British Women's Cinema

Melanie Bell, Melanie Williams, Melanie Bell, Melanie Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415466967
• eBook ISBN: 9781135231927
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

British Women's Cinema examines the place of female-centred films throughout British film history, from silent melodrama and 1940s costume dramas right up to the contemporary British 'chick flick'.

1 The hour of the cuckoo
Reclaiming the British woman’s film

Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams

Yes, but what makes a woman’s picture? Is it a fabulous fashion show, decked out in Technicolor – and guaranteed to make any woman view her last year’s good tweed with distaste? Is it a highly strung yarn of feminine conflict with All About Eve-ish undertones? Is it a dominating female star performance? Or is it a trio of handsome heroes, all amorously inclined and romantically involved? It Started in Paradise is all this, but something more. Personally, I’m inclined to think it’s that something more that makes this tale of an ambitious woman and a fashion house so successfully yet so simply a woman’s picture. Dramatic intensity is the nearest I can get to it in print.

(Hinxman 1952: 12)

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.

(Wintour 1955)

Figure 1.1 Fabolous fashion, feminine conflict, dramatic intensity: Kay Kendall and Jane Hylton in It Started in Paradise, directed by Compton Bennett (1952).
Source: The Steve Chibnall Collection

Moreover, the pleasures of woman’s pictures are often masochistic ones, delighting in feminine agony, and the films frequently close on a conservative note, with the heroine safely ensconced in a traditional female role in spite of what adventures may have gone before. Yet the woman’s film is above all else a Janus-faced genre which is simultaneously complicit with and critical of the gender status quo. In spite of attempts at narrative closure, woman’s films are frequently riddled with contradictions that cannot be contained, and in fact, as Laura Mulvey has argued of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, the value of such a form for feminist critics ‘lies in the amount of dust the story raises along the road, a cloud of over-determined irreconcilables which put up a resistance to being neatly settled in the last five minutes’ (Mulvey 1989: 40).

One of the key issues for scholars of the woman’s film has been the question of where to draw the precise perimeters of a genre variously thought of ‘as escapist entertainment for women, simply as films that men do not like, as examinations of capable, independent female characters and their empowerment, as emotional “tearjerkers”, as tales of female bonding, and as the antithesis to male-orientated action films’ (Hollinger 2008: 225). Often considered alongside or as a sub-section of melodrama (as in the 1987 essay collection Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film) because of a shared concern with effect and pathos, the woman’s film is defined by Maria LaPlace (in the above collection) as being ‘distinguished by its female protagonist, female point of view and its narrative which most often revolves around the traditional realms of women’s experience: the familial, the domestic, the romantic – those arenas where love, emotion and relationships take precedence over action and events’ (LaPlace 1987: 139): a useful encapsulation of the standard definition of the genre. However, Janine Basinger has suggested a more catholic categorisation which can find room for films such as ‘Rosalind Russell’s career comedies, musical biographies of real-life women, combat films featuring brave nurses on Bataan, and westerns in which women drive cattle west’ (Basinger 1993: 7) alongside the more familiar romances and melodramas. Basinger finally settles on a pluralistic working definition of the woman’s film as simply ‘a movie that places at the center of its universe a female who is trying to deal with the emotional, social, and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the fact that she is a woman’ (20).

This collection of essays will mobilise Basinger’s admirably open definition of the woman’s film, originally formulated in relation to classic Hollywood, but apply it to the very different national context of British cinema, in the hope of bringing to light a parallel heritage of British woman’s films, perhaps less well known than their Hollywood counterparts but no less significant. These range from the female-centred dramas of silent British cinema right through to the contemporary British ‘chick flick’, covering the work of actresses from Mabel Poulton to Keira Knightley, and literary inspirations ranging from Ethel M. Dell to Helen Fielding; films that have performed the same function as their American cousins – ‘to articulate female concerns, angers, and desires, to give substance to a woman’s dreams and a woman’s problems’ (Basinger 1993: 36) – but imagined within a British cinematic consciousness. The contributors to the collection deploy various methodologies in their respective chapters but they are linked in their common aim to re-address the question Margaret Hinxman first asked her readers back in 1952 – what makes a woman’s picture – and what does it mean when (as with It Started in Paradise) the woman’s picture is also a British picture?

The woman’s film and British cinema

As we have seen, the focus has tended traditionally to fall on Hollywood in critical discussion of the genre, with substantial attention paid to Stella Dallas (1937), Rebecca (1940), Now, Voyager (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and the work of émigré directors Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls. In spite of the existence of British films such as the female-centred, fashion-orientated, dramatically intense It Started in Paradise, the woman’s film has rarely been seen as an inherently British genre. In one of the few pieces of academic writing to examine this phenomenon (updated for this collection), Justine Ashby (writing as Justine King) suggests why ‘British’ and ‘woman’s film’ seem to have been incompatible terms:

The conceptualisation of the ‘typically English film’ constantly seems to attract the ideologically loaded epithet ‘restrained’ (which reflects not only a middle-class bias but, I would argue, a masculinist bias too) whereby demonstrative displays of ‘excessive’ emotionality – worst of all, tears – are regarded as inappropriate, both on and off screen. It is, then, an easy enough matter to see why the woman’s film might be regarded as something of an unwelcome cuckoo-in-the-nest here. For, despite twenty years or more of sustained critical attention which has repeatedly demonstrated the aesthetic and ideological complexities of the genre, the woman’s film still carries the taint of triviality, emotional excessiveness and brash Hollywood populism. In short, it might well be considered as rather ‘un-British’.

(King 1996: 218–19)

Back in the 1940s, the association of the woman’s film with triviality, excessiveness and brashness stood uncontested, and as a result British films clearly identifiable as woman’s pictures, such as the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s, suffered extreme critical derision at the time of their release. For instance, the Sunday Graphic’s review of Caravan (1946) suggested that ‘to enjoy it, you need to have a mind that throbs to every sob of the novelette and a heart that throbs to every exposure of Stewart Granger’s torso’ (quoted in Harper 1987: 168); a damning dismissal that simultaneously aligns lowbrow culture (the novelette), excessive emotion (the sobbing), intellectual vapidity (a throbbing mind), bodily thrills (a throbbing heart) and inappropriate female desire sparked by a bare male chest – a potent stew of misogynist assumptions if there ever was one.¹ Gainsborough films, populated by lively heroines and dashing heroes, usually showed scant regard for the niceties of historical accuracy, preferring instead to use the exoticism of the past to ‘usher women into a realm of female pleasure’ (Harper 1994: 122). The visual lushness of the films often prompted imitative behaviour, with women apeing the look of their favourite heroines: ‘Margaret Lockwood’s beauty spot was something new, we all started to add them on with eye pencil’; ‘My mother, like many others, bought the fashionable “Wicked Lady” style hat’ (quoted in Thumim 1992: 167).² Further proof of their psychological influence is provided by their appearance in cinema-goers’ dreams, as recorded in J. P. Mayer’s 1946 book Sociology of Film in which subjects recalled oneiric visions of female instability and male brutality indebted to Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944) and The Man in Grey (1943) (cited in Harper 1987: 189–90). The threat they posed to rationality was enough to have them relegated to outer darkness in the British critical milieu of the 1940s with its emphasis on realist ‘quality’ cinema (Ellis 1996), even though it was (ironically) also the source of their later critical rehabilitation from the 1980s onwards (Aspinall and Murphy 1983; Harper 1994; Cook 1996) when they played an important role, along with Hammer horror, in the reconfiguration of British cinema and the rediscovery of significant traditions other than reticent restrained realism in its history.

However, Ashby discerns a further disavowal of a native tradition of British women’s cinema. While some woman’s pictures are openly disparaged, other potential candidates for woman’s film status are not recognised or categorised as such due to ‘a peculiarly skewed and selective characterisation which fails to take account of British cinema’s sustained investment in melodramatic emotionality’, and hence many female-centred films like Millions Like Us (1943), Two Thousand Women (1944), A Taste of Honey (1961), The L-Shaped Room (1962), Jane Eyre (1970) and A Room with a View (1985) find themselves ‘swept under the umbrella of other film movements or genres (the wartime morale film, the New Wave film, the “quality” literary adaptation) in order to fit them, however reductively, into a dominant scheme of national cinema’ (King 1996: 219). If one returns to British cinema with Ashby’s revisionist schema in mind, many other instances of potential woman’s pictures spring to mind, often from the heart of the British cinema canon; Brief Encounter (1945), for instance, is an example of ‘quality’ realist cinema but it is also a masterpiece of ‘melodramatic emotionality’ (Ashby’s phrase) and ‘dramatic intensity’ (Hinxman’s phrase) with a very ‘un-British’ soundtrack of pounding Rachmaninov. It features a woman at the centre of its universe (and in control of its voice-over narration) and focuses on what Janine Basinger deems ‘the major action of a woman’s film: making a choice’ (1993: 19), in this case between untrammelled passion and marital fidelity. The woman’s choice also lies at the heart of The Red Shoes (1948), a film more frequently discussed in terms of the authorship and aestheticism of Powell and Pressburger (represented on screen by the diabolical impresario Lermontov) than the dilemma of its heroine Vicky, who must choose between fulfilment in her private life or her career; a typical woman’s film conflict. It’s not that either film has been mistakenly mis-categorised as anything other than a woman’s film, merely that placing them in a continuum of British woman’s films permits another way of interpreting them. In short, such films are not solely woman’s films but they are also woman’s films, and to fail to recognise that means ignoring a large part of their substance and their appeal.

It should be noted that in non-academic discussions of cinema, there is no suggestion that the woman’s film is somehow ‘un-British’, and a number of more populist film books happily include many British productions in their discussions of woman’s films alongside Hollywood’s output. For instance, Samantha Cook’s Rough Guide to Chick Flicks gives honourable mentions to the 1940s classics Black Narcissus (1947), Brief Encounter, The Red Shoes and The Wicked Lady (1945) as well as more recent favourites like Bend it like Beckham (2002), Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) along with Merchant Ivory films and Richard Curtis rom-coms (Cook 2006). In addition, Jo Berry and Angie Errigo’s Chick Flicks: Movies Women Love name-checks many of these and adds the bio-pics Dance With a Stranger (1985), Elizabeth (1998), Iris (2002), Mrs Brown (1997), Odette (1950) and That Hamilton Woman (1941), the buddy movies Career Girls (1997), Girl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The hour of the cuckoo: Reclaiming the British woman’s film
• 2 Pictures, romance and luxury: Women and British cinema in the 1910s and 1920s
• 3 ‘Twenty million people can’t be wrong’: Anna Neagle and popular British stardom
• 4 The Hollywood woman’s film and British audiences: A case study of Bette Davis and Now, Voyager
• 5 Ingénues, lovers, wives and mothers: The 1940s career trajectories of Googie Withers and Phyllis Calvert
• 6 A landscape of desire: Cornwall as romantic setting in Love Story and Ladies in Lavender
• 7 ‘A prize collection of familiar feminine types’: The female group film in 1950s British cinema
• 8 Swinging femininity, 1960s transnational style
• 9 The British women’s picture: Methodology, agency and performance in the 1970s
• 10 ‘The Hollywood formula has been infected’: The post-punk female meets the woman’s film – Breaking Glass
• 11 ‘It’s been emotional’: Reassessing the contemporary British woman’s film
• 12 Not to be looked at: Older women in recent British cinema
• Selective filmography