Do you get sweaty palms when Cary Grant carries Ingrid Bergman up the stairs in "Notorious"?
Remember, those famous AFI lists of the greatest films of all time are decided largely by men, who, I would argue, see the world very differently from women.
I actually got banned from a blog when I wrote that more women would consider "Gone With the Wind" being the greatest film ever made than "Casablanca". Banned? Probably because the blog host could not persuade me that women appreciate the emotional ambiance created when two middle-aged men walk away into the darkness together.
As in real life, men who are film directors often have a sexual agenda, revealed in the way gender roles are portrayed in the films they direct. Some have, by women's standards, rather juvenile sexualized images (such as Monroe in "Some Like It Hot") or more sophisticated portrayals of the complexity of female sexuality (such as Stanwyck in "The Lady Eve").
The portrayal of woman from a juvenile perspective is evident in "Double Indemnity", a film many women no doubt are reluctant to consider a great movie (sorry, AFI). First, it has as its modus operandi, all intimacy and caring being expressed by men and only among men. Second, putting the great Barbara Stanwyck in that awful-obviously-a-wig platinum helmet just doesn't fudge with our long cinematic memory of Barbara in film. Miss Stanwyck did not need blonde tresses and clingy clothes to woo Fred MacMurray away from the straight and narrow in a much earlier (and I would argue much better) film, "Remember the Night". Worse, the lack of emotional intimacy between MacMurray and Stanwyck's characters in "Double Indemnity" prevents the female viewer from seeing these two as a couple worth being even interested in.
But then again, director Billy Wilder always seems much better at creating intimate moments among male characters than his female ones, as demonstrated in "Some Like It Hot" -- the last line says it all, in terms of male to male eroticism. In that film, poor Marilyn is yet again degraded into wearing a poured on dress that is embarrassing in its needless and useless selling of the female body to hungry male-only viewers's eyes. Wilder wants his women characters obvious in their sexual availability: easy come, easy go. But the woman viewer often prefers sexual tension to explicit voyeurism. Cherie, as Monroe portrayed her so brilliantly in "Bus Stop", creates sexual tension when she weeps in the restaurant, not knowing if she should follow her heart or not. It becomes not a matter of when sexual mating will occur, but if she will let it occur at all.
Still to come:
The great female film roles that women film enthusiasts love, and
The women-preferred alternative films to the AFI "best of" lists.
