Hollywood Invented the Girlboss

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Hollywood Invented the Girlboss<br>ByEileen Jones<br>The Criterion Channel’s excellent new “Office Romances” retrospective shows how Hollywood’s classic workplace comedies exposed a deep panic about women who dared to be competent.

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The Criterion Collection has a new series running called “Office Romances,” about the popular movies from the 1930s through the 1950s dealing with “the ever growing number of working women” that catalyzed a new spin on the romantic comedy “where meet-cutes come amid desks and typewriters, and the course of true love is entangled with office politics and professional rivalry.”<br>The emphasis in the series is “still timely topics” like “work-life balance (His Girl Friday), gender equality (Woman of the Year), and even fears of jobs being eliminated by computers (Desk Set) . . .”<br>But take it from me, if you actually watch a lot of these films, what’s most striking about some of them is the rabid sexism such topics unleash in the moviemakers. The very presence of women in the workplace inspires a frantic misogyny and reactionary traditionalism that seems to mandate that such women are actually desperate to nab a husband and find true fulfillment in domesticity. One of the honorable exceptions is Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940), which knowingly recreates just such a narrative only in order to subvert it by demonstrating that the woman in question is only deluding herself into thinking she wants a husband, children, and suburban living.<br>In case you’ve forgotten, the plot goes like this: top reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) begins the movie announcing to ex-husband, newspaper editor, and former boss Walter Burns (Cary Grant) that she’s through with the newspaper game because she wants to live “like a real woman” married to the slow-witted insurance agent Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), living with Bruce’s huffy mother, and bearing Bruce’s children up in Albany. Walter spends the entire film finding fiendishly inventive ways to stymie the marriage and keep Hildy writing the news stories she does so peerlessly. By the end, Hildy realizes that her great partnership in life is her professional collaboration with Walter — even when battling fiercely, they bring out the best in each other.<br>Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant star in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday. (Columbia Pictures)American philosopher Stanley Cavell, in analyzing the film in his 1981 book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, said that Hildy thinks she needs to be in a traditional marriage in order to find the home she longs for that’s a haven from “the black world” of film noirish urban corruption and scheming that Hawks has established. Keep in mind, a pivotal moment in the film is when a downtrodden sex worker named Mollie Malloy (Helen Mack) tries to save Earl Williams (John Qualen) — a man accused of murder on trumped-up charges who’s been kind to her in the past and has now escaped from prison — by attempting suicide. She jumps out of the window of the newsroom, landing on the cement below, just as the ruthless newspapermen are crowding around her demanding she tell where Earl’s hiding. Pretty damn dark for a comedy.<br>Cavell argues that Hildy finds her haven, without initially realizing it, when she’s working at a frenzied pace with Walter under the harsh light cast by the lamp hanging over the news desk. That’s when Hildy and Walter are “at home.”<br>When Hildy is just beginning to recognize this, she declares feverishly with gleaming eyes that she’s not meant for domesticity after all because “I’m a newspaperman!”<br>By taking herself out of the limited roles assigned to women at the time, she’s “unsexed herself” and moved into a category as yet undefined by a lot of fearful people who were still dominant in the culture.

Also strikingly forward-thinking is the pre–Hays Code film Man Wanted (1932), which stars Kay Francis as Lois Ames, the owner and editor-in-chief of a magazine she inherited from her father. She’s mostly happily embroiled in her work, with one problem — she finds that women secretaries are inclined to balk at her constant requests that they work overtime. A lucky fluke makes it possible for her to try out a man as a secretary. It’s Thomas Sherman (David Manners), and he seems willing to work night and day for her. She doesn’t realize that it’s because he’s in love with her, though his jealous fiancée...