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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 4, 2023 8:34:50 GMT
Continuing our month of business movie melodramas, this Sunday, April 9th at 3pm ET / 1pm MT / 12pm PT, we will be watching and sharing our thoughts on the 1933 movie "Female," starring Ruth Chatterton, George Brent and Ruth Donnelly
Ruth Chatterton is as ruthless at running her automobile empire as she is with her young male "executives," many of whom she uses for her personal pleasure and then discards - yup! So what happens to this hard-as-nails executive when she starts to fall for one of her boy toys?
"Female" is a pre-code movie on steroids whose views on gender roles and sexual shenanigans gives no quarter to what we think is our oh-so-modern outlook.
Plus, wonderful Ruth Chatterton has proven to be a favorite of the "Sunday Live! Don't Be So Melodramatic" gang.
Link to the movie: "Female"
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Post by topbilled on Apr 5, 2023 13:29:52 GMT
Great introduction. At 60 minutes, this may be our shortest film, but a lot happens in one hour!
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 5, 2023 14:18:03 GMT
No kidding, but as you note, precodes usually pack a lot, a whole lot, of story into their, often, shorter runtimes.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 6, 2023 7:29:56 GMT
Please join us Sunday, April 9th at 3pm ET / 1pm MT / 12pm PT, to see Ruth Chatterton shopping for boy toys amongst her employees in the 1933 precode movie "Female."
Ruth Chatterton shopping for a boy-toy employee:
"Hey! Eyes up here, Boss."
Link to the movie: "Female"
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Post by topbilled on Apr 6, 2023 14:16:33 GMT
We should mention that Ruth Chatterton and George Brent were married.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 8, 2023 6:37:26 GMT
Please join us tomorrow, Sunday April 9th at 3pm ET / 1pm MT / 12pm PT, for the very ahead-of-its-time precode movie "Female," where men become sex objects to this huntress:
Clearly, when I planned out this month's schedule, I failed to consider Easter - one of my favorite holidays - but calendar incongruity aside, it will be fun to watch Ruth Chatterton look for men to devour tomorrow.
Link to the movie: "Female"
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 9, 2023 6:47:06 GMT
Looking forward to seeing everyone later today for "Female" at 3pm ET / 1pm MT / 12pm PT.
Link to the movie: "Female"
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Post by topbilled on Apr 9, 2023 14:31:13 GMT
I was trying to remember the last time I had seen this film...I know it's been a few years, so it will be interesting to see how it resonates with me again.
One thing I definitely do remember is that feminist critic Molly Haskell introduced FEMALE on TCM once night in the mid-2010s. She was promoting a book she wrote about women who surrender in the end (strong female characters depicted as having important careers outside the home that give it all up to play wife and mother in the last scene of the movie).
The other film Haskell showed that same evening was THEY ALL KISSED THE BRIDE (1942)...a Columbia romcom in which Joan Crawford stars as the head of a trucking company, who gives up her career as an executive to live happily ever after with Melvyn Douglas. In real life, Crawford married Al Steele, an executive of Pepsico, and after he died, she retained stock and a seat on Pepsi's board of directors. So ironically Joan lived the scenario in real life, except not in a domestic sense, because she gave up some of her acting career to do work on behalf of her late husband's company.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 9, 2023 15:13:32 GMT
So many of these movies had "switcheroo" endings like that in the last minute or two. I've read that, in general, audiences understood that the rushed ending was just that, a thing to get by the censors as, even precodes, had both State censorship boards and the pressure from church groups to contend with.
It's a shame they felt they had to do that, but just as we today see when things are "forced" into a story for political or other reasons, I bet audiences back then saw it for what it was.
It's been several years for me, too, since I've seen this one, so hoping it holds up to my memory. It isn't a great movie, just a fun one, especially since it's such a role-reversal one.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 9, 2023 15:50:07 GMT
Another thing about these movies and their "endings," censorship boards and churches were yelling so loud because the real world wasn't doing what they wanted it to do. Women were working in many types of jobs and couples were sleeping together out of wedlock, etc.
In just my family alone, knowing the history of it back in the 1930s, it hardly conformed to the "movie" ideal. And as I've noted before, books and newspapers of the era revealed, in the open, to 1930s America, a world much more complex with woman in many roles and sex not restricted to marriage compared to what they saw on the movie screen.
In a way, it's later generations, like mine that watched these movies growing up in the '70s/'80s that, sometimes, came to believe the world worked in reality back then the way it was portrayed in the movies. My father and grandmother, who lived through the 1930s, scoffed at movies like that as they knew better.
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Post by topbilled on Apr 9, 2023 16:57:28 GMT
Another thing about these movies and their "endings," censorship boards and churches were yelling so loud because the real world wasn't doing what they wanted it to do. Women were working in many types of jobs and couples were sleeping together out of wedlock, etc.
In just my family alone, knowing the history of it back in the 1930s, it hardly conformed to the "movie" ideal. And as I've noted before, books and newspapers of the era revealed, in the open, to 1930s America, a world much more complex with woman in many roles and sex not restricted to marriage compared to what they saw on the movie screen.
In a way, it's later generations, like mine that watched these movies growing up in the '70s/'80s that, sometimes, came to believe the world worked in reality back then the way it was portrayed in the movies. My father and grandmother, who lived through the 1930s, scoffed at movies like that as they knew better. I think I mentioned somewhere in another post, that my grandparents were actually the "perfect couple" if such a thing exists (maternal set of grandparents, my mom's folks). He was born in 1918, and she was born in 1924. They met when she was a teen, and her older brother played on a city baseball team with my grandfather, who was then in his early 20s. They went to see all the latest movies together every weekend, in the early 1940s, and they believed in all the production code happy ending stuff. I say this in a very endearing reverential way.
They were going to be married in 1942 when she turned 18, but the U.S. entered the war, and he was drafted. He went to Germany and had the task of helping liberate the concentration camps and the worse task of burying bodies found in the gas chambers after the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945. Yes, that is gruesome stuff. But my point is that even the horrors of the war did not prevent them from maintaining a long-distance romance. She did not take up with another guy, and while he probably had flings in Germany, he remained devoted to my grandmother...and as soon as he returned to the U.S. in late 1945, they reunited and were married in February 1946.
As they settled into married life and had two daughters, the youngest being my mother, they were the quintessential 1950s family during the Eisenhower era. There is evidence of this in the family photos from those years. She was the stay-at-home wife who later took a job in a hospital when the girls were older, while he worked in a factory. They had Sunday picnics with her brother and his family. And the movies that continued to reflect the production code values resonated with them. I know this to be true because I would spend time with them in the early 1990s, and we would watch films together on the American Movie Classics channel. So many of those viewings led to their memories of when they had seen those films for the first time years earlier in their local suburban movie theater.
Though they had some financial difficulties over the years due to bad investments, they did have a near-perfect marriage. The romance and nuclear family values never died. Recently I had contacted the caretaker at the cemetery where they are buried, because I wanted to make sure there was no graffiti and their graves are being properly tended to...and I knew in my heart, that their romance continues in the afterlife.
My other set of grandparents, my father's folks, had a much different marriage, not a worse one because it was still good, but very different. My paternal grandparents were not about having the perfect marriage with the perfect children and reflecting specific political values. So it is interesting how what we see in movies from those years can either reflect the way it was, for some, or the way it definitely was NOT, for others.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 9, 2023 18:42:01 GMT
You don't want to get here late for today's 3pm ET / 1pm MT / 12pm PT showing up "Female" and wind up like this guy:
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 9, 2023 18:52:39 GMT
Today's movie snake will be: (oops snack)
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Post by galacticgirrrl on Apr 9, 2023 18:58:02 GMT
Today's movie snake will be:
Yum!?
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 9, 2023 18:59:31 GMT
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