I’ve seen 1939’s The Women approximately 20,000 times, give or take, still it’s one of the few movies I always watch whenever it’s on TCM.  (Despite the fact I own the DVD.)  Though back in 1939 the trailer promoted it as “The Women – and it’s all about men”, this is not true.  While men, “the stinkers”, are certainly a catalyst and focal point of much of the action, in a cinematic world pretty much exclusively devoted to Westerns, action pictures and romantic dramas and comedies including or dominated by men, The Women was an anomaly with an all-female cast.  (They claimed even the dogs were bitches.)  And what females!  The movie stars an estrogen arsenal including Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Mary Boland, Marjorie Main, Butterfly McQueen, Ruth Hussey, Virginia Grey, Virginia Weidler, Lucille Watson and a host of others.  Everyone is great, including smaller stand-out parts* like Dennie Moore as the gossipy manicurist and Muriel Hutchison as the Haines family’s maid. (#JungleRed)

The central plot involves popular Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) putting up with then not putting up with husband Stephen Haines’ affair with scheming shop girl Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford).  Early on in the movie we’re introduced to Mary’s loving daughter, cynical mother, and a bevy of friends including an innocent newlywed, a sharp-tongued lesbian author, and a woman with more daughters than she can handle.  We also meet Rosalind Russell in a breakout performance as Sylvia Fowler, a supremely bitchy “friend” who salivates with schadenfreude when she learns Mary’s husband is having an affair.  She makes sure Mary, and all Mary’s friends, hear of his infidelity, and even goes so far as to clumsily check out Stephen’s paramour at the perfume counter where she works. (#SummerRain)

After an oddly inserted fashion show (a color sequence in a black-and white movie – it includes a monkey in a “Beau Geste-y” cellophane hat, OK?), Mary confronts Crystal in a dressing room (with waaay more self-control than I can stomach).  Apparently, keeping mum while waiting for Stephen to end the affair was not the move.  (Oh, really?!?!?)  Stephen has put Crystal up in some fancy apartment and she’s buying a s—tload of expensive clothes and lingerie.  As Mary leaves the dressing room, she delivers what she thinks will be a real mic-dropper, “May I suggest if you’re dressing to please Stephen, not that one.  He doesn’t like such obvious effects.”  Nice try Mary, but Crystal wins with her sick burn of a retort: “Thanks for the tip.  But whenever Stephen doesn’t like anything I’m wearing, I take it off.”  (Fashion aside: Norma’s gorgeous black dress has chiffon going across her upper arms because the general feeling seemed to be that Norma’s arms were ‘too chubby”.  I happen to like Norma’s full upper arms and think they’re her sexiest feature.  But then, I’m not Adrian.)

There’s a scene where Rosalind Russell and Joan Fontaine take a private exercise class that in many ways is the most hilariously antiquated thing in the film, and then Mary is “on the train to Reno”.  (Reno, Nevada was apparently where weller-to-do women went to get quicker divorces.)  Mary is joined on the train by Peggy (Joan Fontaine) and my two favorite characters in the film: Mary Boland as the Countess De Lave, and Paulette Goddard as Miriam Aarons.  Boland kills it as a wealthy, giddy and somewhat boy-crazy femme d’un certain âge whose love for champagne is only exceeded by her love for love (“L’amour, l’amour! Toujours l’amour!”)  I’ve always loved what she wears at the ranch in Reno: jeans, cowboy boots, bandana, plaid western shirts, and studded accessories, all worn with multiple strings of pearls.  The style has had a lifelong impact on my own wardrobe.  Meanwhile, Paulette’s character has been a role model for me ever since I can remember.  Smart, streetwise, and a sensitive, caring and loyal friend, ready to use her acidic tongue in their service.  (“You’re passing up a swell chance honey.  Where I spit darling, no grass grows ever!”)  In a Dame Hall of fame, Miriam Aarons would be at the very top, if she hadn’t gone and married Sylvia’s ex-husband, Howard Fowler.  (She clearly didn’t marry him for love, and anyone who could have even dated Sylvia Fowler is obviously a pill of some sort.  Though Miriam does say she’s giving Howard a reconstruction job that outdoes the Hoover Dam’s.)

Which brings us to the big catfight.  Would any movie about the “fairer sex’s” spectrum of bitchiness leave a physical fight out of the palette?  Sylvia ends up at the Reno ranch and when it turns out her husband is leaving her for Miriam (NO ONE can blame him), a tussle ensues, with Paulette ending up in undies with Sylvia’s teeth marks on her leg.  (“Pretty well matched, ain’t they?” quips Marjorie Main.)  Rosalind’s performance is fantastic throughout the movie, and she doesn’t hold back when Sylvia then has a major meltdown, with a tantrum that exposes her nasty feelings toward Mary – and most women in general.  (The movie came out the same year as Gone With the Wind, and I would not want Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar taken away from her, but how Ms. Russell didn’t get a nomination for Best Supporting Actress I will never know.  In fact, when you think of her turns in His Girl Friday, Gypsy, Mame, Picnic and lots of other movies, it’s a crime she never won a competitive Oscar.)

Countess De Lave ends up marrying Buck, the singing cowboy she met on the Reno ranch.  But as Buck would have it, the Countess’s cowboy is carrying on with Crystal, who is now married to Stephen Haines.  Sylvia in now all BFF-y with Crystal, in a whole ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ kinda way.  (Chicks, man.)  We learn about the friendship, the affair with Buck, and how Mary’s young daughter (Virginia Weidler) is no slouch in the shade department herself in a scene that takes place in Crystal’s ah-MAY-zing bathroom.  I know, I know, we’re supposed to think it’s tacky and ridiculous, and yes, it is.  But it’s also, I think the phrase is, da bomb!  The bathtub!  The vanity table!  The Lucite bathtub tray, the towels, the glass shelves, the satin pillow, the private phone!  (The moral: golddigging totally pays off!)  We also learn that Stephen is miserable and unhappy with his shallow shrew.  (Good!  And duh!)

Everything comes to a climax when Mary learns that her ex is unhappy, and for reasons I WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND she’s eager to win him back.  (We’ve already been told earlier in the film that Mary has lots of men after her, so why she wants this lying, secretive, unfaithful louse of a man back is beyond me, and I’m guessing almost every woman who watches the movie.)  Right after learning that Stephen’s unhappy and Crystal is cheating, minutes later, Mary gets dolled up to go to a nightclub and hatches a plan to out Crystal’s affair with Buck in public.  (Look, just go with it.)  With several women’s help, including the restroom attendant, Buck and Crystal’s relationship is exposed.  Norma has outmaneuvered Joan, though Joan wins in the two ways that matter.  While supposedly Norma has vixened out for the occasion in gold lamé, Joan’s sparkly midriff-exposing gown crushes every movie dress EVER.  Crawford’s Crystal also gets one of the best exit lines in cinema history: “There’s a name for you ladies, but it’s not used in high society…outside of a kennel.”  (Trust me, a ‘bitch’ reference was a big deal in 1939.)  Meanwhile, poor Norma has one of the corniest exits in movie history: We see her run to get back to her ex, arms outstretched in a gesture too over-the-top for Our American Cousin.  (George, what were you thinking?!?)

Originally a 1936 Broadway play by Clare Booth Luce, apparently The Women’s theatrical script was too outré for Hollywood censors, so screenwriters Jane Murfin and Anita Loos wrote a censor-friendly version.  Though most of the action is related to relationships with the off-stage men, The Women absolutely passes the Bechdel Test.  To pass the Bechdel Test, a movie must have at least two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.  (If this sounds like a low bar to you, you weren’t paying close attention to most movies made in the latter half of the 20^th century.)  While many of the friendships are catty and unsupportive by today’s standards, as a classic movie aficionado, I can’t tell you how unusual, refreshing, and even exciting it is to experience a movie without men.  The Women includes a panoply of featured females.  We’ve got goody-goodies, smart-alecky dames, wives, mothers, daughters, innocents and cynics, women who get by by being beauties, women who get by by being bitches.  Women who are looked over, women who are overlooked.  We meet wealthy women and their maids.  Manicurists, models, women who’ve been through the mill (Marjorie Main’s character’s sad story).  Another rarity, we also see an array of relationships between women: mother-daughter, old friends, new friends, the camaraderie (and rivalries) that come from women working together, living together, struggling together.  The way women have fun together when men aren’t around, and the way women let loose, let their hair down, get honest, and sometimes get down and dirty when men aren’t in the room.

Classic movie lovers, if you haven’t seen 1939’s The Women yet, I whole-heartedly recommend you give it a try.  If you’ve only seen the truly horrible 2008 re-make with Meg Ryan, do not let that deter you.  Intent on replacing the “mean-spiritedness” of the 1930s versions with modern “feminist sensibilities”, the movie SUCKS.  The whole point of The Women is its light and delightful bitchiness. The movie is called The Women, not “All Women”.  While many of the mores and messages of the movie are outdated (did I mention how CUH-RAZY it is that Mary goes back to Stephen?), are we women all that advanced if we have to live up or down to every portrayal?  Just as I don’t expect men to be brave cowboys and don’t want them to be reckless Top Bros in real life the way they are in reel life, I don’t think a fun movie with some catty characters is setting our sex back 100 years.

For people who love old movies, who love great actresses, witty scripts, cool clothes and decadent bathrooms, you can’t do much better than 1939’s The Women.  And as many times as I’ve seen it, I will absolutely watch it again. And again…and again.

*And if you’re a total old movies geek like me, there are itty-bitty bit parts for familiar faces like Theresa Harris, Hedda Hopper, Dorothy Sebastian, Lillian Bond, Natalie Moorhead, Margaret Dumont, Aileen Pringle, and Peggy Shannon.