Cinema
The Women
George Cukor · 1939
Synopsis
Manhattan, in high society. Mary Haines, a happy wife and mother of a little girl, is unaware of what all her friends know: her husband is cheating on her with Crystal Allen, a salesgirl at the perfume counter. Her cousin Sylvia, who learned of it at a manicurist's, sends her there, and Mary hears the story from an employee who does not know who she is. Her mother advises her to be patient. The affair reaches a society columnist, and Mary runs into Crystal in a fitting room at a couturier's. She leaves for Reno, on a train carrying other women who are going to divorce.
Context
The film is taken from a play by Clare Boothe Luce first staged in 1936, whose cast was already exclusively female, and the studio pushed the rule to the limit: no man on screen, not even as an extra, and even the animals were chosen female. Two screenwriters were credited, Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald also worked on it; the play's crudest lines were rewritten for the censorship code. Cukor had just been removed from a major production and was free.
Who it is for
A two-hour-thirteen-minute comedy, entirely in black and white except for a fashion show in Technicolor of about six minutes.
Prizes and reception
A loss-maker according to the studio's records, it entered the National Film Registry in 2007, and was remade twice for the cinema, in 1956 and in 2008.
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