The Women

The Women (1939)

It's all about men!

A happily married woman lets her catty friends talk her into divorce when her husband strays.

Date of release
1939-09-01
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (187)
Runtime
2h 13m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
George Cukor

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: The Women

The Women is a 1939 American comedy-drama film directed by George Cukor. The film is based on Clare Boothe Luce's 1936 play of the same title and was adapted for the screen by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, who had to make the film acceptable for the Production Code for it to be released.

Production

In January 1937 producers Harry M. Goetz and Max Gordon bought the film rights to the play for $125,000 and planned on turning it into a Claudette Colbert vehicle, with Gregory LaCava as the director. In March 1938 Norma Shearer and Carole Lombard were in negotiations to star. It was rumored that MGM sought to bring back Marion Davies for the role of Sylvia Fowler, but she declined.

After the opening credits, the film offers a preview of—and insight into—the principal characters with shots of animals that dissolve to shots of the women, with appropriate music. Mary is a doe, Crystal a panting leopard, Sylvia a snarling black cat, Flora a monkey, Miriam a vixen (female fox), Peggy a lamb, Mary's mother an owl, Edith a cow chewing its cud, Lucy a neighing horse.

The New York Times reported on Cukor's strategies for managing a cast of 135 women led by three famously demanding stars. He described one technique for dealing with precedence: He made sure that all three stars were called to set simultaneously, either by sending separate staff to knock on their dressing room doors at the identical moment or by calling "Ready ladies!" so all could hear.

When it comes to bloopers, the film contains a fine example of misused stock footage. The film transitions from Little Mary weeping in the bathroom over the news of the divorce through an establishing shot—a night scene of a train speeding through a desert in the far West—to the compartment where Mary consoles a weeping Peggy. Peggy barely managed to catch the train for Reno. It is the first night out, and the train is nowhere near the West.

The Women has one sequence in three-strip Technicolor, a fashion show. When interviewed by TCM host Robert Osborne, director George Cukor stated that he did not like the sequence and that he wanted to remove it from the film. New York Times critic Frank Nugent agreed with this assessment.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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