Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 December 23 • Friday

Female has a story that's familiar from any number of old movies and romance comics: a woman's success in a man's world must be punished by her own misery. But Female has a few surprises. Ruth Chatterton is so appealing in her role that no audience would really want her to end up unhappy. She's also an excellent businesswoman who does a great job of running her automobile factory.

The problem is that women are meant to get married and have children. Chatterton's factory is shown to have taken the place of her maternal duty in the first few shots of the film, which show cars, instead of people, being conceived, developing in utero and being born.

Miss Drake has all the sex she wants, though. She selects any handsome guy she wants from her staff and brings him home to her art deco mansion where she gets him loaded on vodka and has her way with him. The next day she's all business again and if he can't handle it she has him transferred to her Montreal factory.

Art deco mansions are pretty common in movies from the 1930s, but Miss Drake's is something special. I don't think I've seen one with an actual organist mounted on the wall before.

Sid Hickox has a lot of fun with the photography, using circles to suggest, it seems to me, that Miss Drake needs to trade the two balls of the boardroom for the single circle of the womb.

Here she is with her happily married friend Harriet, who is content inside her wifely circle while Drake exercises outside of it.

Then there's this one shot, which probably doesn't mean anything but reminded me of a joke from High Anxiety (the glass coffee table scene). The camera sees Drake in the mirrored table, pans over to the gramophone, pans back to the table and then has the view obliterated by a tray.

So of course Miss Drake falls in love with some guy who won't be bossed around and at the end of the movie she breaks down in a moment of crisis and screams that she can't run the company because she's only a woman.

Most stories would have ended it there but in Female, Drake snaps out of it right away, becomes the tough businesswoman again and makes an appointment with a bank in New York to save the company. Only instead of going to New York, she chases after the guy she's in love with. (He had proposed to her and she turned him down.)

Drake is still in charge, though. Rushing to her car she tells the chauffeur to move over and let her take the wheel because "We're going to go faster than you know how to drive".

And when she finally catches up with the guy and tells him she loves him he declares that nobody is going to take the company away from her and arranges for her to fly to New York for the vital meeting with the bank.

It still ends with her saying that her new husband will run the company while she has "nine children" but this is still more advanced than most treatments of this kind of story.