Writing Women in the 1930s

Despite all this, women’s voices were tightly woven into the tapestry—as originators of stories, collaborators on screenplays, and script doctors. A clear-eyed look behind the scenes of the movie business, What Price Hollywood? (George Cukor, 1932) is also a good example of how complicated writing credits could get, with five people listed in various capacities and three more uncredited contributors identified by the IMDb. Adela Rogers St. Johns and Jane Murfin were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story, but lost to Frances Marion. In her long and varied career, Murfin went from cowriting Broadway hits with Jane Cowl (Lilac Time, Smilin’ Through) to penning scripts for Hollywood’s first canine star, her dog Strongheart, to collaborating with Anita Loos on the screenplay for Cukor’s The Women (1939).

Witty and satirical, though laced with bitter and tragic notes, What Price Hollywood? follows a Brown Derby waitress (Constance Bennett) who shoots to stardom while her mentor, a once-celebrated director, slides into alcoholic disgrace. Unlike the many versions of A Star Is Born that followed its basic outline, the 1932 film shows the heroine’s marriage to a snobbish polo player threatened by her husband’s resentment of her demanding career and celebrity. This was a very real problem for Hollywood’s female stars and other successful film workers, and movies of the time often dramatized the struggles of high-achieving women to have a family or hold on to a husband. In Rockabye (another 1932 film starring Bennett, written by Murfin, and directed by Cukor), a Broadway actress who rose from the slums triumphs on stage but loses both the child she hoped to adopt and the man she loves. “You have your work,” her faithful manager consoles her. As Molly Haskell argued in her 1973 book From Reverence to Rape, the formula of the “woman’s weepie” seems designed to offer catharsis to female audiences—in other words, a good cry—while reinforcing the lesson that women cannot have it all.

In the pre-Code era, however, they got away with an awful lot. The puritanical Motion Picture Production Code was formally adopted by the studios in 1930, but for the next four years it was flouted as gleefully as the law of Prohibition. On-screen, women seduced married men (Red-Headed Woman), got pregnant out of wedlock (Finishing School), left their families to go on the stage (Blondie of the Follies), worked cons and turned tricks (Bed of Roses)—all without facing any serious punishment or condemnation. Sometimes they literally got away with murder. A new archetype appeared: the fast-talking dame who knows all the answers, having learned them in the school of hard knocks. Scribes of both sexes responded with exhilaration to the collapse of Victorian restraints and the heady mood of transgression in the culture, but the presence of so many women writers undoubtedly sharpened the frank, bold, at times protofeminist strain in pre-Code films.

In Blondie of the Follies (Edmund Goulding, 1932), with a story by Frances Marion and lively dialogue by Anita Loos, a working-class Irish father throws his daughter out of the house when she comes home at dawn, drunk, on the arm of a rich man; but he is quickly persuaded that he is just being old-fashioned, and that such patriarchal heavy-handedness doesn’t fly anymore. Blondie, played by Marion Davies with a mixture of down-to-earth niceness and iridescent charm, demonstrates how much latitude movie heroines of this era could enjoy. She becomes a star in the Follies and throws wild parties in her palatial penthouse, bankrolled by an oil man whom she does not love, yet there is never any doubt that she is, at heart, a good and decent woman. The real core of the story is Blondie’s turbulent friendship with a fellow chorus girl, Lottie (Billie Dove), a neighbor from the old tenement who reinvents herself as the pretentious Lurline. The two engage in vigorous catfights and intimate heart-to-hearts, especially after they both fall for the same man, yet they always end up affirming their loyalty to each other.

Made during the bleakest depths of the Great Depression, films from 1932 and 1933 readily forgive women who resort to the easiest way. In the startlingly sordid Bed of Roses (Gregory La Cava, 1933), Constance Bennett is a hard-boiled grifter who rolls drunks, then sets her sights on a rich publisher whom she blackmails into supporting her—yet she winds up winning the love of a poor-but-hunky barge captain (Joel McCrea), even after swiping his bankroll and pushing him in the drink. Among the glories of women-centered films from this era are the tart-tongued but loyal sidekicks played by actresses like Una Merkel, Marie Prevost, or, as here, the deliciously jaded Pert Kelton, who delivers every slangy line out of the side of her mouth. Bed of Roses was cowritten by Wanda Tuchock, whose credits also include the scenario for the musical Hallelujah (King Vidor, 1929), one of the first major-studio films with an all-Black cast, including the electrifying Nina Mae McKinney, whose humor and vitality burst through the limitations of her role as a temptress. Like Porgy and Bess, the film offers a moralizing and broadly stereotyped view of African American life through the eyes of well-meaning white artists, but it remains a milestone, charged with a raw, passionate intensity.

In 1934, just before strict enforcement of the Production Code went into effect, Tuchock cowrote and codirected (with George Nicholls Jr.) Finishing School, a stinging attack on moral hypocrisy and social snobbery that is also a potent cocktail of wisecracks and rambunctious misbehavior. Frances Dee stars as Virginia, an earnest new student at the titular establishment, who turns rebellious when she discovers how superficial and narrow-minded the authorities’ devotion to respectability really is. Ginger Rogers, as her savvy roommate, gets most of the zingers, but it is Virginia who proves to be the real firebrand. Furious when the young medical intern she loves is turned away from a Sunday tea at the school, she marches up to one of the socially acceptable scions and says, “I’ve been reading about the Senate’s investigation of your father. Are they going to make him give back all the money he stole?”

Women in the interwar years were caught in a swirl of changing mores and expectations, and movies of the time are a confusing jumble of progressive and reactionary attitudes. It was a time when more women were working outside the home (especially during the Depression), divorce was socially acceptable and extramarital relationships less taboo, and some couples tried to reimagine marriage as a more equal partnership; yet traditional attitudes toward femininity, gender relations, and sexual double standards lurked everywhere, waiting to trap women who stepped out of line. While Loos and Tuchock penned comedies in which bad girls triumphed and audiences laughed off their sins, melodramas invited viewers to suffer with noble women who endure misunderstanding and ostracism. John M. Stahl was one of the great masters of the form, and Back Street (1932), gracefully adapted by Gladys Lehman and Lynn Starling from a novel by Fannie Hurst, is a perfect example of his radical restraint, how he zeroes in on the honest emotion in soapy material. It is the story of a woman who sacrifices everything for love, presented with subtlety and ambivalence as well as lushly cinematic detail. Irene Dunne plays a woman who abandons a successful career to become the kept mistress of a married man: he is selfish, entitled, and blind to what she has given up for him—when she asks him to give her a child, he priggishly refers to “the moral issue”—yet the love between these two is genuine and lasting.

The perennial theme of female self-sacrifice appears in all kinds of films, including the racy, noirish Midnight Mary (William A. Wellman, 1932), based on a story by Anita Loos with a screenplay by the team of Kathryn Scola and Gene Markey, who also cowrote the legendarily lurid Baby Face (1933). Framed by a murder trial, the hard-luck tale of a woman who bounces between desperate poverty and a life of ill-gotten luxury as a crook’s moll is told with punchy, telegraphic efficiency. Loretta Young conveys with great sensitivity the resignation of an intelligent woman who realizes that her beauty is her only value in men’s eyes, and who must pay for their possessiveness with her own freedom.

In Sadie McKee (Clarence Brown, 1934) the title character is the daughter of a domestic servant; abandoned by her first love (whom she has already slept with, believing they would soon be married), she marries a drunken millionaire, putting up with the contempt of those who see her as a gold digger and even accuse her of scheming to let her husband die. Joan Crawford plays Sadie as brimming with raw hurt beneath a thin veneer of toughness; her loyal, tart-tongued sidekick is played by the wonderful Jean Dixon. The original story was by Viña Delmar, who made her name with the 1928 banned-in-Boston bestseller Bad Girl (adapted for film in 1931 by Frank Borzage), about the trials of a young, working-class couple whose loving relationship is continually threatened by their inability to talk openly about issues of money, children, or sex.

While many films were based on Delmar’s magazine stories, she has only two screenplay credits, Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow and The Awful Truth (both 1937). McCarey was known for improvising on set and not adhering to a finished script—causing panic in some actors as well as producers—so it is hard to know exactly what these screenplay credits mean, but any association with these two masterpieces is a feather in the cap. McCarey never got over the public rejection of Make Way for Tomorrow, which he rightly considered his greatest work, but if he really “understood people better than anyone in Hollywood,” as Jean Renoir famously opined, McCarey should have realized that audiences would shun a film that cut so close to the bone. It follows an elderly couple (Beulah Bondi and Victor Moore) who lose their home and must move in, separately, with their children. All the awkward, petty, funny, awful aspects of the situation are mercilessly laid bare, and our sympathies are painfully split between the resentful children and the unwanted parents. Nothing in the film prepares you for its transition into an almost unspeakably moving love story in the final act.

Female screenwriters continued to flourish throughout the 1930s and ’40s, though on-screen the strictures of the Production Code fell harder on women than men. You and Me (1938) illustrates the moral double standard they faced; George Raft plays a former thief and jailbird who wants nothing to do with women who have served time, driving his wife (Sylvia Sidney) to hide the fact that she is on parole. Director Fritz Lang himself dismissed the film as “lousy,” but he was wrong. It is tonally and stylistically uneven, blending extremes of artifice with (Hollywood-style) realism, and mixing comedy with melodrama and touches of noir. But its offbeat-ness is its charm, and the passages set to music by Kurt Weill are almost experimental, especially an atmospheric scene in which a group of ex-cons reminisce about prison, falling into a percussive, rhythmic chant as they recall a fellow inmate’s failed escape attempt. The screenplay was by Virginia Van Upp, and the smart dialogue does much to smooth over the story’s weaknesses. Van Upp spent almost a decade as a writer at Paramount before moving in 1944 to Columbia, where she would be instrumental in building up the career of Rita Hayworth and become—briefly—Hollywood’s only female executive producer, with Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) as her most enduring monument.

Sidney’s character remains the sympathetic heart of You and Me, even as she persistently lies to her suspicious husband and violates her parole. In the end, she suddenly unveils a steel-trap mind as she explains to the ex-cons what a pittance they would earn from a big heist, showing the math behind the cliché that “crime doesn’t pay.” (Afterward, the awestruck mugs think they know why Raft’s character is so upset: “No guy likes to admit his girl’s that bright.”) In 1930s Hollywood movies, it is women who see things as they are and say so, because they have fewer illusions than men about their power to control their destinies. In their wisecracks and confessions and angry diatribes we can hear the voices of other women—their scribbling pencils, their clacking typewriters, supplying words that would be heard in movie palaces and small-town theaters all over the country. Speaking their minds—and getting paid for it.