They say that during hard times we like to go to the movies to escape. I guess in some ways that is true, but we also go to the movies to be enriched in some ways. I also think we like to be reassured about the human spirit. Well, this is March, Women's History month, and we are also still in the midst of a major economic crisis, so I'd like to suggest some really terrific movies about inspiring, amusing and ultimately uplifting women. This is by no means an exhaustive list – but if you do have time to watch some movies this month – or any month, these are about some truly remarkable, everyday people.
1 – The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005) – starring Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson and Laura Dern – A little film that softened the edges of some of the real life characters written about in cartoonist Terry Ryan's memoir of her mother, Evelyn Ryan – hardscrabble homemaker extraordinaire. Julianne Moore is literally luminous in her portrayal of Ryan, the mother of ten married to an alcoholic (Harrelson) who drinks up much of what little money he earns. WIth absolute serenity and a fierce will to provide for her family in the 1950s, when working outside the home, especialy in a Catholic family, was out of the question for most women, Evelyn Ryan turns to contesting. She enters everything, using her wit and her writing skills to pull her family up from the depths time and time again. In a particularly telling scene, Moore and Harrelson sit before a banker on the day they are to sign papers to buy the house that Moore's contesting win has paid for, saving them from eviction once again. Moore slowly takes off her little white gloves to sign the documents and the banker instead hands them to her husband, deciding that only his name is really needed.
2 – Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) – starring Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, Van Johnson and Tim Matheson – Don't worry, not every movie on this list involves a mother of a large number of children, but the original film of this title, taken from Helen North Beardsley's book “Who Gets the Drumstick” is terrific. Ball is less antic and into physical comedy in this film and she transcends her usual wackiness by getting under the very unglamorous skin of a recent widow with 8 children who marries a recent widower with 10. Chaos, of course, ensues, and even in Hollywoodized form, the real Beardsleys and Norths shine through – two large families thrown together with one father soon off to sea. Ball's Beardsley is funny, exhausted, loving and warm – to all 18 children – and she manages to pull a family together, remaining more or less undaunted on their first Christmas morning together when she finds out she is expecting yet another baby. Fonda is also terrific as Frank Beardsley, but it is Ball who commands the screen – and wills her brood together.
3 – Desk Set (1957) – starring Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Gig Young and Joan Blondell – FInally, something for the feminists! This 1950s comedy, the second to last pairing of Tracy and Hepburn, finds a major television network undergoing modernization under the watchful eye of an 'efficiency expert' Richard Sumner(Tracy). The all female research department, headed up by a witty and well dressed Bunny Watson (Hepburn) is the next department under siege. Written by the timeless comedy duo of Phoebe and Henry Ephron, the verbal sparring between Bunny and Sumner is exquisite. And what do we make of a sharp, sensible careeer gal in her 30s named Bunny? Well, up and coming network exec Mike Cutler (Young) figures this sharp spinster ought to be happy with his half hearted and long time affections and should understand why his career always comes before their relationship. And what of Bunny's charges, her sidekick Peg Costello (Blondell) and her two young research proteges Sylvia and Ruthie (DIna Merrill and Sue Randall) are up in arms over the certainty they will be replaced by an electronic brain. But, what Bunny has that the computer lacks is discernment. A computer can spit back information that has been fed into it, but Bunny has almost total recall to add to her discernment, and the scene in which she goes toe to toe with the new brain is priceless. That she outshines cutler and turns out to be the brains behind his professional ascent, and that she and geeky Sumner have marvelous electricity together is a given. A great, funny movie about the dreaded 'sisterhood' – this is not to be missed.
4. Norma Rae(1979)- starring Sally Field, Beau Bridges and Ron Leibman. – This movie is why we like Sally Field, why we really like her. Still apple cheeked and looking like the Gidget, she proved she was five feet and almost one hundred pounds of indomitable spirit and irresistable force. A single mother working in a textile mill in Alabama, like everyone else in her family, Norma meets Reuben (Leibman) a yankee union organizer – and her life is changed forever. A traditional person just trying to survive, Norma is dating Sonny (Beau Bridges) and looking down a long road of remarriage and repeating the same life as her parents; tired, older mill workers with narrow lives waiting to die. Reuben fills her head with the idea of being treated well and fairly in the workplacve, being given the dignity she deserves, but Norma understands the message is not a popular one and she would be risking everything to help him advance his unionization goals. But, when the the conditions at the mill hit home, Norma Rae goes out on a limb and gets up on that counter with her handwritten “On Strike” sign, and history is made. Sally Field's Norma Rae demonstrates that you don''t have to be rich or glamorous or even traditionally well-educated to make a difference and to better your situation.
5. The Long Walk Home (1990) - starring Sissy Spacek, Whoopi Goldberg and Dwight Schultz – This movie is actually a twofer – two strong women. Spacek's junior leaguer Miriam Thompson employs Goldberg's Odessa Cotter as her main household domestic in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. The two women are polite and thoughtful to each other but live in separate worlds exemplified by glitzy cocktail parties at Miriam's house for her husband's business associates and the far side of town shotgun shack where Odessa lives with her husband and three children. Odessa has a strong relationship with Miriam's daughter Mary Catherine (Lexy Randall), and it may be upon the basis of observing their interaction that Miriam is spurred to action when the bus strike happens and Odessa makes the long walk to work each day, exhausted and late, rather than ride the bus. First Miriam just gives Odessa a ride, but when her husband Norman finds out and forbids her to do it again, Miriam becomes part of a network of people giving rides to domestics throughout town. Odessa and Miriam are women, mothers, people. They like their lives the way they are, but each of them rises to the occasion of standing up tall, and when the white business group, headed by Norman's racist younger brother Tucker, tries to put a violent halt to the carpooling one night, Miriam, Odessa, Mary Cahterine and all the other women stand up together. Although Whoopi Goldberg won the Academy award for her role in “Ghost” – it is the strong, dignified and subtle performance she gives here, and in “Ghosts of Mississippi” (1996) as Myrlie Evers – that are probably her best cinematic moments.
6. A Child is Waiting (1963) – starring Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster and Elizabeth Wilson – Make sure you have a handkerchief with you as you watch this early John Cassavettes film about a gifted teacher, Jean Hansen (Garland) who ends up at one of the notorious 'state schools' for the disabled. She befriends a young autistic boy named Reuben and makes strong progress with him, much to the chagrin of the school's dogmatic principal (Lancaster). He spearates Hansen from Reuben. This film is Garland at her fragile, spunky best – a masterful performance. The scenes of the children, some of them just poor or black, or both, some of them extremely disabled, waiting for visitors on visitors day are revelatory. And Hansen does not give up on any of the children or on her views that not enough is being done for them and many could be mainstreamed. Ahead of its time (some of the state schools did not close until the late 1970s) – this film is an absolute masterpiece, and the reality that its heart and soul is a woman teacher and her women teacher colleagues bucking up against a system that has pre-labeled children and pre-ordained how they all should be treated, regardless of degree of disability, is ultimately uplifting.
7. Then She Found Me (2007) – starring Helen Hunt, Bette Midler and Colin Firth – This movie is probably another twofer, as Hunt's April Epner and Midler's Bernice Graves are both unforgettable for different reasons as they solve the age old riddle of the mother-daughter relationship. The films opens with April's wedding to fellow teacher Ben Green (Matthew Broderick) and then goes quickly to a conversation she has with her ill mother (Lynn Cohen) a year later in the hospital when April says she's not, at age 39 1/2, giving up on having a child. Her adoptive mother says she should adopt, they are throwing babies away in China, but April insists it's not the same thing – understanding the dig she is taking at the woman who has loved her as her own her entire life. Then her mother dies and her man-child of a husband leaves her at the same time because marriage wasn't what he thought it would be like. After her mother's funeral April is approached by a man who says he can put her in contact with her birth mother, a famous person. Still trying to catch her breath after severely altered expectations in life, April agrees, and she meets Bernice (the host of a local talk show in New York) in an awkward theatrical moment in a restaurant. Bernice wants to pick up where they left off, at birth, and be the loving mother – and she wants to be adored by April, but her incessant lies and self absorption make this virtually impossible. Meanwhile April has met a a ditched single father with issues (Firth) – and just as she beleives she is falling in love with him, she finds out she is pregnant – by her immature estranged husband. This is not an ideal scenario, but April faces it with grace, dignity, and up to a point, with honesty – and when it all falls apart, she turns to Bernice. They redeem each other. Hunt is almost translucent in her fragility and Midler is at times brassy and overbearing and full of herself, and just when it is needed most, she is quiet and reflective and accepting. Ultimately they both come to understand that motherhood is not about anything as simple as mere biology. A marvelous film.
8. A League of Their Own (1992) – starring Geena Davis, Lori Petty and Tom Hanks – This remains a great film about women being women and also being who and what they want to be. And it explores the eternal mystery of sibling rivalry at the same time. Plucked off their farm by a fast talking scout for the new women's professional baseball league (Jon Lovitz), sisters Dottie (Davis) and Kit (Petty) try out for and make the team – but their rivalry continues even as the other women (including Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell) set aside their differences and learn to work together. Trudging across the midwest and elsewhere on crowded buses with their often drunk coach Jimmy Dugan (Hanks), the women play to half empty ballparks while the men are away at war. Baseball is for some of these women a sanctuary, for the manly Marla Hooch, it is a place where she can be accepted on terms other than her looks, and for the wives whose husbands are overseas, it is a time nad place and game that helps them forget about what might be happening 'over there'. The women all come together when one of their own loses her husband, and they all celebrate when Marla marries and, as she should in the time period, leaves baseball to make a home for her husband. The rivalry between Dottie and the often irritating Kit gets just to the point of being grating, but the main story still unfolds very well and is quite an entertaining history lesson.
9. Corrina, Corrina (1994) – starring Whoopi Goldberg, Ray Liotta and Tina Majorino – A little girls is so heartbroken over the death of her mother, that she stops speaking, and her harried father goes about the process of hiring a nanny/cook to keep their house together while they try to rebuild their lives. Set in the 1950s it follows ad man Manny Singer (Liotta) and his daughter Molly (Majorino) through dubious job interviews and a horribly failed try with the first nanny (Joan Cusack, as a tipling trollop in an apron) until they light upon Corrina Washington, a brassy jazz aficionado who seems a bit much for the job. But, she talks Manny into it, and little by little she draws Molly out of her silent shell, as they go off during the day to clean even more houses to supplement Corrina's income. Corrina even helps Manny through a writer's block with the perfect ending to a Jello commercial jingle, and as she begins to speak again, Molly sees a natural romantic connection between her white, athiest father and her black, Christian maid. Goldberg's Washington is dynamic, sassy, sure of herself and attuned to Molly's needs at the same time. She reminds us that it doesn't matter what name is for the role you play in a child's life, as long as you love that child.
10. Party Girl (1995) - starring Parker Posey, Liev Schreiber and Sasha Von Scherler – A great indie film starring the queen of the indies, Parker Posey as single, carefree NYC party girl Mary, who ends up in jail one night for throwing a payparty in her apartment. Uncertain of who to call to get out of jail, Mary calls her dead mother's best friend and her own godmother, Judy (Von Scherler, mother of the director, Daisy Von Scherler Mayer), and she is presented with an ultimatum, come work as an aide at the public library branch where Judy is head librarian, or to repay the bail, or stay in jail. Mary begins half-hearted work in the library by day while living her libertine life at night, and along the way she meets a Lebanese falafel vendor named Mustafa (Omar Townsend) who appreciates her good qualities and can't quite understand her outward shallowness and why it doesn't concern her that she is so bad at her job and at life. Mary tries to do her job at the library better, but things never quite seem to work out, until she stays up all night at the library one night after losing Mustafa and earning Judy's ire by leaving a window open and ruining a stack of rare books. She finally makes sense of the Dewey decimal system. Mary learns life can't take her seriously and she will get nowhere until she takes herself seriously – and she is okay with the payoff of working in something as noble as a library for the rest of her life, like Judy. A fun coming of age story to counter all the supposed glamor of the party circuit life played out 24/7 for our children by the media.
So, if oyu have some time during Women's History Month – view some of these 'women's' movies and learn a bit about how remarkable everyday women can be.
Jaime Combs