"Before she was a virgin...": Doris Day and the decline of female film comedy in the 1950s and 1960s

Cinema Journal

Volumn 45, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 3-31

  Bingham, Dennis ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950026069     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2006.0025     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. The last woman to date to be voted the top box office draw of a given year was Julie Andrews, on the strength of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, in 1966 and 1967. Julia Roberts came close to the top spot in 1999 and 2000, as did Nicole Kidman in 2003
2. Doris Day and A. E. Hotchner, Doris Day: Her Own Story (New York: Morrow, 1976), 187
3. Lucy Fischer, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child: Comedy and Matricide," in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 60-64
4. Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995)
5. The list of such actors is long, ranging from Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and James Stewart from the studio era, to Tom Hanks, Kevin Kline, and George Clooney more recently
6. John Updike, "Suzie Creamcheese Speaks" (1976), Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 794
7. Dwight MacDonald, "The Doris Day Syndrome" (1962), Dwight MacDonald on Movies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 110
8. See Molly Haskell, "Icon of the Fifties," Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27
9. Ed Sikov, Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 3
10. Rowe, 172
11. Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. (New York: Times Books, 1994), 71
12. Jane Clarke, Diana Simmonds, and Mandy Merck, Move Over Misconceptions: Doris Day Reappraised (London: British Film Institute, 1980)
13. T.E. Perkins, "Remembering Doris Day," Screen Education 39 (Summer 1981)
14. Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
15. Janice Welsch, "Actress Archetypes of the 1950s: Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn," in Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1977), 99-111
16. Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994)
17. Robin Wood, From Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)
18. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1974), 265
19. Doris Day: Her Own Story, 9
20. Mel Gussow, "It Wasn't Always Sunshine," The New York Times, February 14, 1976, 23
21. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York: Ballantine Press, 1988), 23
22. Haskell, "Icon of the Fifties," 32
23. According to Freud, this type of joke "calls for three people: in addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke's aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled... When the first person finds his libidinal impulse inhibited by the woman, he develops a hostile trend against... [her] and calls on the originally interfering third person [the listener] as his ally. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), ed. and trans., James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 118-119. For Rowe, "Freud's account... explains why so much laughter is directed at women and why so much comedy is misogynistic. It also explains why women so often feel alienated from many traditions of comedy, whether the slapstick of early silent film or the routines of standup comedians from Andrew Dice Clay to Eddie Murphy" (68-69), a point on which Fischer expounds in showing women's exclusion from much film comedy. The late fifties-early sixties sex comedy, in finding woman to be the cause of the frustration of man's sexual freedom and his indentured servitude in marriage, grows out of a misogyny that infused much of Western popular and high culture from the end of World War II until the start of "second-wave" feminism in the late sixties
24. Thus, Frank Krutnik in his article, "The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The 'Nervous' Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes" (Velvet Light Trap 26 [Fall 1990]) finds "a marked increase in the prominence and aggressiveness [also Freud's word] of innuendo" in the comedies of this period. "This innuendo tends to be especially directed at women who tend to define themselves in 'nonsexual' terms, like Doris Day's career women" (61). This misogyny peaks in films such as the 1965 Jack Lemmon vehicle, How to Murder Your Wife
25. Of course, comedies starring women do not disappear after the sixties. Female comedy stars, however, flickered as sporadically on cinema screens in the seventies and eighties as did female stars in general. Some seventies comedy stars like Jill Clayburgh (An Unmarried Woman [1978], Starting Over [1979]) came and went with blink-and-you'll-miss-her rapidity. Other comediennes, most notably Diane Keaton, were careful to keep their day jobs as dramatic actresses. Indeed Keaton emerged as Woody Allen's "Gracie Allen" in Play It Again, Sam in 1972, the year The Godfather proved her chops in drama. Keaton's 1977 Academy Award for playing the madcap Annie Hall was probably cemented by her performance that year in the dour sexual revolution tragedy, Looking for Mr. Goodbar. After a six-year hiatus, Jane Fonda, once a star of such comic films as Cat Ballou (1965) and Barefoot in the Park (1967), reentered mainstream cinema in 1977 in a comedy, Fun with Dick and Jane, only to submerge herself immediately into earnest dramas (Julia [1977], Coming Home [1978], The China Syndrome [1979]), making only one more comedy, the massive hit Nine to Five (1980). Barbra Streisand, who, like Day, gained stardom as a singer and in musical comedy, headlined straight comedies, such as The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) and What's Up Doc (1972), but such films and their box-office appeal became more uneven and infrequent as the decade wore on. On the other hand, Goldie Hawn probably carried more comedies than any actress since the heyday of Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn. Hawn is a comic descendent of Judy Holliday, the Jewish dumb blonde (?!); her professional name even sounds like "Billie Dawn," the role in Born Yesterday that propelled Holliday to stardom. Like Holliday, Hawn won a rare and surprising Oscar for a comedic role at the start of her film career (Cactus Flower, 1969). She went on to star in comedies for more than two decades, often in the Holliday-like role of the "dumb blonde" whose "native intelligence" outsmarts the sharpies, a formula revived for new generations, alas, in Legally Blonde (2001)
26. For an informative account of the 1956 liberalization of the Production Code, see Gregory D. Black, The Catholic Crusade against the Movies, 1940-1975 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 154-155
27. Jane Clarke, Diana Simmonds, and Mandy Merck, Move Over, Misconceptions: Doris Day Reappraised (London: British Film Institute, 1980)
28. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, 265
29. Midnight Lace. Special Trailer. Universal-International, 1960. Used as promotion for American Movie Classics Cablecast of Midnight Lace
30. Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 195
31. Haskell summarizes these in her description of "a feminist luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria sometime in the eighties [during which] the woman sitting next to me launched into a near-tirade about how her life had been blighted by 'those films of the fifties in which Doris Day ended up in the kitchen, glued to the frying pan and her apron.' While sympathetic to the woman's tale of woe and the social pressures behind it, I felt Day was more convenient than appropriate as a symbol of oppression of women. The suburban nesting phenomenon was far more a staple of television shows than movies." "Icon of the Fifties," 23
32. Welsch, "Actress Archetypes of the 1950s," 109
33. Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, 267
34. Henry Jenkins and Kristine Brunovska Karnick, "Acting Funny," in Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 163
35. Pauline Kael, Review of Love Me or Leave, Me. Cinemania '97 CD-ROM. Seattle: Microsoft, 1997
36. Cohan, 281
37. For more on the Day character's quiet mastery of the male in The Man Who Knew Too Much, see Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood, 74-78
38. Jenkins and Karnick make the point that "the romantic comedy has created rounded characters who have an integrity and complexity that holds our attention, apart from the particularity of their realization in a given film. Casting Gary Cooper in The Lady Eve, James Stewart in Ball of Fire and Henry Fonda in Philadelphia Story would make a difference, but not as great as casting Groucho Marx in Modern Times, Charles Chaplin in The Road to Utopia or Bob Hope in Duck Soup," 164
39. Tony Randall of course later became a top star on series television, continuing a pattern played out by many actresses such as Lucille Ball, Cybill Shepherd, and Candice Bergen. Gig Young, in another familiar pattern, later won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for a serious dramatic role, as the burned-out Depression-era dance-hall emcee of They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969)
40. Perkins, 26
41. This is made explicit, since among the Hudson roles to which the film refers is his character Bick Benedict in Giant (1956), a Texas rancher whose attitudes toward changing times and racial minorities are broadened by his humanistically feminine Northern wife
42. Cohen, 291
43. This use of the term "ne'er-do-well" comes from an interview with Rock Hudson, who is quoted as saying, "The advertising man in Lover Come Back, like the composer in Pillow Talk, was a ne'er-do-well. And playing a ne'er-do-well is terrific. You automatically like a ne'er-do-well, don't you? I guess it's because it's what we all wish we were, but don't have the guts to be." Liner notes, "Lover Come Back/Send Me No Flowers Double Feature." Laser Disc. MCA/Universal Home Video, 1996
44. Perkins, 29