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Film and Theatre reviews: "The Women"
Thursday, 26 August 2010 10:32 pmWe heard The Shaw Festival was putting on The Women this year, so we re-rented the film last week. (The George Cukor/Clare Boothe Luce version, not the 2008 mess, of which no more will be said).
The story is of Mary Haines, a New York socialite in the late '30s, confident in her marriage, progressive about women's rights, and it turns out, a pretty awful judge of character. Her friends mostly are conniving busybodies, her husband's been cheating on her for months, and she has nobody to turn to but her mother, who tells her to sweep the affair under the rug. She instead takes her "friends'" advice, confront the Other Woman (played by Joan Crawford) and her husband. She ends up on a train to Reno, the only place to get a 6-week divorce, and are soon followed there by her friends, who have highs and lows of their own. Back in New York, two years later, the plot culminates in a big party with a cut-throat battle royale, and formerly naive Mary comes out wiser, and apparently the only one not spattered with mud.
On the one hand, it's a morality play, asking serious questions about whether women spend all their time cutting each other down, and whether modern society was all that modern after all. On the other hand it's a campy bitch-fest with some of the best one-liners of any film I've seen.
So, yes. Highly recommended. (We are possibly having a re-play party in early October; remind me if you're interested and I haven't mentioned it)...
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On Sunday, we saw the Shaw Festival version. On the balance, it was well done, but it lacked the chemistry in the (all-star) movie. The sets were amazing (and the stage-pieces swooped around the stage, in and out of the light, in a very satisfying way) but I can conclude that I liked the movie better.
The accents were jarringly off- they occasionally managed "NYC flapper" but often the accents seemed out of place, which was disappointing.
One of the aspects that I thought I didn't like about the film actually turned out to be lacking in the stage-show: Mary's relationship with her pre-teen daughter, who is played in the film as fairly melodramatic or even mawkish. In the stage-show, she stands more on her own, isn't very hammy at all, but also doesn't have the intense connection with her mother that was so striking in the film, especially after Mary goes through with the divorce. Before seeing the stage-show, I would have said she over-played the character; afterward, I think she was an essential partner for the main character.
Both versions do a good job with Mary and her own mother, who is "pleased that she's finally needed again" to help Mary figure out how to cope. There are slight differences in pacing between the two, and the ending of the stage show is ambiguous, but both were fine in those respects.
The stage version was stylish, and the lines still had as much zing, but the actresses didn't have the stage-presence of the movie-stars, sadly enough. So this is one of the rare occasions when I was happier with the film than with the stage-show.
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melted_snowball rented a batch of Pre-Hayes Code movies, (specfically: Forbidden Hollywood Volume 2). We watched one of the other Norma Shearer films, "A Free Soul". It had many "WTF?" moments, and it wasn't a "greatest of all time" film by any stretch, but it was fun, and one of the better early talkie movies I've seen. Apparently it was fairly scandalous for its time; showing an unmarried woman spending nights with her lover; part of the loose morals that the Hayes Code successfully censored for the following decades.
The story is of Mary Haines, a New York socialite in the late '30s, confident in her marriage, progressive about women's rights, and it turns out, a pretty awful judge of character. Her friends mostly are conniving busybodies, her husband's been cheating on her for months, and she has nobody to turn to but her mother, who tells her to sweep the affair under the rug. She instead takes her "friends'" advice, confront the Other Woman (played by Joan Crawford) and her husband. She ends up on a train to Reno, the only place to get a 6-week divorce, and are soon followed there by her friends, who have highs and lows of their own. Back in New York, two years later, the plot culminates in a big party with a cut-throat battle royale, and formerly naive Mary comes out wiser, and apparently the only one not spattered with mud.
On the one hand, it's a morality play, asking serious questions about whether women spend all their time cutting each other down, and whether modern society was all that modern after all. On the other hand it's a campy bitch-fest with some of the best one-liners of any film I've seen.
So, yes. Highly recommended. (We are possibly having a re-play party in early October; remind me if you're interested and I haven't mentioned it)...
---
On Sunday, we saw the Shaw Festival version. On the balance, it was well done, but it lacked the chemistry in the (all-star) movie. The sets were amazing (and the stage-pieces swooped around the stage, in and out of the light, in a very satisfying way) but I can conclude that I liked the movie better.
The accents were jarringly off- they occasionally managed "NYC flapper" but often the accents seemed out of place, which was disappointing.
One of the aspects that I thought I didn't like about the film actually turned out to be lacking in the stage-show: Mary's relationship with her pre-teen daughter, who is played in the film as fairly melodramatic or even mawkish. In the stage-show, she stands more on her own, isn't very hammy at all, but also doesn't have the intense connection with her mother that was so striking in the film, especially after Mary goes through with the divorce. Before seeing the stage-show, I would have said she over-played the character; afterward, I think she was an essential partner for the main character.
Both versions do a good job with Mary and her own mother, who is "pleased that she's finally needed again" to help Mary figure out how to cope. There are slight differences in pacing between the two, and the ending of the stage show is ambiguous, but both were fine in those respects.
The stage version was stylish, and the lines still had as much zing, but the actresses didn't have the stage-presence of the movie-stars, sadly enough. So this is one of the rare occasions when I was happier with the film than with the stage-show.
---
melted_snowball rented a batch of Pre-Hayes Code movies, (specfically: Forbidden Hollywood Volume 2). We watched one of the other Norma Shearer films, "A Free Soul". It had many "WTF?" moments, and it wasn't a "greatest of all time" film by any stretch, but it was fun, and one of the better early talkie movies I've seen. Apparently it was fairly scandalous for its time; showing an unmarried woman spending nights with her lover; part of the loose morals that the Hayes Code successfully censored for the following decades.
