Now that I watched and wrote about these four films, its time to look at them as a whole, instead of just one at a time. In this feature post, I will make a comparison and contrast between these films using three main ideas that they all share. First, I will talk about the gender roles in each film, then I will continue on to the main love relationships between the main characters and finally finish it off with a talk about how each film revolutionized their genre and the audience's expectations. Now that that's out of the way, lets take a look at gender roles. One of the biggest things that stood out in all four of these films, was the focus on gender roles and how many were flipped upside down. All four films featured some sort of it. In His Girl Friday, Hildy is portrayed as having masculine traits and it is shown in the way she acts around the men. As I described in my blog, when Hildy enters a room, all the men give her respect and listen to what she has to say. This masculinity has lead to Hildy being mentioned as a "Newspaperman" a couple times throughout the film. As for The Lady Eve, Jean is also portrayed to be more masculine than most women. Unlike Charles, who is shy and not very manly, Jean is confident and gets what she wants. She trips Charles and makes him fall in love with her. When he dumps her, she turns into Lady Eve and ruins his life and marriage. Only to return back to the ship and fall in love with Charles again. Moving on to Johnny Guitar, "Vienna and Emma would take center stage in the more traditionally masculine roles." This is shown many times throughout the film. An example of this is in the beginning of the film, where the men themselves stated a couple times that Vienna was more of a man that they were. In Kiss of the Spider Woman we get two men in a prison cell, but while Valentin acts like a man, Molina is homosexual and acts like a woman. There are many times in the movie were we see Molina crying about something, while Valentin gets mad over it. Now that we have a slight understanding of the films and a quick refresher, lets take a look at how they compare. In all four films, there is always a play on gender roles and for all the films except Kiss of the Spider Woman, there is a woman that has a masculine role. Now Kiss of the Spider Woman has the same concept but displayed differently, instead of Molina being a woman, he is a male that is homosexual and acts like a woman in a mans body. Therefore being quite similar to the rest of the films. Though these films are all similar in gender roles, lets take a look at how they contrast from each other. To keep this simple, I will separate the four films into two groups and then compare and contrast the films in each group. The first group being His Girl Friday and Johnny Guitar. The second group being The Lady Eve and Kiss of the Spider Woman.
When Hildy goes to see Walter she tells him, "she wants to go somewhere where she can be a woman and have a home" As the film progresses, Hildy starts to show off more of a masculine side that stays with her for most of the film. While she does act more masculine, she also does have some break downs, where she wants to be a woman. At the end though, it turns out to be hopeless and she falls for Walter again. Now lets take a look at Johnny and Vienna. Vienna is different from Hildy, because right off the bat, we see that she is the "boss". She walks and acts like a man and the men respect her like one. Then when Johnny shows up, he breaks her down to a woman again. This was talked about extensively in my blog. In short, she would change her outfits depending on how she would act. If she was masculine, she would wear trousers and if she was more of a woman then she would wear a dress. Just like Hildy, she had a self conflict between acting like a woman and loving Johnny and acting like a man and being the boss of her business.
The reason The Lady Eve isn't in the first group is because of Charles. He is weak and not masculine for most of the film. Unlike Walter and Johnny, who both represent power and authority. Now lets take a look at Valentin and Molina. They are both men but sine Molina is portrayed as a homosexual, the gender role changes dramatically. When the audience sees a man, they expect him to act strong and powerful but that is not the case for Molina and therefore he is treated differently in society. So obviously the difference between these two films is that Jean is a female and Molina is a male. That being said, they are quite similar in a way. Both Jean and Molina switch their roles and act like the other gender. Jean acts masculine and controls Charles, while Molina acts like a woman and Valentin is the masculine man. Though they might not have the same gender, they do still have internal battles with themselves and their gender. Jean acts masculine but then is scared of a snake and runs away. (As shown in the video below) While Molina is a man but acts like a woman and ends up crying multiple times throughout the film. Looking at the four films, we see that they are quite similar and only contrast some what. Now that we talked about gender roles and how they are sometimes switched, lets go on to the second point, which is the relationships. Looking at the four films, we see that there is always some form of relationship going on. This time, instead of using groups I'm going to just talk about each film in order and then at the end, compare and contrast them all together.
This film's relationship between Bruce and Hildy was challenged many times, with the reporters saying things like, "I give that marriage three months." Moving on, lets take a look at The Lady Eve. This film has a somewhat love triangle between Jean, Charles and Lady Eve. Obviously Lady Eve and Jean are the same thing, but Charles doesn't know that. This film has a up and down relationship between the characters. First Charles falls in love with Jean, but breaks up with her after he finds out that she is a con artist. Then he falls in love with Lady Eve, who on their honey moon trip, makes up fake boyfriends, which results in a divorce. The finale takes us back to the ship, where Charles falls in love with Jean once again. Now lets look at Johnny Guitar. Again we can see a somewhat love triangle between Vienna, Dancin' Kid and Johnny. Though once Johnny enters the film, the Dancin' Kid is told to leave by Vienna and that ends the so called relationship. The biggest relationship is the one with Johnny, were we see that they were together before and ended up breaking up. Now lets look at Kiss of the Spider Woman because this is a bit more complex. Again we can argue that there is a love triangle between Valentin, Molina, and Marta. The difference of course being that Molina and Valentin are both men. Their relationship doesn't build as fast and simple as the other films mentioned, but they do end up making love after Valentin learns, "... that it isn't wrong, or weak, to embrace what he once rejected as trivial." Now lets take a look at the four films together. They are similar in some ways, as I mentioned along the way, they all have some sort of love triangle going on. All four films also end up having the relationships get back together or form along the way and in the end they fall in love. So whats the difference between them? Well there is quite a bit. First, both Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Lady Eve have relationships that start off from fresh. What I mean by that, is that the two characters don't know each other and fall in love over the course of the film. The difference being that Jean/Lady Eve is a woman and Molina is a homosexual man. Meanwhile both His Girl Friday and Johnny Guitar have a relationship that has happened in the past. Walter and Hildy used to be married and Johnny and Vienna used to date in the past. Even though each film has a slight variation in their relationship script, they all have things in combine. For example they all revolve around a love story and take characters that you wouldn't think would be happy together and pair them up during the films run time. Now that we looked at the differences and similarities between these films, when it comes to relationships, lets now take a look at what each film did to revolutionize the gender or audience's expectations. For this final part, I have decided that it would be better to talk about each separately and not really focus on comparisons. If you want a comparison, then lets just say that they all did something to change up the formula. It would not be fair comparing the films by what they did, because they all took a different approach to changing the expectations of its audience. So that being said, lets look at His Girl Friday. This film used overlapping speech to cover a "... 191 page script in a fleet ninety-two-minute running time." If you want to see how it was done, take a look at the video down below. The reason this is a big deal is because of how fast they talked. Sure it was fast, but it also used a style that allowed the audience to understand everything that was going on. This dialogue and great story was what allowed His Girl Friday to become a success and a revolution to the screw ball comedy genre. Now lets take a look at The Lady Eve, another screw ball comedy. This film took a simple plot and added so many small details and plot holes that allowed the audience to experience something greater than just two people falling in love. For more deal, check out my blog on it. To summarize, the film used symbolism and a cycle that was interesting to think about. Every time Charles would trip, he fell in love with either Jean or Lady Eve, then the cycle would be broken once he found out a secret about her. As for the symbolism of the snake and the apple, its like Adam and Eve. Thanks to its hidden plots and secrets, this film surprised audiences all over. The film had a simple screwball comedy plot, but it hide so much more inside its plot. Moving on to Johnny Guitar, we have an interesting take on the western genre. Instead of a typical western cowboy shoot-em-up with gun fights and men, we got two main characters that were actually females. On top of that, both had masculine features that made them stand out as leaders and sometimes even more masculine than the men. This film gained its fame from the audience. Even though the actors and directors weren't pleased with the film, many people enjoyed it and some even said, "No where else in the Western genre will you find a film with such a hallucinatory quality, mixing melancholy lyricism, Freudian psychology, Greek tragedy, romantic melodrama, sexual hysteria and film noir elements in equal parts." I think its thanks to its random and not expected story, that many audiences were satisfied with the film. Finally, lets look at Kiss of the Spider Woman. This film didn't revolutionize the genre as much as it did society and the LGBT community. This film took an adaptation of the book and turned in into something that worked. It targeted views of homosexuals in society and how they were treated. When this film came out, gay rights didn't exist and many were afraid to stand up for themselves. Therefore, as Hurt said, "We had to say something about not just gay rights, but about feminine and masculine relationships, and the nature of courage and what it means to speak truth to a power so much greater than you are." This film allowed audiences to understand the hardships and hate homosexuals like Molina are facing and therefore exposed society to its blindness. Overall each of these four films did something important that lead them to stand out from the rest. Many changed the genre expectation and others focused on the audience's expectations. In the end, all four films deserve a chance and shouldn't be judged by their age or genre. Well we reached the end of line and learned a bit more about each film and its impact on the film industry. Though some of these four films might be years apart, they all did similar things, while still changing it up in a way to keep it different. I hope you enjoyed this first feature post and I hope to see you guys in the next one.
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