Anne Morey

“The Judge Called Me an Accessory”: Women's Prison Films, 1950-1962

(1995). “The Judge Called Me an Accessory”: Womens Prison Films, 1950-1962. Journal of Popular Film and Television: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 80-87.

Film Studies: Women in Contemporary Cinema (review)

diffusion (at the village and popular level) and the development of durable social capital is less substantial. While democratizing civil society appears essential to both political learning and the capacity to act, so too do formal institutions of democracy (functioning constitutions and meaningful elections). The Directory regularly overturned elections and ignored its own constitution. Livesey posits further that the elevation of “moral identity” and “sentiment” as important qualities of the new citizen meant that democratic ideals did not “implicitly exclude women” (197). Yet, the era’s leaders explicitly did just that. Moreover, the Directory survived only briefly. Livesey admits that while the Directory promoted the development of commercial republicanism, Napoleon’s regime “drained the institutions of their content” and “nearly a century would be required to rescue its institutional form” (235). He concludes optimistically that despite this hiatus, the Directory “bequeathed a lexicon for the defense of markets, small property, and political equality to the society” (125). Despite these limitations, Livesay’s thoughtful, well-researched book engages many current debates about the Revolution, political theory, and the processes of democratization and signals important questions for future debate.

A Star Has Died: Affect and Stardom in a Domestic Melodrama

Until relatively recently, it has been fashionable to read Douglas Sirk as ridiculing popular culture through his manipulation of it. In other words, critics tell us, to be moved by a Sirk film is to have missed the critical boat—because, as Paul Willemen has noted, the director himself offers up a textual performance that is anything but sincere. Christine Gledhill and Walter Metz have attempted to rescue the duped audience from this critical opprobrium. Gledhill argues that Sirk appropriates the conventions of the woman’s film, in which female concerns should be and have been central, to reorder the narrative elements into a story of the absent patriarch. Similarly, Metz recuperates this possibly duped audience of female readers/viewers by reevaluating the (female) authors of the texts that Sirk so obsessively remakes, arguing that many of the signifiers of “auteurship” usually granted to Sirk are already on display in the original works (12). Like Gledhill and Metz, I seek to demonstrate that Sirk is more than a parodist. This article compares Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) to David O. Selznick and William Wellman’s A Star Is Born (1937) in order to explore a characteristically Sirkian narrative strategy: the later film does not amuse itself at its predecessor’s expense so much as it inverts the message. A Star Is Born conveys to its audience the idea that envying the glamorous life of the Hollywood star is inappropriate, inasmuch as the glamour has been fully paid for in suffering; arguably, what is lost is more valuable than the beauty, wealth, fame, and indeed audience envy that is won. Imitation of Life, in contrast, suggests that envying the glamorous life of the Broadway star is inappropriate because, as Gertrude Stein once quipped of Oakland, “there’s no there there” (Stein 289). Sirk’s protagonist cannot trade suffering for glamour because she is not sufficiently real to suffer; literally, then, there is here nothing to envy. Like other domestic melodramas of the day, Imitation of Life explores the possibilities of female rebellion and escape, variously offering its audience validation, socialization, and emotional release through tears—but it accomplishes this task in a way that criticizes female aspirations and audience gullibility considerably less than it criticizes theatricality in general. Critics typically read Imitation of Life as an implied critique of women’s labor outside the home (see, e.g., Heung and Flitterman-Lewis), suitable to a historical moment in which, Betty Friedan commented in 1963, women were being hoodwinked into believing that “they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity” (15) even while “more married women were leaving home for work than ever before” (Degler 443). But I would refine this argument by suggesting that the problem is not that Lora Meredith works outside the home, but that her work outside the home subsumes her work