The Women ***** (1939, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Ruth Hussey, Virginia Weidler, Mary Boland) – Classic Movie Review 2919

Director George Cukor’s delicious 1939 comedy is a vastly entertaining all-female film of Clare Boothe [Luce]’s risqué hit play about an interconnected group of prospective divorcées waiting at a ranch for their divorce decrees and their lives and romantic entanglements.

With a screenplay by Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Jane Murfin, the wonderfully sophisticated comedy is full of catty characters, though the estimable Rosalind Russell wins by out-bitching them all in an over-the-top performance. Joan Crawford runs a close second, brilliantly bitchy as Crystal, the hard-boiled perfume clerk who uses every wile to catch another woman’s husband.

Loos provides a really witty script, full of funny lines, which managed to appeal to the censor on the day without damping the play’s power.

Top-billed Norma Shearer clashed with her MGM rival Crawford while making the film, but otherwise sympathetic ‘women’s director’ Cukor somehow managed to keep the temperamental stars all happy. Mary Boland scores in a hilarious performance as the older love-seeker. The boisterous (or is that girlsterous?) cast does the show proud. Cinematographers Oliver T Marsh and Joseph Ruttenberg shoot in black and white but there’s a sequence in Technicolor of a fashion parade of Adrian gowns.

Also in the cast are Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Ruth Hussey, Virginia Weidler, Cora Witherspoon, Marjorie Main, Hedda Hopper, Lucile Watson, Virginia Grey, Muriel Hutchinson, Florence Nash, Esther Dale, Ann Morriss, Mary Beth Hughes, Phyllis Povah and Butterfly McQueen.

It was remade as a semi-musical in The Opposite Sex and eventually just remade as The Women in 2008 with Eva Mendes and Meg Ryan.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2919

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