Saturday Night at the Movies: How To Film A Feminist
Plus: The Day-Hudson Oeuvre
Tonight’s selection is undoubtedly the strangest I’ve picked, and just as undoubtedly the worst. But stick with me and I’ll have some better movies in the conclusion.
To begin with, the 60s were a weird decade (I wasn’t there, but so I’ve heard). Cinematically speaking, I find 60s films are a lot harder for modern audiences to get into than even the old black and white classics I love. I mean, it’s trippy stuff like this all the time. You’ll be in the middle of the plot, heroically overlooking the seasickness-inducing cinematography, getting involved in the story, and then The Yardbirds or Janis Joplin will just show up and everything stops for a live performance. And those are all good movies! The bad ones, yeesh. Just say no to drugs, people!
In addition to the rock n roll and the drugs, it was also the era of the sexual revolution. As I have written before, romantic comedies were in a strange flux between the Golden Age of marriage comedies and our present reality of no marriage at all. In 1960s terms, how to make a sympathetic romantic comedy out of characters who have fully embraced the sexual revolution and its catastrophic free love rhetoric? It was no easy task; let me tell you about my favorite attempt.
Picture your least favorite real life pompous woke intellectual. There are many we could use, for this exercise let’s pick Robin DiAngelo. Now imagine Hollywood buys her awful book, White Fragility, and decides to turn it into a blockbuster movie, with the nation’s biggest, most glamorous stars. You’re probably thinking, uh-oh, not another lame cinematic lecture. Well, what if I told you that rather than make a genuine attempt to convey DiAngelo’s life and work, the movie instead incessantly mocks her for two hours? What if they turn it into a farce, have the big name actress play a character named Robin DiAngelo, and center the whole plot about what a clueless hoaxster she is? Would you start to get interested? Well, it’s no hypothetical - Hollywood really did this!
Helen Gurley Brown is considered a founding member of the sexual revolution; she’s basically the only god that the Sex and the City types worship. Her breakthrough book, 1962’s Sex and the Single Girl, was a publishing sensation that gave single women all sorts of tips on how to carry out affairs (yes, really). She became the editor of Cosmopolitan and was a talking head fixture on television for years.
Before your blood pressure gets too high contemplating the Havisham-like destruction she wreaked, you’ll want to watch tonight’s feature, the Natalie Wood/Tony Curtis romantic comedy adaptation of her book, 1964’s Sex and the Single Girl. It’s not a great movie, just a silly romantic farce - but man does it stomp all over Brown’s legacy. The gorgeous Wood plays Brown herself, which you would think a big compliment to the not-exactly-gorgeous Brown - except that Wood plays the sex therapist as a clueless, virginal fraud who knowns nothing about men. Tony Curtis plays a scummy tabloid reporter who pretends to be a client of hers in order to get in the door and seduce her for a story. But then, as romantic comedy stars are wont to do, he begins to fall for her…
It’s nothing too special, except for charm of the stars (did I mention Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda are the supporting cast?) and the joy you get contemplating how much the vile Helen Gurley Brown must have loathed it! Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and someday our worst intellectuals will get the same deflating cinematic treatment…
I feel bad leaving you with a mediocre movie, even if Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis are in it, so let me finish by recommending the very best of the 60s sex comedies: the Doris Day/Rock Hudson partnership. You can’t go wrong with any of them. Pillow Talk was the first and is considered the best, but my favorite is Lover Come Back. Again, we’re not talking anywhere near the quality of the Golden Age here, but as far as post-sexual revolution romance goes, these are as light and fun as it gets, hope you enjoy!
You're too young not to have missed that thrilling moment in American late night talk show history, circa 1970, when a disgusted Dick Cavett said to Helen Gurley Brown, "Why don't you take a walk until your hat floats?"
As a precocious TV movie watcher in the later 60s, I loved Sex and the Single Girl -- even if I knew it was "naughty." I loved all of Natalie Wood's films in fact. Two of my favorite Day comedies were The Glass Bottom Boat with Rod Taylor and a great cast of character actors and comedians from that era as well as the swoon-y '62 film, That Touch of Mink, with Cary Grant as a dashing millionaire who accidentally meets and woos a squeaky clean, would-be career girl from Ohio (Day) living in NYC.