American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions

Chapter 9: Feminisms: Hester Street, An Unmarried Woman, Girlfriends, Starting Over, Head over Heels/Chilly Scenes of Winter, Coming Home, The China Syndrome

Chapter 9 Feminisms Hester Street An Unmarried Woman Girlfriends Starting Over Head over Heels/Chilly Scenes of Winter Coming Home The China Syndrome One of the most controversial ideas of the 1970s was feminism: the idea that women were discriminated against in both Western and non-Western societies and that gender roles needed to be first analyzed and then reshaped by social and political processes. Feminism was an important force in the arts, in the universities, in the workplace, in the political arena. Feminist writers such as Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Gloria Steinem became household names, as did such antifeminist figures as Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant. A very public debate swirled around women’s rights, women’s roles, and women’s psychology. Surprisingly little of this debate found its way to the Hollywood film industry . The key films of the early 1970s, whether radical or conservative, are overwhelmingly about the problems of men (consider Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, Jaws). Only a few films seriously examine women’s psychology (e.g., Klute, from 1971). By mid-decade, romantic comedies, always sensitive to fashion, had begun to sort out some features of the new battle of the sexes. And at the end of the decade, we see both strongly feminist and strongly antifeminist films. But there is no great feminist director, and no great feminist masterpiece , in the American film industry of the 1970s. Hollywood seems to have resisted this strand of social change more than it resisted the youth culture or the antiwar movement or the Black Pride movement. Any changes in the sexual politics of American film have been gradual, incremental. To illustrate the slow progress of feminism in 1970s American film I have chosen to look at a mix of independent and Hollywood films. Discussion of these films is organized thematically, rather than via strict chronology, to suggest the range of responses to feminism. As a secondary emphasis of this chapter, I explore the influence of directors (Joan Micklin Silver, Claudia Weill) and actresses (Jill Clayburgh, Jane Fonda) on the content and style of their films. ethnicity and the american past Joan Micklin Silver’s first film, Hester Street (1975), is a low-budget, blackand -white production based on the novel Yekl by Abraham Cahan. Its subject, broadly construed, is ethnic consciousness. What constitutes an American? What is the relationship between our cultures of origin and the common American culture we (to a greater or lesser extent) embrace? Within the film industry, Hester Street is part of the breakdown of a white, Anglo-Saxon–oriented Hollywood in favor of a far more diverse ethnic stew. Italian American, Jewish American, and African American films are the most prominent non-WASP groupings in the new, ethnically conscious American film of the 1970s. Hester Street is a story of assimilation set in 1896 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Jake (Steven Keats) is a Russian Jewish immigrant who has been in America for three years. He works as a sweatshop tailor and socializes with a group of young, single immigrants. The group is aggressively secular and Americanized, with men and women going to a dancing school run by the attractive Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh). Jake is pulled away from this group by the arrival of his wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), and his son, Yossele 143 feminisms (Paul Freedman), at Ellis Island. He is overjoyed to see his son, whom he immediately names Joey, but much cooler to Gitl, who wears the traditional wig of a married Jewish woman. Jake is more interested in Mamie than in his wife. Left alone much of the time, Gitl develops friendships with her landlady and with Jake’s subtenant Bernstein (Mel Howard). Bernstein is a former Yeshiva student who works in the sweatshop by day but still studies Torah at night. He thus maintains the traditional Jewish values of Eastern Europe. Jake eventually sends an intermediary to ask Gitl for a divorce (a ‘‘get,’’ in Yiddish). She agrees, and when the divorce is completed Jake and Mamie go off to City Hall to be married. Gitl and Bernstein are also planning a marriage. Though Jake is the active, aggressive character, and he has the greatest amount of screen time, the film’s sympathy is with Gitl. We see scenes of her bewilderment in New York, knowing nobody and totally dependent on a husband...