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When film surrendered its mass-medium primacy to television in the '50s, it bequeathed to TV most of the female audience. For the next 40 years the small screen would be a comfortable home for women stars, from Lucy to Roseanne. Those actresses who stayed in films found themselves playing caricatures. Davis devolved into a harpy, sharing the horrific What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with Joan Crawford and a rat. Younger actresses took the bimbo route. Both groups were deprived of the intelligence of the '30s, the malefic grandeur of the '40s. Movies were now a man's world. If women wanted to survive as more than sluts or nutty aunts, they had to be as burly and aggressive as men.
The '90s has given us the butch heroine--at once babe, district attorney and driving-men-crazy. She can be a victim, in, say, Thelma & Louise, an outlaw fantasy in which the women's suicide is seen as a magnificent screw-you gesture. Or she can be a victor, in Waiting to Exhale, where most of the guys are so lame and preening that there's little triumph in outsmarting them. The set piece in both films was blowing up an automobile: sexual revenge as car-nage. But that was not nearly so explosive as the smoulder of Sharon Stone's sexual menace in Basic Instinct. In elevating or degrading the '40s femme fatale to pansexual sociopath status, Stone showed that a gorgeous woman's predatory stare can be as piercing as an ice pick.
Hollywood wants women to fit these stereotypes (even feminist stereotypes), if only to prove the rules of its game: that films must be tailored to the appetites of young men; that women will go to male-oriented movies but men can't be dragged to women's pictures; that an actress's bloom as a box-office icon (Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster) can soon fade, while the appeal of male stars (Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman) stays solid for decades.
This year's stats support that argument. Of the nine 1996 films that earned $100 million or more at the domestic box office, the No. 1 hit, Independence Day, is about three guys saving the world. Six other films are vehicles for men (Robin Williams, Tom Cruise, Connery, Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Travolta) who've been stars for at least a decade. That leaves two films whose top-billed actors are women. But even Helen Hunt wouldn't say she's the main reason for Twister's success. And Sandra Bullock, who has her name above the title in A Time to Kill, plays in support of hunk du jour Matthew McConaughey. It's a lousy year for movie women when the meatiest femme role--the comedy, the pathos, the earrings!--is Nathan Lane's in The Birdcage.
But to read only the current grosses is to see Hollywood with blinkers. Last year there were a handful of strong female roles in popular films, not just Waiting to Exhale but less reductive fare: Pocahontas, Dangerous Minds, While You Were Sleeping, The Bridges of Madison County, Waiting to Exhale, Clueless, The Net, Sense and Sensibility. First Wives is in the generous spirit of those films. It takes a subject whose painfulness might not automatically attract middle-aged females ("Now playing at a theater near you: your husband left you for a younger woman!") and cannily repackages it as cathartic comedy.