Gender, Professional, and Class Identities in Miss Director and Modern Cinderella

Miss Director (1964) and Modern Cinderella (1965) are two well-known romantic comedies from Greek popular cinema of the 1960s. This essay examines how the female protagonists of these two films are represented in terms of changes in their self-awareness, appearance, and idiolects. It explores the succession of occupational and sexual roles which give rise to contradictions in their identities, and it considers how time and space are disorganized in the working lives of these women in such a way that their gender and professional identities become categorically distinct. It concludes with an analysis of the significance of social class as a factor in the way the heroines' identities are constructed. The heroines in Miss Director and Modern Cinderella do not share the same attitudes because they hold different positions in the work place (one is a director and the other is a secretary), and they have different social characteristics.