ABSTRACT
In the pages of Picturegoer in the early 1950s, the critic Margaret Hinxman considers a new British release It Started in Paradise and mulls over the various elements that make it a ‘woman’s picture’, citing the importance of qualities such as visual splendour (and indirect encouragement to go shopping in emulation of said splendour), feminine conflict, female star performance and handsome heroes before finally deciding that ‘dramatic intensity’ is the distinguishing feature of the species. In its attempt to get to grips with the conventions of this particular genre, Hinxman’s article pre-empts a very sizeable body of academic literature engaged in the same task from the 1970s onwards. One of the earliest examples was Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape, which queried the idea that the pejorative industry category of ‘woman’s picture’ offered nothing more than ‘softcore emotional porn for the frustrated housewife’. Instead she tentatively celebrated a filmic form in which ‘the woman – a woman – is at the center of the universe’ for a change (1974: 155), drawing attention to powerful performances by actresses such as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Margaret Sullavan, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Fontaine in movies dealing with the grand themes of ‘sacrifice, affliction, choice, competition’ (1974: 163). Scholarly interest in the woman’s picture continued into the 1980s, part of a
growing feminist interest in ‘gynocentric’ cultural forms such as soap opera and romantic fiction (Kuhn 1984; Modleski 1984; Brunsdon 1986; Doane 1987b; Radway 1987). With their unabashed courtship of the female cinema goer, woman’s films posed an interesting challenge to psychoanalytic theories of cinema
spectatorship which had hitherto conceptualised the gaze as inflexibly male. The very nomenclature of the genre, as Mary Ann Doane pointed out, ‘stipulates that the films are in some sense the “possession” of women and that their terms of address are dictated by the anticipated presence of the female spectator’ (1987a: 284). However, this is not to say that the woman’s film is necessarily a progressive or proto-feminist genre. Unsurprisingly, many critics have taken issue with the gender ghetto-ism implicit in the generic label ‘woman’s film’ (pointing out the lack of any masculine equivalent, the ‘man’s picture’) and have questioned the automatic assumptions about women’s cinematic preferences that such categorisation seemed to entail. In 1949, British critic Catherine De La Roche complained that in film marketing ‘you will find that sentimentality, lavish and facile effects, the melodramatic, extravagant, naively romantic and highly coloured, the flattering, trivial and phoney – these are the elements in pictures, whatever their overall qualities, that are supposed to draw women’ (De La Roche 1949: 27). A few years later, Eleanor Wintour, occasional critic for Tribune, went even further in her angry dismissal of a special category of films just for women:
If the frustrated female audience is really so important to the film producers, can they not give them special showings as they do of films for small boys? Screen them on Saturday afternoons at reduced prices, and frankly call them Ladies’ Afternoons. Adults of both sexes could then avoid them as they avoid the Saturday morning cowboy films.
