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PALIN, GIRL-POWER AND OBLIQUE ANTI-FEMINISM IN "THE WOMEN"

Back in September, I set out to write a piece comparing George Cukor's 1939 film "The Women" with Diane English's 2008 remake. Because English's version of "The Women" stayed in theatres for about a New York minute, that piece almost went by the wayside. Then along came Sarah Palin, a woman who is meant to be our proxy for female power, and I found myself unexpectedly dwelling on what I'd thought was a forgettable film. Chiefly, I was struck by how deeply antiquated English's film feels in comparison with the sly original. It's insipid take on "girl power" now feels all too pertinent.

In George Cukor's film, there are absolutely no men on screen, not even an image in a photograph or a voice on the telephone. You leave it thinking about Norma Shearer's impossibly dewy sweetness, Rosalind Russell's gift for nasty comedy, and how icily terrifying Joan Crawford was, even in her early 30s. That's not to say men didn't matter. The film's tagline was "It's All About Men!" and essentially the entire cast is either grousing, plotting or swooning over one man or another.

These are Park Avenue matrons whose husbands have made them not just comfortable, but cosseted; displays of male-generated wealth stand in for the male sex. But the utter removal of one sex puts a microscope on the other, and the results are dazzlingly genuine, even within the confines of a classic 1939 set where nothing looks real (no breezes blow through this picture).

The film was adapted from a play by Clare Booth Luce, who had enjoyed a front-row seat observing Manhattan's female society as wife to publisher Henry Robinson Luce. The screenplay is full of bitchy, back-biting, calculating women, ready to sell each other out at a moment's notice--"a glorious cat-clawing rampage", observed the New York Times film critic at the time. They love gossip. Sylvia (Russell) deliberately sends her supposed best friend Mary Haines (Shearer) to the same chatty manicurist who told her that Mary's husband is having an affair with a perfume saleswoman (Joan Crawford). Even motherly Edith, often mocked for her excessive fertility, delights in Mary's troubles (and arches her eyebrows at the cheap hand towels in Mary's bathroom). No one is immune; everyone judges, manipulates, connives.

In the new version of "The Women", written and directed by English (best known for creating the clever sitcom "Murphy Brown"), the role of Mary Haines is inhabited by Meg Ryan, America's sweetheart of the 80s and 90s. The radiantly luscious Eva Mendes is the perfume counter salesgirl who steals her husband. English has retained the gimmick of an all-female cast, despite some advice to the contrary (she rebuffed suggestions that it would be easier to finance with a big-name star as Mary's cheating husband).

But while in Cukor's film the female machinations were so well developed that we stop looking for men, in English's update the gimmick is the film's steadiest form of intrigue. When the action hits a busy New York street corner, I found myself panning the crowds in search of anyone with a penis (a perverse game of "Where's Waldo"). This distraction is welcome; without the gimmick the film is just "Sex and the City" without the fun or "Steel Magnolias" without the drama.

If a man were to enter English's set, it might signal at least a sign of real life. These women live in a rarefied world of multiple maids and luxurious country homes. Most of them work, although this Mary makes dresses for her daddy's company (like paper dolls for grownups). But they aren't thrown together by class structure, as Luce's women were. Instead they've chosen to be friends with each other, which means English doesn't want them being mean to each other. When this Sylvia (Annette Bening)--now "Sylvie"--betrays this Mary, it's not for the sport of the game. Rather, she's forced into it by a contrived twist involving her careerism. The modern-day Mary declares Sylvie's sell-out of their friendship a more severe blow than the discovery of her own husband's perfidy.

Yet all is swiftly forgiven, after a confrontation thoroughly suited to the Golden Age of Oprah, when we are all girlfriends forever. Within seconds, Mary and Sylvie's big fight/reunion scene dissolves into compliments, platitudes and confessions of inadequacy (cue the line "I'm a terrible mother"--today's version of small talk at school drop-off time). She wants us to feel that these two women can't live without each other. Ultimately, they decide their real foe is their shared desire to "have it all". The sacred sisterhood is preserved.

In contrast, back in the refreshingly awful world of 1939, Norma Shearer's Mary didn't bother making up with her Sylvia. Cukor's triumphant denouement gives us Mary employing the rumour mill to fight back. She is positively giddy about learning how to manipulate others. By the end of the film, it is as though she's finally become a woman in full, a realist, willing to compromise and strategise in order to defend her marriage. It's a cat-eat-cat world.

Cukor's satire was over-the-top, but it effectively captured how terrible women can be to each other. Was it anti-feminist? Hardly. Cukor was legendarily a woman's director; he really "got" women. It's worth rewatching the opening sequence of the film, in which women parade through a succession of manicurists, facials and bizarre beauty treatments. There's so much chatter on screen, an impenetrable din. It brought back vivid memories of standing outside a sorority rush party at my very southern university, realising how grateful I was to be outside that particular sisterhood. There's certainly mockery here, directed at the way women waste time indulging their insecurities, physical and emotional. But Cukor also celebrated our complexities: the way we talk to each other, the way we over-share, and the ways in which we can't, and shouldn't, all be lumped together. His Mary didn't need an undermining friend, she needed a backbone. And she got it--and most everything else she wanted in the end.

It's perhaps fitting that English's film, with its watered-down girl-power attitude, arrived in tandem with Sarah Palin's ascendancy. John McCain seemed to choose Palin as his running mate with the presumption that female voters would all unite behind anyone who smashed a glass ceiling, regardless of party (or, it seems, the nominated woman). He was counting on an unrealistic scenario of faux (and unpragmatic) "sisterhood", the kind peddled in English's film.

The reality is that the American election has women ready to tear each other's hair out. Many are reserving their harshest words for Palin, our supposed symbol of how far we have come. Just dip into the scathing opinion pieces about Palin's fashion makeover, or watch "The View", a daytime chat programme geared for women, which has descended into a frothy daily political battle between female co-hosts.

We are not all girlfriends now--and we needn't be. We are complicated and powerful. Cukor is surely smiling somewhere, recognising that the world's cast of women is still a complicated, fractious bunch.

Picture credit: "The Women", Picturehouse Entertainment

(Mary Pols is a film critic and the author of the memoir "Accidentally on Purpose: A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made" (Ecco/Harper Collins), coming out in paperback in the UK in March 2009 from Viking/Penguin.)