ON THE VERGE OF REVOLT: WOMEN IN AMERICAN FILMS OF THE FIFTIES

• Published in: Film Criticism Vol. 4; no. 2; pp. 47 - 50
• Main Author: Welsch, Janice R.
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Edinboro, Pa Allegheny College 01.01.1980; Film Criticism; Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan Library)
• Subjects: Careers; French, Brandon; Gender equity; Motion picture criticism; Motion pictures; Nonfiction; Women; United States > US
• ISSN: 0163-5069; 2471-4364

French states that these "are by no means the only financially successful or critically acclaimed movies (she) might have chosen to illustrate the sexual transition from the forties," but that each of the selected films "sheds light on different clusters of issues and situations women faced in their transition from the forties to the sixties: romance, courtship, work, marriage, sex, motherhood, divorce, loneliness, adultery, alcoholism, widowhood, heroism, madness, and ambition" (pp. xxii-xxiii). By providing a double text, which contradicted itself without acknowledging any contradiction. . . they documented the practical, sexual, and emotional transition women were undergoing beneath the threshhold of the contemporary audience's conscious awareness, (p. xxi) Isn't French describing a large number of the Hollywood romantic movies of every era when she points to women's domesticity and inequality and to happy endings? [...]The Nun's Story is decribed as a nun's use of "marriage to Christ as a way to evade secular marriage and thereby safeguard her career as a nurse" and her discovery "that Christ as the Ultimate Husband is the Absolute Enemy of female career aspirations" (pp. 124-5). In her exploration of Douglas Silk's All That Heaven Allows, the author writes that "while the film liberates its heroine from self-sacrificing motherhood, a passionless widowhood, and a stifling suburban community, its protest against the fifties bourgeoisie is ultimately reactionary" because this protest in presented as "a return to an agrarian and craft economy where men can be self-sufficient individuals in harmony with nature, and women can make a more substantial contribution to the economic welfare of the family. . . ."