Bad Girls Go to Heaven: Hollywood’s Feminist Rebels

Hollywood has produced some of the most memorable bad girls and wicked women on-screen—from silent era’s infamous vamps to film noir’s femme fatales—but bad women do more than just entertain, particularly if we’re talking about the sweepingly emotional and excessively dramatic world of woman’s melodrama.

Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

 


This guest post by Emanuela Betti appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.


Hollywood has produced some of the most memorable bad girls and wicked women on-screen—from silent era’s infamous vamps to film noir’s femme fatales—but bad women do more than just entertain, particularly if we’re talking about the sweepingly emotional and excessively dramatic world of woman’s melodrama. The bad girls I will be discussing are different from the exotic vamps of the ‘20s and the dark femme fatales of film noir; while both these types have their own essence of “badness,” it’s the women in melodramas, specifically the woman’s film sub-genre from the 1930s through the 1950s, where you’ll find some of most unapologetic bad girls in cinema.

I will first explain why the vamp and film noir’s femme fatale are not as interesting, or at least not as groundbreaking compared to the bad woman in woman’s film. Although I’m personally fascinated by both archetypes, the vamp and femme fatale are “creatures of prey,” and that prey is always and inevitably a man. The femme fatale is in essence a selfish creature (this is most evident in the vamp, short for “vampire”) and their function is to extract every penny or remnants of a soul from the male character; in short, the purpose of the femme fatale is to cause a man’s downfall. Nothing wrong with that—but in this perspective, these female archetypes can hardly exist if not in relation to, or in the context of, a male-dominated world.

Olivia de Havilland as the twins in The Dark Mirror (1946)
Olivia de Havilland as the twins in The Dark Mirror (1946)

 

The femme fatale also exists in the woman’s film, but due to the nature of the genre, the archetype is in a very different position. The woman’s film is a sub-genre of the melodrama, and is strictly centered around women. The genre takes place within a woman’s world, and the bad woman exists in relation to other women. A common trope is the “double woman,” which manifest as a look-alike or as a sister/twin: a good example are the twins in A Stolen Life or The Dark Mirror. Whether they’re rivals or friends, sisters or twins, the trope of the “double woman” implies that femininity is split into two sides, and the bad woman embodies the negative side of that spectrum.

While film noir tells us that women are dangerous flytraps, the woman’s films give us insight into how Hollywood spoke to women. Specifically in the case of “double woman” films, in which we are presented with a good character and a bad character, the good one always prevailed. Evil or fallen women were not permitted to win, and by the movie’s end, they were subjected to punishment either through death or abandonment. The woman’s film was a genre that allowed female spectators to live vicariously through a bad woman—Bette Davis, Gene Tierney—but by the end, female audiences were taught that being bad doesn’t pay. The path of the good woman was the most prosperous, and only those who submit and surrender get the man. Basically, the “negative” side of femininity was associated with women who did not submit or conform, and Hollywood eagerly discouraged any identification with them.

Ellen Berent, a cold-hearted bad girl
Ellen Berent, a cold-hearted bad girl

 

I am always disappointed and sad when the bad woman, who I usually root for, is finally subdued or destroyed. Yet, the act of being punished brings up a lot of questions: why is she punished, and what for? Not all bad women were murderers, criminals—and most often, they’re biggest fault was just stubbornness.

Jeanine Basinger describes woman’s films as a genre of limitations: the typical environments that these women inhabit are department stores, prisons, but most often these films take place in the home. Although the women may inhabit a woman’s world, they were restricted on every side. Their personality, their environment, and their success are all dictated by a male-governed ideology: women’s place is in the home, and their only career is love and marriage. The bad woman breaks out of these imposed limit: Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven plays Ellen Berent—a sporty, outdoors type—completely defying the convention of a woman relegated to a domestic setting; Dorothy Malone plays Marylee, a promiscuous heiress in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind, dressed in hot pink and flirting with the confidence of a playboy. These characters are punished because according to a male-governed system they go against what is deemed “acceptable” in a woman: they’re aggressive, stubborn, and active (compared to the good girls—Ellen’s sister, Marylee’s romantic rival—who are passive, submissive, and compliant).

Dorothy Malone as Marylee in Written on the Wind (1956)
Dorothy Malone as Marylee in Written on the Wind (1956)

 

Another important aspect of these bad women is the fact that men cannot understand them, which makes them harder to pin down and subdue. It’s not uncommon to see the inclusion of psychoanalysis in woman’s films, with characters described as “mad” or “hysterical.” To pin down unexplainable behavior is an attempt to subdue and control it: we see this in Leave Her to Heaven, in which Ellen’s doctor attempts to understand her lack of maternal instincts; in Cat People, Irena’s aggressive sexuality is described as a supernatural occurrence. The medical gaze, in which a doctor attempts to ascribe a woman’s bad or unusual behavior as a result of mental illness, is very close to the idea of the male gaze. When a woman defies the male gaze, the medical gaze may attempt to explain and understand her, in an effort to “fix” her. As much as on-screen psychiatrists and analysts try to “help” the women, they always seem to fail, never able to pin-point why a woman would want to live outside a male-dominated system. So wanting to go horseback riding instead of cooking dinner meant the woman was evil. But was she, really? Or maybe she was just a woman who somehow managed to dodge every attempt at being domesticated.

Finally, bad girls in woman’s film are similar to femme fatales in some ways: they enjoy men, want men—but don’t really need men. Men often play marginal roles in the woman’s film, usually a romantic interest who is too often overwhelmed by the women’s personalities, and often fail to control the woman. In Jezebel, Bette Davis calls off her engagement numerous time, and always due to the fact that she’s too stubborn to submit to her fiancé’s idea of an “acceptable” idea of femininity. Jezebel, and Ellen, and Marylee are full-flesh women, and their existence is not defined by men—instead, their biggest conflict lies between maintaining their identity or giving it up for their man.

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The “bad girl” in woman’s film is not so much a wicked or evil person, but simply a woman who unapologetically inhabits her world, and the belief that she is ruler of that world is her biggest crime. In the end, her defeat is really a victory: she cannot exist in a world in which the rules are set by men. Her final demise leaves the men bitter, because they could never control the bad woman, and she never gave them the chance.

 


Emanuela Betti is a part-time writer, occasional astrologer, neurotic pessimist by day and ball-breaking feminist by night. She miraculously graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing, and writes about music and movies on her blog.

 

The Great Actresses: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for The Great Actresses Theme Week here.

Louise Brooks: A Feminist Ahead of Her Time by Victoria Negri

Brooks and her characters were powerful women, fighting for control of their lives. In Roger Ebert’s review of Pandora’s Box, he states, “Life cannot permit such freedom, and so Brooks, in her best films, is ground down—punished for her joy.” Her real life mirrored her characters, often being punished for her freedom and feminist power.


Ellen Page Is Like the Coolest Actress We Know, And She Doesn’t Even Have to Try by Angelina Rodriguez

Page explained that she has a sense of responsibility that compels her to be honest and ethical as a person and a public figure. This same integrity will help her to continue her dedication to playing strong, interesting, dimensional characters that speak to young women. She sets her standards high with her roles and looks for stories with uniqueness, depth, and a message.

The Unfinished Legacy of Pam Grier by Leigh Kolb

Grier’s legacy has lasted over four decades, but there’s something about her career that leaves me feeling unsettled, as if her filmography is indicative of larger (backward) social trends. She started out headlining action films–an amazing feat for a woman, much less a black woman in the early 1970s. A glance at a few of these films show incredibly feminist themes that are incredibly rare 40 years later. Her early films were groundbreaking, but nothing much was built after that ground was broken.


Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was able to ride the wave of art house popularity starting in the 80s when theaters were more likely to program subtitled films. He came to prominence in no small part because of his star, Carmen Maura who first gained the attention of U.S. audiences in ‘Law of Desire,’ Almodóvar’s 1987 film, as Tina, the transsexual actress who is the sister of the main character, the gay director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela).

From the feminist angle, Streep’s mold-breaking of the representation of women and her mark on scripts probably adds to her greatness in a way we can never completely measure because we can’t track it. One particular example worth mentioning is that the script for ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ did not originally explain why Joanna Kramer wants to leave Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and she fought the director Robert Benton on the script until the character is allowed to say why herself.


To say that Harris is a revelation in this film may be an understatement. It not only prepared her to tackle the complex layers of Winnie Madikizela a few years later, but it also proved yet again that she is able to take on a variety of different roles–from heroic to villainous. She solidified a sci-fi fan base with her totally badass performance in 28 Days Later, showed that she can steal scenes from 007 himself, and continues to surprise audiences in roles across all genres.


Another Side of Marilyn Monroe by Gabriella Apicella

Her return to Hollywood in the film version of William Inge’s play Bus Stop was again a chance to shun the glamorous armour of her gold-digger characters, to explore the role of a downtrodden saloon singer with ambitions above her abilities. Not only did her performance stun the film’s director, Joshua Logan, who called her the greatest actress he ever worked with, but it also left critics in no doubt as to her ability.


Pre-Code Hollywood: When the Female Anti-Hero Reigned by Leigh Kolb

We agonize over the lack of female anti-heroes in film and television as if women have never been afforded the opportunity to be good and bad on screen. It clearly wasn’t always this way. And in a time when the regurgitated remake rules Hollywood, perhaps it’s time for producers to dust off some old scripts from the 1920s and 1930s so we can get some fresh, progressive stories about women on screen.


Read more about them. Watch their films. Remember who and what has been too easily forgotten.


Great Kate: A Woman for All Ages by Natalia Lauren Fiore

Most of the nine films Kate and Spence did together feature battle-of-the-sex plots which, at certain points, blurred or even reversed the roles women and men typically played in marital or committed relationships. These plots suited Kate’s life-long image of herself as inhabiting both female and male traits, particularly in the wake of her older brother’s tragic death.


Reflections On A Feminist Icon by Rachael Johnson

Possessing mass and cult appeal, the bilingual, Yale-educated Jodie Foster has, moreover, been popular with both mainstream and indie audiences. Although the adult Foster fulfills conventional ideals of female beauty, she has never been a traditional Hollywood sex symbol. She has been both a figure of identification and desire. In many of her roles, she personifies female independence, heroism and resistance. As an actress, she brings a naturalism, intensity and integrity to her performances. She engages audiences both intellectually and emotionally.


Whatshername as a Great Actress: A Celebration of Character Actresses by Elizabeth Kiy

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A young woman–poised, talented, above all enthusiastic–performs a scene in acting class and is praised by the teacher. The teacher can’t say enough good things about the student, but the main thing she keeps going back to is, “I think you’d be a wonderful character actress!” Now, the student can’t help but beam about this, seeing a brilliant career flashing before her, her name up in lights. She steps back into the group and the woman sitting beside her whispers in her ear, “That’s what they call an actress who isn’t pretty.”

Pre-Code Hollywood: When the Female Anti-Hero Reigned

We agonize over the lack of female anti-heroes in film and television as if women have never been afforded the opportunity to be good and bad on screen. It clearly wasn’t always this way. And in a time when the regurgitated remake rules Hollywood, perhaps it’s time for producers to dust off some old scripts from the 1920s and 1930s so we can get some fresh, progressive stories about women on screen.

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Norma Shearer in The Divorcee

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on The Great Actresses.

An Upworthy post is making the rounds in which Shirley MacLaine, in 1975, is telling an interviewer that the disappearance of the Hays Code in the 1960s was when women stopped getting good, solid roles in Hollywood. While it’s an interesting observation–that if the bedroom was off-limits, filmmakers had to get creative–this viral meme is ignoring the crucial fact that before the Hays Code (or Hollywood Production Code) was enforced in 1934, women’s roles in Hollywood were complicated and women were allowed to be sexual, not just sexy, and have sexual agency.

A quick history:

Until 1930, states had their own regulatory/censorship policies that would deal with films.

In the 1920s, Will H. Hays (a Presbyterian elder who was Postmaster General, a former head of the Republican National Committee, and president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America for 25 years) started working on lists and regulations for the film industry to follow in the interest of “decency.”

In 1929, two male leaders in the Catholic church developed a “code of standards,” and studios were expected to adhere to it. The religious overtones in the “Code” (good must prevail over evil and strict rules about morality) were clear.

For five years, the Code had no “teeth,” and filmmakers still, for the most part, did what they wanted.

In 1934, however, the Production Code Administration (PCA) was formed, and all films released from July 1 onward were required to be approved by the PCA before release.

This was what Hollywood studios adhered to until 1968, when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) moved to a rating system, which is still in place today.

The years that spanned 1927 (when The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film with a synchronized soundtrack and dialogue, was released) and 1934 (when the Production Code was officially enforced) saw feature films that had themes and scenes that would seem shocking and progressive today.

In 1929, Norma Shearer starred in The Divorcee, and kicked off a five-year heyday for women in film. The excellent documentary, Complicated Women (based on the book by Mick LaSalle), delves into the actresses and films of this era. The actresses who brought these complex characters to life–including Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo (both of whom fought hard to play complex characters), Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck–would go on to act after the Code, but in roles that were much less daring and progressive. Seeing complex women on screen is essential for audiences to get realistic depictions of women, and of course, playing complex women allows great actresses to work to their fullest potential.

When female anti-heroes (rarely) make it on the big- or small-screen now, we act as if it’s revolutionary. However, if we look to film history–before religious white men got control–there is a strong precedent for the female anti-hero.

Simply looking at the IMDb descriptions of some of films from that era show us a great deal about the powerful stories that made it on screen during this time:

The Divorcee (1930, starring Norma Shearer): “When a woman discovers that her husband has been unfaithful to her, she decides to respond to his infidelities in kind.” (Shearer won the Academy Award for Best Actress for this role.)

thedivorcee
Norma Shearer in The Divorcee

Anna Christie (1930, starring Greta Garbo): “A young woman reunites with her estranged father and falls in love with a sailor, but struggles to tell them about her dark past.” (Anna Christie was a prostitute, but she is never “punished” for her past; her story ends happily.)

Red-Headed Woman (1932, starring Jean Harlow): “Lil works for the Legendre Company and causes Bill to divorce Irene and marry her. She has an affair with businessman Gaerste and uses him to force society to pay attention to her. She has another affair with the chauffeur Albert.” (Both the book and screenplay were written by women.)

Ex-Lady (1933, starring Bette Davis): “Although free spirit Helen Bauer does not believe in marriage, she consents to marry Don, but his infidelities cause her to also take on a lover.”

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Bette Davis in Ex-Lady

Female (1933, starring Ruth Chatterton): “Alison Drake, the tough-minded executive of an automobile factory, succeeds in the man’s world of business until she meets an independent design engineer.”

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Ruth Chatterton in Female

Baby Face (1933, starring Barbara Stanwyck): “A young woman uses her body and her sexuality to help her climb the social ladder, but soon begins to wonder if her new status will ever bring her happiness.”

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Baby Face

Midnight Mary (1933, starring Virginia Davis): “A young woman is on trial for murder. In flashback, we learn of her struggles to overcome poverty as a teenager — a mistaken arrest and prison term for shoplifting and lack of employment lead to involvement with gangsters…”

Queen Christina (1933, starring Greta Garbo): “Queen Christina of Sweden is a popular monarch who is loyal to her country. However, when she falls in love with a Spanish envoy, she must choose between the throne and the man she loves.” (The biopic–about Queen Christina of Sweden–features an on-screen portrayal of Queen Christina’s bisexuality, including a kiss between Queen Christina and her lady-in-waiting.)

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Greta Garbo, left, in Queen Christina

Torch Singer (1933, starring Claudette Colbert): “When she can’t support her illegitimate child, an abandoned young woman puts her up for adoption and pursues a career as a torch singer.”

Design for Living (1933, starring Miriam Hopkins): “A woman can’t decide between two men who love her, and the trio agree to try living together in a platonic friendly relationship.” (Note: things don’t stay platonic.)

These synopses are fascinating enough, and the fact that these films were released to popular and critical acclaim 80 years ago is amazing. These films are about complicated, complex women who are not punished for their sexuality or their pasts. These women have careers, these women are leaders, these women have agency. Furthermore, the actresses who portrayed these women truly starred in the films–they weren’t simply supporting male leads. Eighty years later, it’s rare to see a Hollywood film with a female character at the center of the action, much less a female anti-hero.

What the MacLaine sound bite is missing is that, while the Code kept women out of the bedroom, its religious and puritanical strictures equated goodness with subservience and purity. Depictions of homosexuality and interracial relationships were also scrubbed from Hollywood when the Code was enforced. From a feminist point of view, we moved backward when the Code, and even the MPAA ratings system, were enacted. There are still remarkable double standards regarding female sexuality on screen, and mass audiences typically have a hard time with female characters who don’t fit nicely into the virgin/whore dichotomy (since for years, that’s all we’ve really been exposed to). Male characters have always been allowed to be “good and bad,” but the Code (and in a sense, the MPAA), just like the religious dogma it reflected, needed women to be out of the bedroom or in the bedroom–never both without being punished.

We agonize over the lack of female anti-heroes in film and television as if women have never been afforded the opportunity to be good and bad on screen. It clearly wasn’t always this way. And in a time when the regurgitated remake rules Hollywood, perhaps it’s time for producers to dust off some old scripts from the 1920s and 1930s so we can get some fresh, progressive stories about women on screen again.

Recommended Viewing: Complicated Women, This Film is Not Yet Rated (available on Netflix)

Recommended Reading: “Remembering Hollywood’s Hays Code, 40 Years On,” by Bob Mondello at NPR; The Motion Picture Production Code (interactive website); The Motion Picture Production Code – 1930 (PDF); Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mick LaSalle; “Pre-Code films: the way we really were,” by Mick LaSalle

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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Motherhood in Film & Television: ‘The Great Lie’

The Great Lie (1941)
This is a guest post from Erin Blackwell.
My mother used to sit me down to watch movies in front of a small black-and-white TV in our Southern California living room, not far from Hollywood, where she’d spent the happiest years of her childhood. Watching movies was part of a wide-ranging curriculum of aesthetic exercises she assigned my brothers and me. Not just any movie. The classics from MGM, the comedies from Paramount, an occasional noir from Warners. I’ve never been able to simply watch a movie like a normal person. I’m always evaluating the design elements, the performances, the script. 
Bette Davis stars in The Great Lie
In 1941, when my mother was 17, the United States entered World War II and Warner Brothers released The Great Lie, starring Bette Davis and George Brent. Bette Davis was a great actress and George Brent was the only actor in Hollywood who hadn’t gone away to war. Unthinkable today that an actor would put his high-priced face in harm’s way but in 1941, the U.S. did not have a standing army, or a “volunteer” army of mercenaries, let alone private contractors. What was called “the war effort” included the publicity generated by the donning of uniforms by Hollywood stars, several of whom saw active duty. 
There are two scenes in The Great Lie that made an indelible impression on my teenage psyche. One involves crossdressing, the other involves food, and both express the anxiety attached to giving birth and the difficulties modern women have integrating this biological imperative into an otherwise blithely artificial lifestyle. But mostly, these two scenes depict powerful moments of emotional intimacy between women in which conventional gender roles go out the window. 
The Great Lie, despite its portentous title, was not part of the war effort, although George Brent’s character, Pete, dons a uniform right after his wedding and flies off on a secret mission to a South American jungle. Pete’s lackluster presence at movie’s start and extended absence during movie’s middle is characteristic of what was called “women’s films,” in which the man is merely a rag doll to be fought over by the real characters: female rivals who vie to possess him. 
Mary Astor plays Sandra
Mary Astor, whose name is one-third the size of George Brent’s (whose name is one-third the size of Bette Davis’s — whose name is alone above the title) on the original poster, is the pivot point of this romantic triangle. She’s better known for playing Brigid O’Shaughnessey opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, a truly great film released the same year. Astor’s particular cocktail of beauty, eroticism, class, emotivity, intelligence, weakness, and the febrile glamour synonymous with mental instability raise The Great Lie to the level of… what exactly? Something more exciting than it deserves to be, something operatic with the frisson of a tabloid. She won an Oscar for her performance. 
Astor plays Sandra, the internationally acclaimed concert pianist, whose manager (Grant Mitchell) refers to her as Madame Kovac. Unthinkable today that a concert pianist could feature as a love interest in a Hollywood film but in the 40s, classical music was part of the national dialogue and every kid in Brooklyn was trying to get to Carnegie Hall. Astor is believable as a concert artist, although the script by Leonore Coffee (revised on set by Davis and Astor) trades in clichés about the artist’s life. No matter. Astor brings an innate musicality to her scenes. Her voice, a rich contralto, is itself a stunning instrument. 
The opening credits roll over a series of tightly framed shots of a woman’s arms banging out Tchaikowsky’s Piano Concerto Number One on a Baldwin, backed by a healthy string section. The piano is muscular, the ascending chords weighty, rhythmic, obsessive. The whole sequence establishes the beating heart of passion which is the source of the great lie. (Those aren’t Astor’s arms, but we do get some choice glimpses of her banging away at the keyboard. She brings to it the conviction of a trained pianist.) 
The production values in this film, dynamically directed by Edmund Goulding, are uniformly excellent, from the supporting cast, to the sets, props, costumes and the kind of chiaroscuro lighting you only get from Warner’s. Watching it for the umpteenth time, I was struck by the pacing, how the camera patiently tracks the actors. This approach is futile when filming George Brent, who has little to give, but pays off with Mary Astor, who has the reactivity of uranium. And, of course, Davis knows exactly what to feed the camera at all times. Starting with her famous eyes. 
Maggie and Pete post-wedding
Exhibiting those characteristics considered essential to the life of a temperamental musician, Sandra marries Pete while they’re both on a drunken spree, but the marriage is annulled post-consummation when it’s revealed Sandra’s divorce from her previous husband wasn’t yet final. That frees a newly sober Pete to rush back into the arms of Maggie (Davis), his true love. They marry without delay but the rivalry continues when Sandra discovers she’s pregnant. The fetus is considered a powerful bargaining chip in her attempt to recapture her runaway husband. 
When Pete’s plane’s reported missing somewhere in the South American jungle, the great lie is concocted in the head of his wife Maggie, who sees a way to preserve Pete’s only known earthly remains — his DNA — by getting his ex-wife to carry his child to term. In a stunning surrogate switcheroo, it’s not the paternity but the maternity that’s going to be in question. Maggie shows up at Sandra’s Central Park apartment in full noir regalia: wide-body fur coat and oversized black hat. Sandra’s in haute bohemian chic: a stunning floorlength black dressing-gown. 
Maggie arrives at Sandra’s apartment in suddenly-noir lighting
Sandra leans back on her white satin bed, cowed by the interloper’s assertiveness. Maggie stands looking down at her and explains, “He left us two things in this world. I have his money. You might have his child. You’re extravagant. You’re a woman of the world, a public figure. Your piano, your success, they won’t go on forever. None of us gets younger. Let me insure your future. And you ensure mine.” 
Sandra asks, “Your future?” Maggie says, “His child. That could be my future. And I’d make you secure financially always.” Sandra considers this, then says softly, “Money.” Maggie says, “Yes.” Sandra shakes her head dismissively. “It’s so completely mad.” Exactly what the audience is thinking. 
Fifty minutes in, we’re at the heart of the matter: an extended showdown between virtuous wife Maggie and vicious baby mama Sandra. Implicit to the great lie is the thwarting of an abortion but that precise issue is never raised. This kid’s life only has meaning as an extension of Pete’s. That’s the one thing these two women can agree on. They love that man! 
Their car arriving at the Arizona safe house
This scene kicks off twenty minutes of high histrionic and low comedic bliss as Bette convinces Sandra to hide out in a clapboard house in the Arizona desert, surrounded by dust and cactus, serviced by an untraveled road. Scenes of delicious intimacy suddenly erupt as the actresses sink their teeth into their new roles-within-roles. None of this would work with lesser actresses playing for laughs or, worse, camp. There’s a same-sex erotic undercurrent a mile wide to these domestic scenes, under a thin frosting of glamour puss personality. Astor unleashes a volatile vulnerability which Davis parries with pugnacious charm. And I’m suddenly reminded of a similar set-up in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), where Bette Davis dominates the wheelchair-bound Joan Crawford. That’s the late-career, Grand Guignol version. 
Maggie deploys wifely know-how to tend the tempestuous Sandra, grown crankier in a terrycloth bathrobe through forced isolation, dietary restrictions, and the gratingly upbeat companionship of her arch rival. But is Maggie the wife or the husband? She runs errands for Sandra in town. She monitors her cigarette smoking, unsuccessfully. She even keeps her from eating a pickle during a middle-of-the-night fridge raid. This scene is unique in the canon, for the pathetic self-abasement Astor offers up in her quest for a ham sandwich. 
Maggie relents and cuts a slice of ham for Sandra
Awakened by a wind storm, Maggie’s attracted by the light under the door to the kitchen. She enters and finds Sandra, frozen in dread, like a mouse cornered by a cat. Maggie gestures to the table full of food. “Sandra. Ham, onion, butter. Everything the doctor said you couldn’t have. What have you got behind your back? Come on. Hand it over.” Sandra puts a jar on the table. “Pickles. Oh, Sandra.” Sandra answers, “Yes, pickles. I like them. I want them. I’m sick and tired of doing without things I want. You and that doctor with your crazy ideas of what I can and what I can’t eat. You’re starving me.” The martyred Sandra practically sings her lines. “I’m not one of you anemic creatures who can get nourishment from a lettuce leaf. I’m a musician. I’m an artist. I have zest and appetite and I like food. I’ve being lying awake in there thinking about food and now I’m going to have it.” So Maggie gives in and makes her a sandwich. 
Maggie alone on the deck, awaiting the birth of the baby
The greatest transgressive thrill comes when the country doctor arrives to deliver the baby. Maggie’s prowling around in men’s slacks and loafers, odd man out at this female ritual. When the doctor says he’s used to having the father around, nervously wondering when the baby’ll be born, he’s describing Maggie. Then he closes the door to the bedroom, shutting her out of this women’s mystery. Virile Maggie can’t sit still but goes out onto the deck, alone in the night, smoking and pacing like a guy until that universal signal, a baby’s cry, summons her back inside. Women, too, can be fathers! She enters the bedroom only long enough to eyeball Junior. This baby is an abstract goal for Maggie and Davis is not a convincing mom. 
Sandra playing Chopin, dressed to impress
I don’t think it’ll spoil the movie for you to reveal that Pete is not dead and that his resurrection as a plot point reignites the women’s rivalry. The Great Lie is nothing if not a primer in how to get melodramatic mileage out of a baby. That’s when Pete surprises us all by declaring that he prefers a childless Maggie to a babied-up Sandra. Like the judgement of Solomon, this remark reveals the identity of the “true” mother, Maggie, who, while not the biological parent, is the one who wants to keep the kid. To cover her humiliation, Sandra sits down at the baby grand and starts banging out the same concerto we heard under the opening titles. We’re back where we started. 
Violet (Hattie McDaniel) leads the celebration
The one big glaring no-no smack in the middle of The Great Lie is Hattie McDaniel’s reprise of her role of Mammy from Gone With the Wind (1939). They’ve changed her name to Violet, but her function is the same. Treating Maggie the way she treated Scarlett O’Hara (a role Davis famously fought for and lost to Vivienne Leigh) only makes sense within a regressive, racist fantasy. It’s mind-boggling to watch the scenes of happy blacks celebrating their mistress’s wedding. Did anything remotely resembling that world exist in 1941? Because it sure doesn’t exist now. But then, The Great Lie is a time capsule full of outmoded conventions. Which is what makes it so fascinating.


Erin Blackwell reviewed films for the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco. She just finished writing a play. Her blog is Pinkrush.com.