I was thinking this morning about just how famous Greta Garbo was.
I can’t think of anyone today who even comes close to her living icon status. The closest I can come up with is Marylin Monroe and Audrey Hepburn in the fifties and sixties respectively.
Now, the studios deliberately broke the star system in the nineties after the Brat Pack (Tom Cruise et all) got too rich, and pivoted to focus more on properties that they control. Today we have plenty of famous actors, but none of them are as iconic as Yoda or the Iron Man. They trained audiences to obsess over the characters rather than who plays them, so they can now switch out any actors who get too big for their boots.
Yet even so, I struggle to think of many contemporary male stars who could light a candle to those three women. Of course, we could argue all day long about what constitutes an icon as opposed to a really, really famous actor, and I’m not pretending that Sinatra, Dean or Bogie weren’t uniconic. But I do think it is interesting that from the dawn of Hollywood right up until the seventies or eighties, women led the pack.
We’ve talked many times about how Mary Pickford and Florence Lawrence were the original movie stars.
Later in the teens there was Chaplin, but as a comedian he was kind of his own category. Again there were plenty of great, successful male actors throughout the twenties, but I can’t really think of any man approaching iconic status until maybe Clark Gable or Cary Grant from the late thirties onwards. Along with Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Mae West, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Bette Davis dominated the twenties and thirties.
Of course that’s all subjective, I’ve no doubt you could remind me of some male stars that aren’t springing to mind for me right now, but the point is female stars were powerful. At least as powerful as their male contemporaries, if not more.
How many times have you heard the argument that female stars earn less because they don’t have the same draw as men?
How many “explanations” have you read that movie stars’ fees aren’t about fair wages but the value they bring to a given project, so the Hollywood wage gap is a perfectly neutral matter of economics? I once had some dude patiently explain that it’s not a wage gap but a value gap and I’ll just say he’s very lucky it’s reasonably challenging to punch someone through Twitter.
Because sure, that might be technically true to a point, but why is it the case?
Or more accurately, how did it become the case?
Okay here is my theory, and hear me out…
I blame Star Wars.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Star Wars as much as the next movie fan. I watch the original three at least once a year. I am very glad that it is part of our culture.
But I think it might have heralded the rise of the movie bros.
From the eighties onwards, the top ten grossing films by decade, are all pretty male-dominated. The eighties themselves are dominated by blokey franchises: Die Hard, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Rambo.
However, look at the top ten grossing movies by decade in the other direction, and in the seventies we’ve got Grease, Love Story and Kramer vs Kramer. In the sixties there’s Cleopatra, Funny Girl, My Fair Lady. Basically the further back you go the more balanced it becomes in terms of the lead actor or actors and subject matter. From the sixties working backwards, the top grossing film of each decade was The Sound of Music, The Ten Commandments, Bambi, Gone with the Wind and Ben Hur.
What’s crucial about this list is that they’re not guy movies or chick flicks, they’re just movies.
Grown up, epic, important dramas that appeal to pretty much everyone.
I just took a look at contemporary reviews for Queen Christina in 1933, and The Women and Gone with the Wind, both released in 1939. Both movies have female leads, and both with a prominent romantic plot. Not a single review I could find makes a song and dance about them being LADY films.
I normally blame the Motion Production Code for destroying female characters, but perhaps that’s not entirely fair. While some of the dark, complex women we find in PreCode and silent era movies were no longer possible, there’s no question that plenty of phenomenal roles were written for iconic female stars between the twenties and the seventies. And I’m not suggesting that there haven’t been any in the past thirty, thirty-five years — but there has definitely been a shift to a world in which we have “movies” and “girl movies.”
This is an annoying post, I know, because I’m asking questions to which I don’t have answers.
My Star Wars theory is half-jokey -- not least as, while I’ve been writing this post, it’s occurred to me that Alien came out in the same year. Maybe that was it? Maybe the badassery of Ripley so terrified generations of male screenwriters that they were forced to reduce female characters to love interests so they could sleep at night?
Or am I missing something? Let’s discuss in the comments…
Also this was going to be a post about Garbo, but I’ll get back to her next week!