Film Forum

U.S., 1939
Directed by George Cukor
Starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine, Paulette Goddard
Approx. 133 min.

“‘It’s all about men!’ said the tagline on the poster for this extraordinary, almost Dalíesque Hollywood comedy from 1939. But there isn’t a single (or married) man in it. Every character on camera is female, and it’s an elegant whirl of moneyed and married Manhattan women: ladies who lunch off each other’s reputations in health salons and beauty parlours, participating in bizarre regimens and surreal treatments, breaking out firecracker dialogue and indiscreetly tattling about whose husbands are stepping out with shopgirls on the sly. Rosalind Russell is the waspish Sylvia Fowler; Joan Fontaine is the doe-eyed Peggy Day. Norma Shearer establishes the movie’s heterosexual romantic idealism with her soft, almost myopic gaze, playing Mary Haines, a sensible and beautiful, married mother-of-one—no gossip, but genially tolerant of her friends’ chatty foibles. But then her world is to come crashing down when she hears that her husband has been seen canoodling with a woman who works at a department store perfume counter, a gimlet-eyed predator called Crystal Allen, superbly played by Joan Crawford.” – The Guardian

Presented with support from The Robert Jolin Osborne Endowed Fund for American Classic Cinema of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s and The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“The entire cast is so good that it’s hard to do any more than hand each individual a separate laurel wreath.”
 – The Boston Globe

“Exhilaratingly funny.”
– The Guardian