Women in Film Term Paper

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THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN FILM:
HIS GIRL FRIDAY, SEMI-TOUGH
&
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER

The history of women in the cinema can be traced back to the early days of film production, beginning ca. 1896 with films by director Alice Guy Blache, such as "The Cabbage Fairy" and "The Bewitched Fianc?." With the advent and popularity of the so-called "silent era" of film production, women began to be depicted as various stereotypes, such as "damsels in distress," weak-minded, timid city girls and impoverished "white trash," while men played an overwhelming majority of lead roles, usually as heroic figures who rescue these "damsels" from a plethora of dangerous situations. In a study of one hundred films released between 1930 and 1940, part of the "Golden Age" of American cinema, "eighty percent focused on the love/hate of a man with a good/bad girl, while fifty percent had the good/bad girl opposing another bad girl" (Doane 134).
Likewise, another study showed that between 1930 and the 1970's, four types of roles for women were dominant in the American cinema-first, "The Pillar of Virtue," a good example being Hattie McDaniel as the morally stout housemaid in 1939's Gone With The Wind; second, the "Glamour Girl" like the sex goddess Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or the German "bombshell" Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus; third, the usually sexually frustrated "Emotive Woman" such as the sexual vixen Elizabeth Taylor in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and lastly the "Independent Woman," two prime examples being Katherine Hepburn in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and Jane Fonda, the stalwart prostitute in Klute.
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In the 1950's, when cinema began to "reaffirm male dominance and female subservience by showing women as mere sex objects" (Manchel 235), the contempt generated by film producers for showing strong, powerful women was at its peak, yet by
the mid 1970's this had evolved into pure sensationalism by subverting women into true
sexual objects with a focus on their sexual appetites and physical attributes.

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In contrast, by the mid 1960's, the feminist movement in America had begun to be greatly concerned with how women were being portrayed in the cinema. Several important studies have shown that women were restricted to motherly family roles while men were shown to be masters of their own destinies. Ally Acker points out that "men were employed, had careers and were doing something outside of the home" (257) as contrasted with women who were totally dependent on the strengths and abilities of their male partners.
In relation to the three films as examples of old and new roles for women in the cinema, namely His Girl Friday (1940), starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, Semi-Tough (1977) with Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh and Flirting With Disaster (1996), starring Ben Stiller and Patricia Arquette, the movie genre of the "film noir" seems most appropriate as a focal point for this discussion of women in film. This genre was "made up of thrillers produced in the 1940's and 50's, shot in black and white, with female stars who used their attractiveness to manipulate men" (Doane 188). Film noirs like Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck as a manipulative married woman and Sunset Boulevard starring Gloria Swanson as a washed-up, dominating silent film star, are good examples of how leading ladies ensnared leading men via their relentless attempts to
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"satisfy their own desires which often threatened the stable roles of marriage, family and female submissiveness" (Manchel 174).
However, recent feminist views have maintained that the women in these….....

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