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"Do we know how the men talk about us when we're not around?" Ovidian opening credits announce the menagerie, the camera takes note of snipping pooches before sweeping into a palatial health spa. The feminine Park Avenue whirl, snobs and drips and wags and "beezles," no menfolk allowed. The virtuous socialite (Norma Shearer) is a staid center, her opposite number is the perfume-spraying shopgirl (Joan Crawford) in the process of snagging her husband. (The conjugal state is described via eavesdropping maid and hard-boiled cook: "Don't you believe in marriage?" "Sure I do, for women. But it's the sons of Adam they have to marry.") Gossip is the lingua franca, camaraderie and treachery are two sides of the coin, MGM sets make for a plush laboratory. "A nice little bout between lady palookas," George Cukor's technique of pure speed keeps everybody running on tiptoes. Pregnant simp (Joan Fontaine), foxy chorine (Paulette Goddard), bemused daughter (Virginia Weidler), and gallant matriarch (Lucile Watson), above all Rosalind Russell's rendition of a bulldozing penthouse ninny. (She twists her torso with cyclonic prattle, wields knitting pins like daggers and licks her lips before chomping on Goddard's leg, a thing of goony beauty and a warm-up for His Girl Friday.) Mary Boland's mangled French and Marjorie Main's caterwauling give the range of the tessitura at the Reno divorcee ranch, the heroine weeping on a flannel couch dissolves to Crawford eating bonbons in a bubble bath. "Did you get her innuendo?" All that, plus an "adventurous little voyage into Fashionland," a splash of Technicolor surrealism for the benefit of Hitchcock and Dalí in Spellbound. Antonioni (Le Amiche) and Lumet (The Group) have their variations, and Tarantino offers the damndest tribute with Death Proof. With Phyllis Povah, Virginia Grey, Ruth Hussey, Hedda Hopper, Florence Nash, Cora Witherspoon, Mary Beth Hughes, Lilian Bond, Dennie Moore, Butterfly McQueen, and Muriel Hutchison. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |