An Unmarried Woman: The Business of Being a Woman

Mazursky belonged to the seventies’ first wave of directors, born in the late twenties and the thirties, which also included John Cassavetes, Francis Ford Coppola, and Alan J. Pakula. The decade also brought to the field the first generation fresh out of film school—George Lucas and company. What makes Mazursky a fascinating figure in this landscape isn’t just his extraordinary humanity or his relatively rare interest in common people but his humane, tender treatment of women. This can be seen in nearly all his films—consider the dynamism and contradictions of Alice (Dyan Cannon) and Carol (Natalie Wood) in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. But it comes to the fore in An Unmarried Woman, which exists on a limited continuum of New Hollywood films directed by men with feminist concerns, also including Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977). An Unmarried Woman is especially intriguing, however, because it seems to hark back to an earlier era in Hollywood, working as a cultural linchpin—at once a bold descendant of women’s pictures from the past and a synthesizing of contemporary feminist concerns that even lightly points to attitudes in the decade to come.

One of the great tragedies of the fall of the old Hollywood studio system was that it marked the end of women’s pictures. The women’s picture was a (sub)genre of sorts that could be spliced with noir (as in William Wyler’s The Letter, 1940) or pure melodrama (King Vidor’s Stella Dallas, 1937) and spanned roughly the thirties, forties, and fifties, making stars of the likes of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck. The women’s picture has a contradiction at its heart, taking seriously the concerns of a woman’s life while also often bowing in the end to the sexist culture it was born into. But women’s pictures also offered freedom, as the genre questioned notions about motherhood, desire, and navigating being part of the workforce with a sometimes boldly feminist panache.

None of this is to say that there weren’t complex characters or situations for women on-screen in the seventies. There were the fractured femme fatale played by Faye Dunaway in Chinatown (1974); the complicated enclave of college-age girls in Black Christmas (1974); and the tough, levelheaded dynamo Lieutenant Ellen Ripley introduced to the world in Alien (1979), and played with undaunted verve by Sigourney Weaver. But while the male directors in films such as these empathized with women’s situations, they failed to ask the questions that might demonstrate an interest in women’s perspectives—questions like, What does it mean to be a woman? What does having autonomy look like? How do you craft an erotic life and sense of self without the institution of marriage as support? How do the strictures of motherhood shape and affect your psychological terrain? It was these very predicaments—funneled at times through wit or melodrama—that had powered women’s pictures. And it’s these very predicaments that power An Unmarried Woman.

Take, for example, a scene midway through the film in which Erica’s tried-and-true friends—Elaine (Kelly Bishop), Sue (Pat Quinn), and Jeannette (Linda Miller)—are lounging in the bedroom of her grand Upper East Side apartment. “Bette Davis always had self-esteem,” Sue says, poring over glamour shots in a book propped on her lap. “It’s strange, isn’t it? Where are all the women who were in the movies in the old days?” Erica’s teenage daughter, Patti (Lisa Lucas), slips in just before the mood of the scene shifts. While everyone is laughing and reading, Elaine has a faraway look. “How’d we get started on this?” Erica asks. “Self-esteem. I could write a book on self-esteem. Self-esteem and the American woman.” The camera stays tight on Elaine’s face as tears roll down it. Erica gently caresses Elaine’s face. “Don’t worry, honey, Auntie Elaine is just a manic-depressive,” Elaine says matter-of-factly to Patti. An Unmarried Woman is brimming with scenes like this, poignant evocations of what it means to be a woman, in which the mood of a single character disrupts and dominates the scene, spilling it in a new, unexpected, and emotionally revealing direction.

Mazursky weaves feminist concerns into the film with a light touch, while remaining refreshingly frank. Patti mentions a girl at school, only sixteen, who recently had an abortion. Erica contends with an aggressive man who refuses to take her no for an answer in the back of a cab. Elaine talks perceptively about being bipolar, missing her manic moods, and the way her darker ones rush over her like a tide. The women in the film are yearning and enraged, lonely and tender. Mazursky, basically, revels in the full brunt of their humanity.

My favorite swath of the film is its middle section, before Erica tentatively begins a relationship with the charming abstract-expressionist painter Saul, whom she meets through her part-time gallery job. Here, we get astute scenes of Erica opposite her therapist (played by feminist psychologist Penelope Russianoff). In one session, Erica talks about the nervous joy she felt getting her first period. In another, she gets teary-eyed about the deep well of loneliness she’s submerged in and her desire for sex as a newly single woman. Clayburgh imbues the scenes with a warm energy and an incisive understanding of a character who is defining what her independence will look like. It’s this terrain—desire, sex, romance, and autonomy—that dominates the film, offering a fascinating reflection of a particularly fraught time in feminist history.