I watched The Women (George Cukor, 1939) last night. The cover of the box says "It's all about men!" which wasn't promising, but I rented it because George Cukor directed it, it's got an amazing all-woman cast, and I was hoping for a sort of biting Dorothy Parker-esque thing, with smart women and biting wit.

Also, Rosalind Russell is in it.

I knew I was in trouble from the moment when the opening credits got all "clever" and visually compared all the characters to animals. (Norma Shearer is a doe, Russell's a cat, Joan Crawford is a cougar, Paulette Godard is a fox, someone less famous is a cow, etc). It turned out to be a reallly well-acted movie about how society wives doing anything to hold onto their men. Joan Fontaine getting pregnant while she's divorcing her husband is great because it saves her marriage; once they reunite over the phone, she says "Now I'll do whatever Johnny says."

It ends with the heroine responding to "Don't you have any pride?" with "No pride at all. That's a luxury a woman in love can't afford."

I've been watching old movies for a long time, I have a lot of patience for the getting-married-is-good,a-woman's-place-is-in-the-home vibe but I literally cringed through the last half.

So someone tell me why my big iTunes songs right now are "Bootylicious" and "99 Problems" (Hook: "If you're having girl problems I feel bad for you, son / I got 99 problems and a bitch ain't one")?