The Women (1939)

Not­ed play­wright, socialite and staunch con­ser­v­a­tive Clare Boothe Luce had already mar­ried and divorced one good-for-noth­ing man by the time she wrote her 1936 play ​‘The Women’, about Man­hat­tan soci­ety mavens and their absent mates.

One year pri­or, she hitched her wag­on to hus­band num­ber two, Hen­ry Robin­son Luce, a filthy rich pub­lish­ing mag­nate whose prop­er­ties includ­ed Time, Life, and oth­er mid­dle­brow peri­od­i­cals tar­get­ed toward the com­muter class. Some­time between these amal­ga­ma­tions, you can bet sis­ter spent a lit­tle time in Reno, Neva­da; one of the few places where a woman of means could shame­less­ly dis­solve her hap­py home.

Per the film’s title card, ​‘The Women’ ran for an aus­pi­cious 666 per­for­mances at New York’s Ethel Bar­ry­more The­atre. The sub­se­quent film, adapt­ed for the screen by author Ani­ta Loos and direct­ed by woman-whis­per­er George Cukor, would have swept the Acad­e­my Awards had it not faced stiff com­pe­ti­tion that year.

Epic-ish in length, with more bitch­es than a West­min­ster Ken­nel Club show, there was noth­ing quite like The Women at the time of its release. Although men are the absolute nucle­us of the film’s plot, one sees nei­ther hide nor hair of them on screen. Even one-sided phone calls are devoid of those tell­tale, gar­bled bari­tones – instead, hus­bands and lovers exist mere­ly as top­ics of spec­u­la­tion, deri­sion and desire.

Set in the beau­ty salons, sup­per clubs and depart­ment stores that make up the char­ac­ters’ nat­ur­al habi­tat, the rules of engage­ment between prin­ci­pal play­ers Mary (Nor­ma Shearer’s mar­ried socialite with a stray­ing hus­band) and Crys­tal (Joan Crawford’s con­niv­ing shop­girl who’s stolen said hus­band), are on a silky, but hard­ly soft, play­ing eld.

With­out gen­der as a dif­fer­en­tia­tor, it is class and sta­tus that become the key delin­eation: Mary and her idle, rar­i­fied milieu at the top, with Crys­tal and her climb­ing coterie under­neath, wait­ing for one of these rare birds to slip. An ad hoc net­work of man­i­curists and maids mete out well-received gos­sip (and plot points!) to our hero­ines, who tie them­selves in knots try­ing to relay this juicy intel to the right par­ties at just the right time.

Even poor, saint­ly Mary, the cen­tre of this con­vo­lut­ed tale, dis­cov­ers her husband’s indis­cre­tions while hav­ing her nails done in Jun­gle Red. When his infi­deli­ty is exposed, her trip to Reno becomes a fore­gone con­clu­sion, but the jour­ney to America’s divorce cap­i­tal is a bumpy one.

Cukor does some of his nest work as the roost­er in this mani­a­cal hen­house, bring­ing cin­e­mat­ic flour­ish to the oestro­gen-soaked source mate­r­i­al. With his sig­na­ture gift for cul­ti­vat­ing rhyth­mic deliv­ery – seen lat­er in The Philadel­phia Sto­ry and Adam’s Rib – and an air for the extrav­a­gant (a Tech­ni­col­or fash­ion show set piece mid­way through is par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable), Cukor cul­ti­vates nat­ur­al and nuanced per­for­mances from his cast of sirens; star Shear­er, vil­lain­ess Craw­ford, and a Greek cho­rus of gal pals that include Ros­alind Rus­sell, Joan Fontaine and Paulette Goddard.

Direct­ing ensem­ble scenes with upwards of half a dozen divas is no easy feat – leave it to Cukor to cor­ral this kind of star pow­er into a two hour-plus film that nev­er takes a break to pow­der its nose.