The 1930s and 1940s were helped out by the talkie revolution. (Also just by having to churn out so much product! No pressure for blockbusters = More complexity and variety.) Needing a completely whole bunch of new actors, Hollywood got sharp young men and women both coming in and both working their sexy young butts off. As the years went by, though, the men got older and stayed stars; the women were tossed and replaced with girls. Kind of restricts what sort of relationships show up. And then the ever-magnified male hysteria of the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the hegemony of film school geeks and their fanboy power fantasies, pretty much eliminated any interest in women as people.

Now 1980s and early 1990s Hong Kong — _there_ were some cool female stars (along with the return of great “churn ‘em out” filmmaking). Maggie Cheung reminded me of Barbara Stanwyck.

Suddenly they needed writers who could write dialogue. So they went to Broadway and hired all the playwrights they could. Ben Hecht! Dorothy Parker! Ruth Gordon! Garson Kanin! Preston Sturges! Charles Brackett! Anita Loos! Orson Welles! Herman J Mankiewitz!

Mankiewitz wrote to Hecht saying, “Will you accept 300 per week to work for Paramount? All expenses paid. 300 is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”

Hollywood was always a sexist place, but the success of the “Jazz Singer” panicked the bigwigs into hiring women.

Alas, when that generation passed, they were replaced by a generation that knew only the movies and television.

And some fell pretty hard. Ben Hecht wrote “Queen of Outer Space,” with Zsa Zsa Gabor.

At present there are plenty of women writers in television, where they’re earning better money than the movie writers, but the upper echelon are almost always men.

By the way, apropos another post, I think Cary Grant did indeed intend the contemporary meaning of “gay,” which did exist then. Sophisticated viewers laughed their hats off, but ordinary folks in the audience thought he meant something else.

i don’t know if it means more work done. There’s always procrastination. However, it means i get a lot more READING done, and also that i do not waste any hours of my life watching dumb cable programming like “Bride vs. Bride” or reruns of the Ashlee Simpson show. I am in danger of doing that if i have access.

Gwenda: All my old tapes are back in Sydney. Not that I ever had many. I always hated videos. They get buggered up so easy. I heart DVDs so much more. Yes, please on your cunning plan.

SaraZ: Diana has no cable and barely any network TV, just DVDs. She claims she gets more work done that way.

But I can list a couple.

Casablanca
Notorious (this is American I think, despite having no Americans in the main cast and being directed by an Englishman)
Holiday Inn
Yankee Doodle Dandy
The Philadelphia Story
Now, Voyager

I’ve had Mildred pierce listed as “very long wait” on my netflix queue for months now.

I love midnight. Is *THAT* why Colbert acts that way? I’d always thought it was some bizarre affectation from the English stage or something.

Gwenda: Theodora Goes Wild! Wow, I haven’t seen that in years! And would you believe it’s not available on DVD? Gah! Midnight isn’t either. Damn and blast! I want to own every movie I love. All of them!

On the slightly less well known side, I also have a soft spot for Theodora Goes Wild, even though Irene Dunne isn’t my favorite of all-time (which I’ve always felt guilty for, since she was a Kentucky girl).

There’s a funny tension in that, how the femme fatale draws the eye and is like this great monster crashing against the walls of appropriateness, and is put to death as punishment. On the one hand, death. On the other hand, who’s the one everybody remembers from *The Postman Always Rings Twice*? It’s not Tyrone Power, nuh uh.

(Not a woman, but, it was only this past winter that I discovered that Jimmy Cagney is my secret boyfriend for eternity. So, go ahead and include *Angels with Dirty Faces* on your syllabus, okay?)

Wizard of Oz
Singin’ in the Rain (yes, I know it’s a fairly misogynist piece of work, but I give it a pass because I love it so)
The Thin Man
Arsenic and Old Lace
To Have and Have Not

Bringing Up Baby (1938)
My Favorite Wife (1940)
Laura (1944)
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
North by Northwest (1959)
Pillow Talk (1959)

[the blog overlord has removed films from outside the timeframe specified]

Near misses include To Catch a Thief.

Favorite actress: Barbara Stanwyck – amazing acting range, dynamic and commanding presence, atypical looks, strong and bold.

Favorite actors: Gene Kelly – amazing singer/dancer/director/choreographer/actor/visionary with whom I should have worked; and Cary Grant, dapper, self-depricating (have you read his memoir?), kind, able to play dramatic and comedic roles.

Sara Z: You’re a genius! But what if the postie steams open the evelope and steals the idea? What then? And how did you know that Scott is the biggest idea thief in the world? I wear a mask at nights so that if I talk about my ideas in my dreams he can’t hear them and steal them.

pet filmes – silent, non-American: Metropolis. talkie, American: Wizard of Oz

That’s what I do.

A subject near and dear to me. Here’s a bit about early Hollywood and women, focusing mostly on directors. I also recommend a documentary called Without Lying Down about Frances Marion. You’re talking about slightly later than that though; here’s a decent Mother Jones piece specifically looking at actresses.

Me have lots of books on this!

(And Marisa de los Santos’ Loved Walked In is an excellent, make-you-sob update on the classic romance. Came out back in the spring, I think.)