A Film Canon

The Women fetishises upper-class feminine spaces (beauty parlour, department store, boudoir), obsessions (makeup, clothing, diets, interior decoration), and character types (women, females, old maids), condensing them into a sickly medium, part perfume and part nail polish remover, that thrives on destructive speculation. At its heart is Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell), knitting gossip around gentle Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) and her husband's mistress (Joan Crawford), while delivering her pronouncements with a rapidity that both allows her to insert the most outrageous barbs into the midst of apparently sympathetic conversations and, more ingeniously, to imbue them with an autonomy that decreases her accountability, as if gossip were a parasite, or pathogen. Yet this outrageousness masks a fairly conservative subtext. Just as adultery is construed as the male equivalent of gossip - that is, as a process of self-invention, or at least distraction - so is it imbued with the same autonomy, and figured as something that simply 'happens', rather than something for which the perpetrator should be held accountable. This, in turn, creates a pervasive anti-divorce agenda that sits uneasily with the apparent self-sufficiency of Cukor's female universe, itself reinforced by the stringent policy of an all-female cast, extending to children, animals, and even the paintings and magazine illustrations that pervade Cedric Gibbons' production design. This may explain the film's cult status as a gay classic, since it ensures that heterosexual masculinity is both everywhere and nowhere, constantly invoked in a way that defamiliarises and removes it to an exotic, erotic distance.