From Reverence to Rape

When I first read this book over twenty years ago, I thought, finally, someone who sees what I see in classic Hollywood films—dynamic and exciting women. She traces American women onscreen: from the flappers of the 1920s (It girl Clara Bow) to the European goddesses Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to the sultry Mae West in the 1930s, to the fast-talking Dames Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, and to Marilyn Monroe and her postwar millionaire-seeking pals.

Her multi-decade analysis contemplates what changed in the 1970s-80s; as American women earned greater equity in real life, their onscreen representation paled compared… show more.

Film critic Molly Haskell provides an excellent narrative overview of the major eras, themes, and issues related to women in film, with particular emphasis on Hollywood’s best, worst, and most complex images and genres.

I especially like the section on “The Women’s Film” as it explains the form and function of melodramas, a.k.a. “the weepies,” which later became “the chick flick.” These films that focus on women’s lives and emotions both limit the way women were (and sometimes still are) portrayed on the big screen while simultaneously centering women’s lives in ways too few films have.

Join Haskell on a… show more.

Molly Haskell, like Thomson, is one of my idols. Her pioneering feminist account of how Hollywood depicted women from its golden age to the late twentieth century is also a monument to its supreme women actors, including Stanwyck and Davis, Hepburn and Bergman, and Monroe. Haskell is an expert at understanding how art shapes and responds to its era, and how film actors refine their roles.