Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 19, 1995 TAG: 9508220006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MAL VINCENT LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Beaus flocked around as Scarlett flirtatiously declared that she just couldn't decide which was the handsomest, and whipped them into a competitive frenzy over the burning issue of just which one would bring her a tidbit to eat.
But Scarlett was not the first or the last Southern woman to grip our consciousness. The Southern Belle, a woman as strong as she is manipulative, has endured in both literature and cinema as a pop symbol.
Julia Roberts' version of a wife who takes revenge on her wandering husband in ``Something to Talk About'' is the latest movie-belle to renew the image. The film had a surprisingly strong box office opening, in spite of generally tepid reviews.
According to the movies, the Southern woman is deceptively flighty and frantic, but also strong and open. She says what she means and says it in a way that women in any other geographic area in the world might hesitate to try. She gets what she wants, but in indirect ways. She's put on a pedestal by her men, but she often chooses the wrong man. She's withstood wars and bested rivals - even when she had to stitch up the curtains to make herself a new gown.
All those wiles make her the strongest of women. But just as often, she pays for her strength in the end.
Steel magnolia, or just steel?
The debate is renewed with ``Something to Talk About,'' the latest screenplay by Callie Khouri, the Tennessee-raised woman who won an Oscar and unleashed a national war of the sexes with ``Thelma and Louise.'' In ``Thelma and Louise,'' two women took guns into their own hands and went on a cross-country rampage that let men know they weren't going to take it anymore. The script spawned a dozen imitations in which men were pictured as rotten, cheating swine.
While ``Something to Talk About'' is being promoted as a ``romantic comedy'' in the hopes of selling tickets to the dating crowd, it actually is a 1990s look at the Southern Belle. As it turns out, she isn't so far from Scarlett after all. She's still having trouble with men. She's still taking matters into her own hands. She's still being thwarted by the ``traditions'' of the old South.
Julia Roberts stars as Grace, the eldest daughter of a traditional Southern-gentry family. (Before the commercial-minded decision makers took over, the film was called ``Grace Under Pressure''). Her strong-willed father, Wyly King (Robert Duvall) raises throroughbred horses and keeps Grace under his thumb. She's married to Eddie (Dennis Quaid), whose nickname in college was ``Hound Dog.'' When she learns that Eddie has been fooling around with a flashy local blonde, she reacts in a highly public and outrageous manner.
Even though Eddie is clearly a rascal, and has been caught red-handed, her family doesn't support her display. Her father feels she's embarassing them by making a scene.
The unwritten message is that Southern husbands, after all, are expected to ``fool around'' a bit and that she should look the other way.
But Khouri, who doesn't look nearly as tough as you'd expect when you meet her, claims ``I certainly don't hope this movie brings about the kind of national debate `Thelma and Louise' did. I'm trying to sell a popcorn movie here.
``I think I've given the men a fair shake in the script. I make it clear that Grace didn't realize the marriage had fallen apart. There is a scene that shows that they hadn't had sex for a long time. Eddie, due to some extent to the way Dennis played him, has a good deal of sympathy.''
To some, though, Eddie comes across as a drunken, philandering slob who has become something of a Southern stereotype himself.
Screenwriter Khouri counters that ``this family is very steeped in tradition - ever connected to the South. They're eccentric, but people tolerate that in families.''
Born in Texas but raised in Kentucky and Tennessee, Khouri says ``the South is a place that's still very proud of its traditions. People have no hesitancy about saying so. You're still expected, to some extent, to follow in the family tradition.
``I live in California now, and when I go back, they say to me `You're so lucky.' I wasn't lucky. I left. I wouldn't have written either of these screenplays if I'd stayed, but still, I admire the tradition. I'm not rebelling. I'm just branching out.''
Southern women are facing a whole new batch of pressures.
``There are a lot of women working at the same time they have families,'' Khouri said. ``They feel that they've failed. It's not a failure not to be perfect. Women have children, but they now, also, have to work. Women who are working are being made, unnecessarily, to feel guilty.''
She feels that a scene at the Social Club, when Grace explodes and calls the other women to bear witness to her husband's infidelity, is funny ``but I can't imagine it ever really happening. I made it up. But wouldn't it be great if it did?''
Suffering for her spunk
In the movies, Southern women have intrigued screenwriters and moviemakers more than any other species. The Southern woman was stronger and more eccentric than her sisters, but she usually had to suffer for her spunk.
Scarlett O'Hara in ``Gone With the Wind'' saved Tara, withstood the Yankees and made her lumber business profitable but, in the end, she lost the man she loved.
Author Margaret Mitchell wrote that ``there was the usual masculine disillusionment in discovering that a woman has a brain.''
In ``Jezebel'' (1938), Bette Davis shocked polite society by wearing a scarlet-red dress to the Olympus Ball, shouting ``This is 1852! Girls don't have to simper around in white just because they aren't married.'' She may be strong, but she loses the man, Henry Fonda, who marries a Yankee girl.
Almost 30 years later, in ``Hush-Hush, Sweet Charlotte'' (1965), Davis still had a Southern accent and was just as feisty when she stopped a bulldozer from approaching her Southern mansion. ``From where I'm standing, ahhh could spit in your eye,'' she told an offender.
The Southern temptresses may have put up a showy fight, but Hollywood scriptwriters often punished them for it. In ``Raintree County'' (1957) Elizabeth Taylor stole Montgomery Clift away from his Yankee girlfriend (Eva Marie Saint) by telling him, falsely, that she was pregnant. Elizabeth, subsequently, went insane.
In ``Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,'' Liz attempts to keep her homosexual husband and, at the same time, keep in the good graces of Big Daddy as she explains that the fate of a cat on a hot tin roof is to ``just hold on ... just hold on, baby.''
In ``Giant,'' (1956) Taylor played a strong-willed Virginia girl who adapts to the harsh sun and dust of her husband's Texas empire, proving that true grit triumphs - at times.
Poor Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams' ``A Streetcar Named Desire'' (1951) put up an equally valiant fight for gentility and sensibility, but lost.
Blanche is the epitome of lost tradition as she admits that Belle Rive, the family plantation, has become no more than a faded batch of unpaid bills. When her sister's brutish, and symbolically ``modern,'' husband rapes her, it is a rape of the lost past.
Gloria Grahame won an Oscar for playing a ``modern Virginia belle'' in ``The Bad and the Beautiful,'' a cyncial 1952 look at Hollywood. She was the charming, but manipulatively sluttish, wife of screenwriter Dick Powell, and came to a bad end.
``Fried Green Tomatoes'' had a group of strong women, perhaps best epitomized by Kathy Bates' parking lot scene. The space she's jockeying for is stolen by a group of youngsters who inform her they are ``younger and faster.'' She rams their car, telling them that she is ``older and has more insurance.''
``Steel Magnolias'' was a sisterly bonding of varied Southern women in a beauty parlor. But only Dolly Parton seemed truly Southern. Even if not as focused as the play upon which it was based, the film got across the idea that bonding counted.
It was the same feeling that sparked the television series ``Designing Women,'' which effectively satirized the South of the past while depicting career women of the present.
Modern Southern career women have received short shrift in the movies. A notable exception was the sharp, insightful TV newswoman played by Holly Hunter in ``Broadcast News.''
Janine Basinger, author of the film-study book ``A Woman's View,'' claims that for women in movies, the Big Three has always been ``Men, Marraige and Motherhood.'' She claims that even the strongest film women were usually punished for the rebellion in plots that still showed ``what fun, glamour and power they could experience along the way. A man had the choice to be bad, and bad, for him, wasn't necessarily evil. But a woman was either good or bad.''
``In the movies,'' she said, ``the worst fate of a woman is to choose a bad man and it is usually accepted that the one goal in her life, after all, is to get a man.''
As often as not, writers and moviemakers knew little of the South they pictured. Only one brief field scene of ``Gone With the Wind'' was actually shot in the South.
by CNB