestly or expertly as Polanski has, which can be equated to the buzz saw metaphor I used earlier – a woman who becomes pregnant is in a sense tied down to a place she may or may not belong/want and the noise she hears is actually time ticking away towards the end of the inevitable nine months when she must give birth to her baby. The terror Rosemary feels throughout the film isn’t that she has to give birth to her baby or be a mother, it’s the fact that someone might take it – that privilege - and everything else away from her. She doesn’t even want to scream. To depict a woman who is willing to raise the devil’s spawn and stay with her evil husband just so she can attain the “ideal” of feminine value speaks volumes about our society.

Now, should I really be optimistic about some Hollywood hack remaking this film? Does anyone really think they’ll keep that underlying message there? Of course not. Mia Farrow’s Rosemary will become Jessica Alba’s (or some other inane actress’) Rosemary – a submissive, baby-hungry weakling with no purpose. The original character may be all of those things too, but her character arc (or lack thereof) serves a devout and important purpose – to show women (or men since they generally watch more horror movies than women do) how idiotic it is to sacrifice your entire self in exchange for the American female’s box of patriarchal freedom. No original or remake created in this day and age is brave enough to even attempt to capture that message, even if it is a rehash of an original story.

Pray for Rosemary's Baby not to be remade.