#lea jacobs

“My observations about women’s genres in the 1920s clash with descriptions of the woman’s picture of the 1930s and 1940s, which were often characterized as ‘weepies’ both by the trade press and, subsequently, by scholars trying to explain the appeal of the films. In one of the first scholarly treatments of the subject Molly Haskell writes, ‘At the lowest level, as soap opera, the ‘woman’s film’ fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. The weepies are founded on a mock-Aristotelian and politically conservative aesthetic whereby women spectators are moved, not by pity and fear but by self-pity and tears to accept, rather then reject, their lot.’ One way to resolve the disparity between this view of the woman’s picture and the one that emerges from an examination of the industry trade discourse in the 1920s is to refine our sense of the plot types associated with feminine taste and to consider how these types might vary over time. Haskell’s description of prototypical plots for the woman’s picture includes stories of medical affliction, rivalry in love, mothers separated from their children, and women who suspect that their husbands may be criminal or potentially murderous. But clearly prior to the advent of sound, other sorts of films were associated with feminine viewing preferences, among them the adventure serials of the 1910s described by Ben Singer and Shelley Stamp, and the Orientalist excesses of the romantic drama in the 1920s. In short, I would argue that the ‘woman's picture’ cannot be considered as a single, coherent, and historically stable entity.

“I would not maintain that many were, nor that Hollywood films en bloc became in some sense more ‘naturalist.’ I would argue, however, that some of the most prominent stylistic and narrative features of the naturalist films recurred in other generic contexts. Thus, in discussions of films otherwise quite remote from naturalist concerns, one finds praise for simple over complex plots, for dedramatized scenes and situations, and for restrained modes of storytelling. It would be decades before the Hollywood cinema readily accepted (and could prevent the censorship of) the sort of frankly salacious material to be found in Greed or The Salvation Hunters. But across a wide spectrum of Hollywood filmmaking in the 1920s one finds a rejection of blatantly didactic or highly moralized narratives.”