Bette Midler, the designated frump in The First Wives Club, stares at Goldie Hawn's body with mixed feelings: envy for its sleekness and disdain for the work needed to maintain it. All those hours logged on the Stairmaster: "You climb and you climb, and you don't get anywhere." Why, Midler might be referring to women movie stars and women's pictures. In Hollywood it's one step up, two steps back, and sometimes you fall off.
To stand in line outside a Santa Monica multiplex on a Monday afternoon waiting to see The First Wives Club is to see women climbing the movie Stairmaster and getting someplace. The queue is long and homogeneous. Nearly everyone is female; these are the ladies who lunch taking a movie aperitif. Inside, the audience laughs along with the gags about women's fear of aging ("If I give you one more face-lift," Dr. Rob Reiner warns Hawn, "you're gonna be able to blink your lips") that make the movie a more genteel version of the misogynistic She-Devil and Death Becomes Her. And the audience applauds when Midler, Hawn and Diane Keaton take comic revenge on their duplicitous mates. In movie theaters around the country, similar crowds registered similar approval for the movie--enough to set Hollywood to scratching its (male) head and to give women moviegoers cause to hope for more films like it.
Sixty years ago, no one needed hope; the screens teemed with movies about women. Strong women, saintly or desperate ones, but always smart. Greta Garbo drove men to their doom; Barbara Stanwyck did the same and went along for the ride. Carole Lombard traded quips and punches with her co-stars. Rosalind Russell ran giant corporations from her perch as executive secretary to some very soft plutocrats. Katharine Hepburn, a cool goddess, came to earth to cuddle with Spencer Tracy. Bette Davis strutted her sensationally neurotic hauteur. Joan Crawford played the unapologetic gold digger, which is how she leveled half a dozen other star actresses in The Women. These actresses played characters who didn't need to take revenge. They had sexual equality, emotional superiority.
Yet Hollywood was also attentive, as The First Wives Club is, to a brutal supposition in popular psychology: men tend to homicide, women to suicide. In the traditional view, this is the only heroic violence suitable for a lady--to die with dignity. In the 1932 Three on a Match, society wife Ann Dvorak leaves her loving husband for a small-time gambler, neglects her child and, realizing the error of her ways, kills herself. Best friend Joan Blondell marries the husband, and Bette Davis moves in as nanny. The 1937 Stage Door has an array of dazzlers (including Hepburn and Ginger Rogers) as young actresses angling for Broadway stardom. They fight over powerful men, choice roles and new stockings. And amid the lightning comedy, the most sensitive creature (Andrea Leeds), having lost a plum part, commits suicide.
In the '40s, with men off at war and women taking their place in the factories, Hollywood turned paranoid. Film noir made the black widow an embodiment of evil as seductive as she was destructive. What man wouldn't want to go to hell with Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice? What man wouldn't prefer hell to two days in a motel room with the spectacularly shrewish Ann Savage in Detour?