Red-Headed Woman
1932, directed by Jack Conway
Almost a century after it was made, it’s remarkable that audiences look at Red-Headed Woman through a lens of morality. Whether we appreciate Lillian’s liberated sexuality or take issue with her wanton behavior, modern audiences always seem to focus on the movie’s transgressiveness. In recent decades the “Pre-Code” Hollywood film has become its own genre, defined by a perception of looser morals than films from 1934 onward when the studios enforced the Hays Code. Red-Headed Woman is the Pre-Code movie par excellence, and even today, long after the Sexual Revolution, viewers are still shocked, delighted, or offended by Jean Harlow’s portrayal of the bold home-wrecker, the serial seductress Lillian “Red” Andrews. The audience’s reaction is virtually written into the part of Lil’s roommate Sally (Una Merkel) who’s constantly gasping at Lil’s latest move.
How has this movie retained its edge of licentiousness for so long? Are we merely surprised by the perceived anachronism, by its deviance from a “Victorian” code that we assume to have held until the 1960s? No, even if we made that assumption, it’s more than that. The fact that Lil gets away with everything certainly plays a role, but that’s not the whole story either. If Red-Headed Woman strikes us as a celebration of immorality, it’s because we’re still blinded, even now, by a social outlook that we often like to attribute to “conservative” or “old-fashioned” eras of the past. It’s important to recognize this blindness, because it interferes with recognizing the positive work that such a film might accomplish. The subversive quality of Red-Headed Woman is that it manages to be edifying despite – or as a result of – casting aside traditional Christian morality.
We know what Christian morality would do with Lil, because it corresponds precisely to what Joseph Breen demanded when he took oversight of the Production Code Administration two years later. First of all, a sexually unrestrained person like Lil could no longer exist on film, or at least her behavior would have to be reduced to innuendo. Second, after aggressively breaking up a happy marriage, insulting upstanding members of society, making a fool of a gentlemanly coal baron, and shooting her estranged husband with a pistol, she would need to be punished – not merely punished in kind, but sentenced to prison or killed off.
Consider, though, what it would mean to punish Lil. Born on the “wrong side of the tracks”, her motivation is to rise out of poverty, and at the dawn of the Great Depression it would not be a good look to make a punching bag of the lower classes. The film could have put her on equal footing with her “victims” – making her a member of their class – but that would have been the easy way out. Lil’s economic ascent is so important that she reaches her summit precisely at the one-hour mark, when the arrow above Gaerste’s elevator points to the penthouse level. There’s also the problem that Lil’s damage isn’t lasting. The people she hurts turn out fine, so that any punishment of her would smack of retribution.
Nevertheless, Lil’s escape from punishment shocks audiences, then as well as now. Colonel Jason Joy, head of Hollywood’s censorship office in 1932, had (unlike his successor Breen) a good working relationship with the film’s producer Irving Thalberg, yet he called Red-Headed Woman‘s script “the worst ever” for its ending. If we’re fair, we probably have to admit that the story’s sexual politics disturb viewers more than its class differences do. It’s not for nothing that Bill’s surname is Legendre, calling attention to his role as an avatar of masculinity. Despite the presence of a couple of distinguished male actors (Lewis Stone and Charles Boyer), the women consistently outshine the men, both as performers and as characters. Only one bit part, the waiter at the country club, breaks the pattern, discreetly wiping lipstick from Bill’s neck in a comic display of male solidarity (though his gesture repeats what Sally had done for Lil’s boyfriend earlier). Sally, Irene, and Aunt Jane are all stronger and more memorable than any of the leading males.
Jean Harlow of course dominates the cast, and Red-Headed Woman was evidently made with the idea of pushing her to stardom. She had previously worked with Howard Hughes and Frank Capra, but it’s here that her persona emerges. It was her first film under contract with MGM, and Thalberg gave her a chance to shine in this relatively low-end production before pairing her with Clark Gable later the same year. It showcases her full range, from seductive (“Chaaar-lie… you’re gonna do something for me”) to fast-talking flashes of temper (“I suppose I’m just a cross-eyed, half-witted, hunchbacked cripple.”) In both respects she’s a force of nature before which weak men inevitably bend. At the same time she’s an avatar of female sexuality, and it’s striking how many scenes begin or end with her in a reclining position, starting with the film’s first shot.
Apart from Lil’s two big seductions, Bill Legendre Jr. and Charles Gaerste, her story is bracketed by two boyfriends: the bootlegger Al and the chauffeur Albert. The difference in the names signals a progression from the U.S.A. to France, which the story also follows by ending in Paris. The implicit suggestion is that the film will embrace a frankness about sexuality that’s more typically French than American. Legendre’s name is French, and the film is about as close as Hollywood came to a French style in the way Lil, Sally, and the crooner often address the viewer almost directly (think of the way actors mug to the camera in Lumière, Méliès, or Feuillade; the apostrophes to the audience in Guitry or Cocteau; or the rupture of the fourth wall in the French New Wave).
This sexual frankness is synonymous with honesty about masculine weakness. Prefacing each of her two seductions, Lil says, “Well he’s a man, isn’t he?” Instead of being a cause for pride, sex is mortifying to the men in Red-Headed Woman. More than any fleeting pleasure it might bring, we’re constantly shown the embarrassment it causes every man who encounters Lil. Like so many French farces, the film treats sex comically, yet here it’s worth making a distinction. Clearly Red-Headed Woman is not the kind of comedy that bombards us with jokes, but nor is it a comic drama in the mold of My Man Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby, which are essentially morality plays with a light tone. It can be described rather as a “dramatic comedy” that looks charitably at human shortcoming instead of finding corruption and seeking moral resolution. It aims at understanding and reconciliation rather than judgment. Hollywood’s imposition of the Hays Code effectively suppressed the dramatic comedy, and in so doing closed off a particular way of looking at life.
Moral judgments are not only weaponized against the disadvantaged, they also distract us from more constructive observations. If we’re shocked at Lil’s impunity, it probably means we’ve overlooked the skillful way Red-Headed Woman brings Bill and Irene back together, repairing a broken marriage and teaching Bill once and for all to see Lil for what she is – not as something inhuman, but as a gifted social climber whose interests are thoroughly opposed to his own. He understands now that her act of affection toward him was a total charade. In the process, if the audience is receptive, the film could fortify untold numbers of men against temptations like Lil.
This charitable outlook may elude American viewers, but it does not elude Bill Legendre, the man most affected by Lil’s actions. Despite having been shot, he declines to prosecute her, and at that stage we can presume that his leniency is no longer motivated by attraction. His love for Irene is evidently genuine, and at the end, at the Paris racetrack, he’s content to observe Lil from a distance, through binoculars, seriously at first but then with an unfolding smile of comprehension. In his last gesture he quietly slides Irene’s binoculars out of her reach, a comic touch that spares his wife’s feelings while also paying respect to the strength of the woman who had temporarily thrown his life out of balance.
CONNECTIONS:
The Wizard of Oz – Consistent pattern of strong female characters and weak males
Charulata – An episode of infidelity disturbs a happy marriage then passes like an illness or a storm
I Knew Her Well – Subversive story of a sexually “loose” woman from a poor background trying to find her place in the world
Dogville – Implicit or explicit critique of American society’s predilection for moral judgment
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
This essay is largely adapted from an unpublished April 2007 piece written by my late friend and teacher Larry Fox, one of the few essays on film that he ever completed.