The Women is a bitter satire resting on the spoiled lives and struggles for clout and control of a variety of wealthy Manhattan women, social climbers and up-and-comers and the gossip that drives and wounds their relationships. At the same time men are recurrently the focus of their airy banter and take part in important functions of the action on screen, they are no more than characters mentioned but never seen.
Norma Shearer plays a fashionable wife and mother who learns by way of hearsay that her husband is having an affair and leaves him. Shearer is far from the strongest actress in the film. Rosalind Russell thoroughly steals every scene she is in, hitting the nail on the head as the epitome of the gossipy, scatter-brained, motor-mouthed drama queen who brings the most wit and laughs to the film's mercurial verbal spars. Joan Crawford, Shearer's husband's cold adulterous lover, renews the comfort of your seat in front of the screen after a first act that does not keep up with the speed of its characters' mouths. It follows that the bitchy exchanges spin into great fun and laughs when Russell and sexy, brassy Paulette Goddard burst out into a catfight.
Madcap and unpredictable in temperament just like its characters, George Cukor's estrogen festival, at its core, becomes a little too affectionate with the object of its acidic commentary. As a result, it goes through tedious troughs like the color fashion show sequence included in this black-and-white film which has no content but the glossy spectacle of fashion. This loss of cynical edge causes one to feel that the film's criticisms are ones that it merits itself, that every single character acts as if her function in life is defined by men, and that we are intended to ponder these childish and high-strung women who think about and act upon nothing more than the battle of the sexes.
Norma Shearer plays a fashionable wife and mother who learns by way of hearsay that her husband is having an affair and leaves him. Shearer is far from the strongest actress in the film. Rosalind Russell thoroughly steals every scene she is in, hitting the nail on the head as the epitome of the gossipy, scatter-brained, motor-mouthed drama queen who brings the most wit and laughs to the film's mercurial verbal spars. Joan Crawford, Shearer's husband's cold adulterous lover, renews the comfort of your seat in front of the screen after a first act that does not keep up with the speed of its characters' mouths. It follows that the bitchy exchanges spin into great fun and laughs when Russell and sexy, brassy Paulette Goddard burst out into a catfight.
Madcap and unpredictable in temperament just like its characters, George Cukor's estrogen festival, at its core, becomes a little too affectionate with the object of its acidic commentary. As a result, it goes through tedious troughs like the color fashion show sequence included in this black-and-white film which has no content but the glossy spectacle of fashion. This loss of cynical edge causes one to feel that the film's criticisms are ones that it merits itself, that every single character acts as if her function in life is defined by men, and that we are intended to ponder these childish and high-strung women who think about and act upon nothing more than the battle of the sexes.