comedy and drama, from what is often called the "Hollywood dream factory" that continue to resonate in the nation's collective consciousness as four-star classics: Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights, Beau Geste, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Dark Victory, Ninotchka, Union Pacific, Drums Along the Mohawk, Intermezzo, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Young Mr. Lincoln, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Gunga Din. "Hands down, it was the best year in the movies," declared Life Magazine in a 1989 50-year-anniversary issue devoted to Hollywood's 1939 output.
The Women, an adaptation of Clare Booth Luce's play directed by George Cukor and featuring a star-studded cast, was part of the 1939 product line. At a time when star power was equal to Hollywood, Hollywood was equal to glamour, and glamour was a core preoccupation of popular culture, The Women presented the American masses with a lush glimpse into high-society glamour--along with an arch and apparently knowing look through its rear entrances. As both play and movie The Women was distinctive in presenting the female sex in a way that was universally regarded as unflattering. The play has been described as Luce's "undisguised attack on her sex" (Geracimos, 1997, p. 8), a "toothy portrayal of "unregenerate wordlings'" (Heinze, 2000, citing Brooks Atkinson), "a diverting and cynical exposT of her own sex" (Hughes, 1951, p. 435), and so on. Luce herself is quoted in William F. Buckley's remembrance of her published at the time of her death:
[T]old by someone how utterly admirable were the characters of Clare's play, The Women, she replied in writing, "The women who inspired this play deserved to be smacked across the head with a meat axe and that, I flatter myself, is exactly what I smacked them with. They are vulgar and dirty-minded and alien to grace, and I would not, if I could, which I hasten to say I cannot, cross their obscenities with a wit which is foreign to them and gild their futilities w...