What are the movies every woman should see?
It may seem presumptuous for a guy critic to offer any opinions on this. But, in fact, it’s an intriguing question–and one that I’m often asked.
In the adult film appreciation class I teach twice a year at the University of Chicago’s Graham School, women students regularly ask me to give them a list, or even do a whole term, on women’s films–or on films by women directors. When I demur, pleading gender gaps, I’m always reminded, gently, that most of my students are women. Shouldn’t they have a class once in a while focused on woman-centered movies, even if it is taught by a man?
So, what would a course devoted to women’s movies of major historical importance–by the great women filmmakers, writers or actresses–look like? Should I include only films by the top woman filmmakers? What about the cinema’s great actresses–many of whom were directed to their best performances by men? And what about movies that raise crucial issues or brilliantly reflect their times–or have simply lived on as great cultural dreams for audi-ences–like “Gone With the Wind?”
These are all questions that are difficult–but fascinating. The following list is only a start. They are all movies that every film-literate woman (and man) should seek out. But there are others just as worthy.
It would be interesting, in fact, if Tribune readers took up the challenge and began sending in their special film lists (to ctc-woman@tribune.com). But here is the beginning–the syllabus for the course I’ve never taught, but maybe, someday, will.
1. “Stella Maris” (Marshall Neilan; 1918)
The most powerful movie collaboration between women, in the teens and ’20s of the last century, was the one between Mary Pickford (with Charlie Chaplin, then the most popular movie star in the world) and Pickford’s favorite writer, Frances Marion. And Pickford’s most outstanding single performance came in this inspired pop romantic fairy tale, written by Marion. Here, “Little Mary” plays the dual role of Stella Maris, a beautiful invalid sheltered from the world’s ugliness, and homely persecuted Cockney orphan Unity Blake.
2. “Adam’s Rib” (George Cukor; 1949)
The American movies’ greatest actress is that radiant Bryn Mawr alumna, Katharine Hepburn–and its greatest offscreen love story was the 25-year-long “secret” affair between frequent co-stars Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. In this great comedy, Hepburn and Tracy charmingly incarnate the marriage of equals as spouse-lawyers locked in courtroom battle. After a distraught wife (Judy Holliday) shoots her cheating husband (Tom Ewell), her case is taken by firebrand defense attorney Amanda Bonner (Hepburn); Amanda’s husband, district attorney Adam (Tracy), is assigned as the prosecutor. Each night these two warring attorneys attempt to bury their legal hatchets, conju-gally–but gradually, courtroom spills into bedroom and vice versa. This is the best of all the Tracy-Hepburn comedies (second best is a tie between 1942’s “Woman of the Year” and 1952’s “Pat and Mike”), and one whose unabashedly feminist screenplay gets more contemporary with each passing year. It was directed by Hollywood’s supreme actress’ director, George Cukor, written by longtime couple Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. (Two other essential Hepburn performances are as Jo March in 1933’s “Little Women” and as morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone in 1962’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”)
3. “The Scarlet Empress” (Josef von Sternberg; 1934)
In old Russia, women rule. Nowhere else is Marlene Dietrich’s hauntingly perverse image–and her surroundings–more ravishing than in Sternberg’s lurid epic on Russia’s Catherine the Great. Drenched in glamor and melodrama, barbarity and splendor–with Dietrich’s Catherine rising from girlhood to majesty, in a court dominated by matriarchs and madmen–it’s a visual/aural feast of baroque decor and sensuous camerawork, scored to Tchaikovsky and Wagner. (The two other great Dietrich-Sternberg collaborations, both from 1930, are “The Blue Angel” and “Morocco.”)
4. “Daughters of the Dust” (Julie Dash; 1991)
Julie Dash’s lyrical re-creation of the lives of West African immigrants and descendants of slaves, living in replication of their old rituals off the U.S. Southern coast, is a unique statement of a vanished life and heritage.
5. “Maedchen in Uniform” (Leontine Sagan; German; 1931)
One of the great early German sound films and a sensational international hit on its first release, this now-neglected classic was directed and written by women (Sagan and Christa Winsloe), as German society disintegrated into Naziism. A brilliant portrayal of psychological and cultural oppression at an all-girls school, it charts the growing romantic obsession, with obvious lesbian undercurrents, of a sensitive student (Hertha Thiele) for her only kind teacher (Dorothea Wieck)–with Emilia Unda as the tyrannical principal who drives the girl toward suicide. “Maedchen” is a precursor of doom: depicting so well the brutal psyche of the nascent Hitler era that Sagan was soon forced to flee the country. (The other great early German woman director was, of course, Leni Riefenstahl, whose 1935 “Triumph of the Will” is a stunning, hateful propaganda classic and whose 1938 “Olympia” is a great sports documentary.)
6. “Gone With the Wind” (Victor Fleming-George Cukor-Sam Wood; 1939)
Critics may prefer “Citizen Kane,” but in the hearts of many moviegoers, this is the Hollywood studio movie par excellence. Based faithfully on Margaret Mitchell’s mega-best seller of the ’30s (with one crucial change: the elimination of the novel’s more violent racism), “Gone With the Wind” offers the kind of big, rich, opulent experience the movies try for but seldom do as well. Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara is a sublime fusion of actress and role.
7. “Camille” (George Cukor; 1936)
“All champagne and tears” is how Henry James once described the classic drama of star-crossed love by Alexandre Dumas (fils). And George Cukor’s 1936 film with Greta Garbo as Camille and Robert Taylor as Armand captures much of that quality. It seems breathless and shiny, on the verge of a glorious breakdown, and Garbo, as the tragically buoyant, consumptive heroine, delivers her best performance.
8. “Dance, Girl, Dance” (Dorothy Arzner; 1940)
Maureen O’Hara is a prima ballerina working in a burlesque house; Lucille Ball is her brassy stripper nemesis. Rediscovered by feminist critics in the late ’60s, this essential woman’s movie–a failure on its first release–was the most notable effort of Dorothy Arzner, the only major Hollywood woman director of the Golden Age. Later, she was Francis Ford Coppola’s teacher at UCLA.
9. “Meshes in the Afternoon” (Maya Deren; 1943)
A major experimental art film in the tradition of the early works of Luis Bunuel and Jean Cocteau, writer-director Maya Deren’s wordless exploration of psychological unease and dream-symbols has a fascination all its own. A woman (played by Deren) moves through a strange, sunny, threatening landscape of open streets, staircases, doors and mirrors; the effect is both disturbing and hypnotic.
10. “Persona” (Ingmar Bergman; 1966)
The most remarkable director-actress collaboration in film history was the four-decade partnership between Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman and Norway’s Liv Ullmann. Their first meeting, “Persona” has long been regarded as one of the screen’s great works. Classicist Bergman here uses electronic music, shock cuts, abstraction, and symbolism to explore the relationship between two women with hauntingly similar faces: an actress who never talks (Ullmann) and a nurse who never seems to shut up (Bibi Andersson). (Two other essential Bergman-Ullmann films, both from 1973: “Cries and Whispers” and “Scenes from a Marriage.” When Bergman retired from film directing, Ullmann took over, remarkably, as director of his screenplays “Private Confessions” and “Faithless.”)
11. “A Woman Under the Influence” (John Cassavetes; 1974)
Under the direction of husband John Cassavetes–and playing opposite their friend, Peter Falk–Gena Rowlands (as Mabel Longhetti) gives one of the screen’s greatest portrayals of a woman torn apart: as the passionately “different” wife of a construction worker (Falk).
12. “My Brilliant Career” (Gillian Armstrong, Australia; 1979)
Based on Miles Franklin’s autobiographical novel, Australian director Gillian Armstrong’s trail-blazing 1979 movie, which introduced Judy Davis and Sam Neill, portrays the turn-of-the-century life of Sybilla Melvyn (Davis), who is determined to defy orthodoxy and become a writer. With salty, poetic veracity, Armstrong and Davis give us one woman’s exemplary life.
13. “An Angel at My Table” (Jane Campion, New Zealand; 1990)
Jane Campion, an electrifying talent, shows us the life of the lower-class New Zealand writer Janet Frame (Kerry Fox), who was institutionalized, subjected to electro-shock and nearly lobotomized on a false diagnosis of schizophrenia. Frame is shown with touching sympathy and scathing irony; rarely has an artist’s alienation from conventional society been more convincingly portrayed. (Campion’s other major works: 1989’s “Sweetie” and the 1993 Cannes Grand Prize-winner “The Piano.”)
14. “Thelma & Louise” (Ridley Scott; 1991)
This great feminist chase thriller, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Callie Khouri, galvanized audiences in 1991. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are suburban housewives turned reluctant fugitive/outlaws who find love and strength on the run.
15. “The Gleaners and I” (Agnes Varda, France; 2000)
From the remarkable ’60s New Wave survivor Agnes Varda, this is a beautiful documentary about scavengers: people who glean their food and belongings from post-crop fields or the surplus of Paris markets. Shot by Varda herself on digital video, it shows the intrepid 72-year-old filmmaker (auteur of the French classics “Cleo from 5 to 7,” “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t” and “Vagabonde”) traveling and communing with people who, by necessity or choice, make staples and treasures of other people’s junk. A heartening film of real humanity, it’s about making do in a crashing economy, but it’s also about growing old gracefully.
16. “Erin Brockovich” (Steven Soderbergh; 2000)
The Oscar-winning real-life courtroom tale with Julia Roberts’s feisty Erin vs. the power companies is a great empowerment story.
