# On View: The Women **URL:** **By** David Brudnoy **Published:** April 1, 1981 --- “Americans don’t like strong women and American movies don’t portray what American moviegoers don’t like.” What does woman want? asked Dr. Sigmund Freud. To be tougher than nails, said Dr. Robin Cook, the Boston ophthalmic surgeon who sat down to study the elements of the novel and came up sometime later with _Coma_ (1977) and, last year, with _Sphinx_. Robin Cook’s horror story of a sinister traffic in human organs struck to the core of many people’s queasiness about the unsettled question, When does death occur?—_vide_ the Karen Anne Quinlan case. And along the road to making Dr. Cook a very affluent young man indeed it also set back, at least temporarily, the cause of transplant donor-ship. _Coma_ was a super quick-read novel and in 1978 it became a stylish, intriguing, fairly successful movie. But one of Robin Cook’s goals, the creation of a believable female protagonist with brains, daring, and insight, was realized in the book but fell partially by the wayside in the film. Hollywood somehow manages, on rare occasions, to come up with a _Gloria_ (reviewed in the December 1980 _LR_), but comes up with flibbertygibbets by the dozen. The movie _Coma’s_ Dr. Susan Wheeler (Genevieve Bujold) was less notably capable than the book’s Dr. Wheeler, less activator, more acted-upon. _Coma’s_ story, a corker, survived the transformation from the page to the screen, but Dr. of millennia on his shoulders, and who reflects the mysterious habits of an ancient race in his smouldering eyes (you get the picture)—but by the time the mystery is unravelled, and we have seen the riches of the ancient kingdoms of upper and lower Egypt and the unpleasant deaths of characters both noble and venal, we have been left with one pretty girl straight out of the Hollywood book, standing tall but shaken. Bujold, who can act, put enough of her skills into _Coma_ to show us on screen some hints of the courageous, in- Wheeler ran out of steam. Now along comes _Sphinx_, a lesser novel, though intelligently derived from Robin Cook’s long-time and slightly more than amateur interest in Egyptology, and with _Sphinx_ comes another of Cook’s dynamic heroines, Erica Bacon, who stumbles around Cairo and Luxor and into a devious plot concerning the traffic in stolen antiquities. One of these days Robin Cook will have to go the route of Joseph Wambaugh, whose excellent cop stories underwent grotesque mauling when made into movies, such that Wambaugh finally took matters into his own hands and turned himself into a moviemaker (_The Onion Field_), thus rescuing his ideas and his characters from the clumsiness of others. Director Franklin J. Schaffner and screenwriter John Byrum have given us, in _Sphinx_, the movie, a gorgeous travelogue, a luscious invitation to catch the first plane to Egypt, but they have translated Cook’s heroine, via the exceptionally attractive and utterly talentless Lesley-Anne Down, into a standard movieland image of the much put-upon female in distress. The perils of this Pauline are nicely enhanced by the scenery and by Frank Langella, who plays the part that Omar Sharif would have played ten years ago—the dark, glamorous, urbane Egyptian who bears the weight genious character Robin Cook focused on in his book. But Down is one of those actresses who, either of her own volition or because her keepers insist, always appears just to have left the hairdresser’s, even after she has suffered the torments of the darned. I saw _Sphinx_ months in advance of the public opening, with, among others, Robin Cook, and periodically I heard sighs, perhaps actually they were polite moans, coming from Cook’s direction. That occasion was his first look at the movie, and mine, and while I realized that yet another intelligent woman’s role had been all but erased, Cook realized that yet another of his intelligent woman’s roles had been trashed. Why does this happen? Much has been made lately of the new crop of women directors in Hollywood, people like Claudia Weill, whose little movie, _Girl Friends_, impressed everybody, though nobody went to see it, but who was at last permitted to make a bigger movie, _It’s My Turn_, which promptly invited unhappy reactions from her fickle fans, because the heroine, played by Jill Clayburgh, showed us exactly nothing more of the “new” woman image than any of a hundred male directors might have concocted. Maybe there’s a correlation between the size of a movie’s budget and the rigid adherence to formula: if you make a shoestring you can do as you like, if you are backed by big money you cannot. But that is at once too facile and too futile for further discussion. It’s also untrue. John Cassavetes finally made his big movie, _Gloria_, and in the capable hands of Gena Rowlands the protagonist was, is, exquisitely self-reliant, mythically so, the sort of woman who can be called a “tough broad” without exciting the fury of the modern guardians of liberated language. The problem goes beyond budgets, beyond even the varying skills of directors and screenwriters, surely beyond all that. It goes to the heart of the American conception of Woman. You can name a dozen or two dozen exceptions to this, you can throw Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and a few other big name screen toughies at me, but I can throw five hundred counter-examples back. Americans don’t like strong women and American movies don’t portray what American moviegoers don’t like. Even in our days of declension, even at the nadir of our contemporary appreciation of heroism, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the screen, like life, boasted a few valiant heroes. And with _Rocky_ and _Superman_ and _Star Wars_ and other blockbusters in the late 1970s the screen once again welcomed manly men, heroic men, men with ideals and admirable ambitions and self-confidence enough for two, the sort of men Ayn Rand glorifies. But the sort of women Rand created are nowhere to be seen. On screen, as I write this, are a dozen significant women characters, each at best a little gutsy, each at worst a mite silly, each, at last, more a caricature of the submissive woman than a fully-fashioned heroine. (I exclude _Gloria_.) These are the women in significant movies; these are Hollywood’s women. These are, in no particular order, Vicky La Motta (_Raging Bull_), Judy Benjamin (_Private Benjamin_), Olive Oyl (_Popeye_), the loving waitress (_Inside Moves_), the vengeful secretaries (_9 to 5_), Beth Jarrett (_Ordinary People_), the put-upon housewife (_A Change of Seasons_), the prize-winning pianist (_The Competition_), the second wife (_The Jazz Singer_), and the ex-wife (_Tribute_). The movies vary in quality and in style and type, but the women are best comprehended as slightly differing versions of the same person. Vicky La Motta (Cathy Moriarty, an exquisite and awesomely talented newcomer) is the young girl who fell for the debonair, excitable young boxer who briefly held the middleweight championship (1949–’51) and for a considerably longer time tyrannized all those who loved him. _Raging Bull_ is based to some extent on the actual life of Jake La Motta, and according to the real Vicky, now divorced from Jake but doing the circuit with him to promote the movie, she was as naive and timid way back then as the movie depicts her. Robert De Niro dominates the film, and by the time you read this he will almost certainly have picked up an Oscar for his work, but the submissive Vicky La Motta is one of the two major foils (the other is Jake’s brother) off whom the protagonist must play, and against whose decency and passivity his grossness and insensitivity stand out so boldly. Vicky evidently was the way the movie reveals her. So, too, Olive Oyl (Shelley Duvall) conforms to the (cartoon) character—is, in fact, much finer an incarnation of Popeye’s girlfriend than is Robin Williams as the title character. She looks the part and she sounds it, to the last desperate “oh oh OH oh oh oh oh oh OH oh oh....” Of Vicky and Olive we have, I suppose, a right to expect nothing but what life (_Raging Bull_) and the classic cartoon (_Popeye_) insist upon. Not so, the other female characters. Goldie Hawn’s Judy Benjamin does grow in her part, from the vapid, spoiled little Jewish-American Princess to the somewhat matter-of-fact woman from whom we part at the end of her riotous stay in this man’s army. She outwits a female tyrant (Eileen Brennan), she eludes various lecherous soldiers, she walks out on her wedding to a “schmuck” (Armand Assante), and we cheer for her (and dread the inevitable sequel, or sequels), but what has she accomplished? She’s toughened up, she’s learned to polish her boots, she’s come to see the difference between a dream prince and a chauvinist pig, but she’s unemployed, uninvolved, unmotivated—I know, it’s a hit, so the sequel ought to remedy that—and she’s still batting her baby blues to get her way. _Private Benjamin_ is a sweet little comedy and Goldie’s a peach, to be sure, but Judy Benjamin has moved about eight inches along the road to maturity. _Inside Moves_ drew critical raves and no audiences in its first appearance in December, though by the time you read this it should be back with a new promotional campaign. It deserves success, sentimental though it is, primarily because of the remarkably believable work of its male leads (John Savage and David Morse) and a handful of supporting actors. The women in it are dreary. A junkie (Amy Wright), who may be ignored here, and a nice cocktail waitress (Diana Scarwid) are the women who float through the life of the young bartender turned basketball star (Morse), and the waitress eventually realizes that the crippled would-be suicide (Savage) is a swell guy, swell enough to love, gimp and all. She is the proximate cause of the rift between the two male buddies, and, long after it is apparent to anyone over the age of three that Roary (Savage) is the man to love, the waitress comes around to loving him. She is a gentle simpleton. Beth Jarrett (Mary Tyler Moore) makes life neat but cold for her husband Calvin (Donald Sutherland) and miserable for her unhappy son (Timothy Hutton), but these _Ordinary People_ are wonderful to know. The movie’s very fine, Robert Redford has made his directorial debut in great form, all the acting is first-rate. And Moore has, let us hope once for all, shed her shackles to the sweet Miss Mary role she perfected on television. Moore is nothing short of tremendous, and her Beth Jarrett is awful enough to convince us that young Conrad and poor, sappy Calvin could in fact be dominated by her. But dominance is not authority, and bitchiness is not strength. Beth is a shrew, a harpie, a scold. She is neither admirable nor potentially improvable: she has mastered the art of psychological castration, as the nearly gelded Calvin so pathetically demonstrates, but the movie’s sympathies rest entirely with the men, particularly, and quite properly, with the anguished young man who is her son. One question nags: from whom did Conrad get his personality, his decency? From his gutless dad? From his chilly mom? Beth Jarrett could put a frost on Havana in July. The three secretaries (Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton) who work their aching little fingers off all day for a boorish, vain boss (Dabney Coleman), manage at long last to turn the tables on the bastard and introduce day-care centers and flexi-plans to the company, and a middling good time is had by all. Still, _9 to 5_, which, admittedly, is not the social tract that might be expected of any latter-day Jane Fonda project, degenerates midway through into a slapstick farce, messy and dumb and ultimately demeaning. The boss pays for his sins, and that’s nice, but what happens to the ladies? The efficient one (Tomlin) stands taller, the awkward one (Fonda) gets some gumption, and the ditsy one (Parton) shows that even chesty blondes come with some grey matter upstairs. So what? Their energies are devoted entirely to humiliating a stupid man and to engineering a few cosmetic changes in their work environment. Imagine them five years hence: Tomlin is a vice president with an ulcer, Fonda is a field manager with an American Express gold card, and Parton has more and bigger wigs in her closet. The remaining four roles are all failures, too, if they were intended in any way to suggest women as equal to men. In _A Change of Seasons_ Shirley MacLaine tosses off another attractive middle-aged wife taking up with a younger man — she did virtually the same routine in _Loving Couples_, also in 1980 — and in both cases the motive is neither love, nor lust, but revenge. In the earlier movie she punishes her husband (James Coburn) for his obtuseness, in the newer film she does with a young carpenter what her husband (Anthony Hopkins) does with one of his students (Bo Derek). She is energized by me-too-itis. “You’re gonna cheat on me (with work, or with a 10), I’ll cheat on you with a stud of my very own.” The movies are appalling, devoid of imagination, consumed by cutesiness, mindlessly inattentive to any consistent set of values, and especially in _Change of Seasons_, MacLaine’s character functions entirely as a get-even doll. Amy Irving competes with and then falls in love with Richard Dreyfuss as they pound the ivories for _The Competition_. When she wins and he comes in second, he almost gives way to terminal pout. But we need a happy ending, and nothing, nothing, along the way suggests anything but a happy ending, so she comforts him and he becomes a good sport, this big overgrown infant piano whiz, and suffers her to be the champ. By the time they move in for the final clinch, we’ve already forgotten that, damn it, she won, not he. You must project a bit into the future to contemplate the resolution to this tale (which, thankfully, will not spawn a sequel). They will undoubtedly wander around the country concertizing, he will knock her up — that’s the way he’d put it to the guys — and she will retire to make babies while he becomes Glenn Gould. It’s written in the stars. Lucie Arnaz is the only reason even to contemplate subjecting yourself to _The Jazz Singer_, arguably Laurence Olivier’s most obnoxious performance ever, and the first (if God exists, the last) screen role for Neil Diamond. The 1927 weeper, notable mainly because it introduced sound to moviegoers, was hideous enough when Al Jolson took it to the movies from George Jes-sel’s stage play, but its current version, the third on screen, simply reeks. Arnaz at least cares enough to give it a try, and she acts, not, like Lord Olivier, to her gums but all the way down; she cares and she acts and she tries, oh mammy how she tries. And would you care to know how she gets the twerp back? She makes a baby. His Yiddische papa forgives him because he comes back to the synagogue and sings Kol Nidre, he goes on stage, and she puts on a pretty dress, hires a babysitter for the kid, and beams. After the concert, presumably, the singer and his father toss off a couple of Mogen Davids, and she goes home to give the baby his 4 a.m. feeding. _Tribute_? Lee Remick is at least making a graceful transition to supporting roles. In _The Competition_ she plays Irving’s piano teacher; here, she lectures her self-righteous, priggish son (Robby Benson), getting him to stick around while dad (Jack Lemmon) dies. At the end she comes back and smiles through the tribute to the funnyman rotting with cancer. But all the attention in _Tribute_ is paid to crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s on a case of unresolved father-son awkwardness, not quite an Oedipal number, but the next worst thing. Mom, the ex-wife, ever-smiling, ever-sensible, contributes to the plot by getting it on with Scottie (Temple) for old time’s sake, then conveniently disappearing until she’s needed again for the glycerine finale. These are twelve pretty ladies. They’d have a nifty afternoon of bridge and gossip. They’re what we get as heroines when we go to the movies. Schlafly’s won. LR’s film critic also reviews for WNAC-TV (CBS), WHDH-AM, and _The Boston Herald American_. He hosts “The David Brudnoy Show” on radio and “Nightscene” on television, writes a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and reviews books for a number of journals. © Copyright David Brudnoy 1981.