While Ned is in Europe being cured, Helen develops an affair with a rich politician called Nick Townsend (Cary Grant). On his return, Ned discovers that Helen is having an affair and tries to take custody of Johnny. Helen goes on the run with Johnny.
She falls into destitution and becomes a prostitute. She is found by an undercover cop hired by her husband and gives up her son. She eventually picks herself up and becomes a famous cabaret star in Europe. In Europe, Helen meets Nick and they return to America to enable Helen to see her son again. But, during the visit, Helen decides to remain with Ned and Johnny.
Blonde Venus is clearly a melodrama, for the following reasons.
It is dominated by a woman, Helen Faraday, who is also a victim.
She is confronted with moral conflicts throughout the film: she has to give up her successful career for a domestic life; she sleeps with Nick in order to obtain the money to cure her husband; she leaves home with her child when her husband finds out that she 4 Film genres: defining the typical film 127
is having an affair; she gives up her child and eventually returns home again. These are not straightforward choices that Helen makes; each requires a sacrifice and creates a moral dilemma.
Moreover, many of these dilemmas are shared by most women living in a patriarchal society. There are several unexpected twists and sharp reversals in the plot: Ned returns early from Europe, which is how he finds out about his wife’s affair (the main secret in the film); and Helen very quickly pulls herself out of destitution and becomes a cabaret star in Europe. Ned and Helen first meet each other by chance while Ned is on a walking tour in Germany, and Helen and Nick meet by chance in Europe at the time that she has become a famous cabaret star.
According to the censors, there were three basic problems with Blonde Venus: 1) the affair between Helen Faraday and Nick Townsend; 2) scenes of Helen soliciting; 3) the film’s ending.
The film’s director, von Sternberg, incorporated or avoided the censors’ criticisms of the script through the manipulation of the film’s causal logic.
The script of Blonde Venus indicates that, after singing one evening in a club, Helen must sleep with Nick in order to obtain $300 to pay for her husband’s treatment in Europe.
The depiction of Nick sleeping with Helen was obviously
objectionable to the censors, but Sternberg filmed it in such a way as to make it acceptable (but at the cost of making the scene ambiguous). First, we see Helen and Nick in Helen’s dressing room. This scene is followed by an insert of Nick writing a cheque for $300 to Helen, and finally, we see a shot of Helen being driven home.
We do not see Helen go to Nick’s apartment to sleep with him. Yet it is precisely this event which motivates (which is the primary cause of) the action of Nick giving the cheque to Helen.
All we see is Nick writing out a cheque. The reasons why he does this are not explicitly stated in the film itself. The spectator has to supply the repressed part of the narrative, namely that, after Nick and Helen met in Helen’s dressing room, Helen returned to Nick’s apartment and slept with him for $300. So the spectator has to infer the cause of Nick’s action of writing the cheque.
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Later in the film, Nick offers Helen an apartment while her husband is in Europe. But we do not directly see or hear Helen agree with Nick’s proposal. We know that she has taken up Nick’s offer only when she returns to her own empty apartment to pick up the mail. As with the scene just described, this is an indirect representation of events that the censors found objectionable (namely, a married woman living with another man). This part of the film is indirectly stating that Helen is living with Nick in his apartment. But because we do not see on the screen Helen cohabiting with Nick, the censors cannot object. With only a small amount of information, the spectator can infer the cause of Helen’s return to her own apartment to pick up the mail, namely that she took up Nick’s offer to live in his apartment. Rather than happening on screen, the film prompts the spectator to infer the objectionable material.
During her fall – that is, when she runs away, taking her son Johnny – Helen resorts to prostitution. The censors objected to a number of scenes in the script where Helen walks the streets and solicits men, is arrested by an undercover cop and is then charged in court with soliciting. In the actual film, the scene of Helen walking the streets and soliciting has been removed.
Nonetheless, she still appears in court (although she is arrested for vagrancy, not soliciting). Helen therefore appears in court without motivation – she is not shown being arrested or causing a nuisance. In one scene we see her and Johnny take a ride on a hay cart. Cut to a shot of a card from the bureau of missing persons which indicates that Helen has been sighted. Cut again to Helen being led into court on the charge of vagrancy.
An event consisting of what censors regarded to be
objectionable material but which is crucial to the cause–effect logic of the film is eliminated, resulting in an ambiguous, elliptical sequence. Later in the film, we do see Helen soliciting (she picks up the undercover cop) but this scene is not
motivated in order for Helen to gain money from sex; rather, it is motivated so that Helen can humiliate the undercover cop (obviously acceptable to the censors!).
Finally, we need to say something about the ending of Blonde Venus. In one version of the script, Helen’s husband Ned is 4 Film genres: defining the typical film 129
reported to have had an affair with the housekeeper. This would then have given Helen sufficient reason to keep her son and to marry Nick Townsend. In this version of the ending, Helen retains her successful career in show business, keeps her son and marries the romantic lead. But the censors objected that this ending violated what they called the ‘rule of compensating moral values’, which states that all immoral actions must be compensated for in the film by means of the punishment of the immoral character or through the redemption of her immoral ways. But in this unfilmed ending of Blonde Venus, Helen’s immorality (living with Nick, soliciting, etc.) is not compensated for; it is merely paired off with an immoral action performed by her husband. Sternberg’s decision in the final script to end the actual film by pairing off husband Ned to his wife Helen was acceptable to the censors because it meant that Helen gives up Nick Townsend and her successful show business career in order to return to a domestic life for the sake of her son. Thus, Helen’s illicit love affair and soliciting are compensated for at the end of the film by her maternal affections and her conformity to patriarchal values.
themeloDramaoftheunknoWnWoman
For Cavell, ‘failure’ is the defining characteristic of the melodrama of the unknown woman. This failure is an inability to recognize – the male character’s failure to recognize a woman from the past with whom he had a brief love affair. But it is also a matter of the female character’s failure to prove her existence to a man – that is, her failure to be recognized by a man with whom she had a brief love affair. The female character is in control of all the relevant information, whereas the male character is distinguished by his ignorance. The moral conflict and the secret and the dramatic knot of the melodrama of the unknown woman are generated by the male character’s lack of recognition of the female character. The moral conflict in the melodrama of the unknown woman can be summed up by the
following question: How should the unknown woman make
her presence known to the man she once loved? Furthermore, does she reveal to him the secret that only she remembers? The dramatic knot of these films is represented as a struggle: ‘The woman’s struggle is to understand why recognition by the man 130
has not happened or has been denied or has become irrelevant’
(Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears, p. 30). Perhaps it would have been more accurate if Cavell called this subgenre the
‘melodrama of the forgotten woman’, because it clearly involves a loss of memory.
Cavell takes Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), Letter From an Unknown Woman
(Max Ophuls, 1948), Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) and Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) to be the quintessential melodramas of the unknown woman. But, as my own following analysis will attempt to demonstrate, Only Yesterday (John Stahl, 1933) is also a melodrama of the unknown woman, a film Cavell does not mention at all.
Only Yesterday opens on the day of the Wall Street Crash. Jim Emerson (John Boles) loses all his, and his friends’, money. He goes into his study to commit suicide, but finds a long letter on his desk. The film then returns to the past to follow the story narrated in the letter. The letter begins with Jim, in uniform, meeting Mary Lane (Margaret Sullavan) at a party for soldiers.
They leave the party together to walk by a lake. When they return to the party, they discover that everyone has left so Jim walks Mary home. Jim leaves to fight in the war without saying goodbye to Mary. Later, Mary talks to her mother, who is saddened and ashamed by the news that Mary tells her (we find out only later what the news is: that Mary is pregnant).
Mary goes to New York to stay with her aunt Julia. Mary has a baby boy and, later, goes to greet Jim as he returns from the war. But Jim fails to recognize Mary. Mary, who continues to live with aunt Julia, brings up her son on her own, and also works successfully as a fashion designer. Several years later, Mary meets Jim again at a new year’s party. Jim still does not recognize her. Soon afterwards, Mary falls ill and decides to write the letter to Jim. She finishes just before she dies. We then return to Jim reading the letter. He rushes to Mary’s home, but is too late, as Mary has died. However, Jim introduces himself to his son.
What defines Only Yesterday as a melodrama of the unknown woman is Jim Emerson’s inability to recognize Mary as he returns from war (or, from the opposite point of view, Mary’s 4 Film genres: defining the typical film 131
failure to get herself recognized by Jim). This structure of unknownness is made more dramatic by the fact that Jim just happens to be the father of Mary’s illegitimate child.
Mary’s misfortune in becoming pregnant out of wedlock is therefore compounded by Jim’s failure to recognize her. Mary could have become a fallen woman as well as an unknown
woman if it wasn’t for her broad-minded aunt Julia in New York. Julia remarks that ‘this type of thing isn’t even good melodrama’ by which she presumably means nineteenth-century literary and theatrical melodrama, in which the sexually transgressive woman automatically becomes a fallen woman and an outcast from society. Aunt Julia prevents Mary from becoming a fallen woman, but she cannot prevent her from becoming an unknown woman.
There are a few seconds of dramatic tension during Jim’s return from the war, as we see Mary’s face in extreme close-up as she finally realizes that Jim does not recognize her, which becomes the crucial moment in the film’s definition as a melodrama of the unknown woman. This crucial moment consists of a
brutal discrepancy of knowledge between Jim and Mary, and, correspondingly, between Jim and the spectator, for the film is, of course, taking the point of view of the female victim. This discrepancy of knowledge is created by means of omniscient narration, a defining characteristic of melodrama. The whole of the film’s narrative is then focused on the resolving of this discrepancy. However, this resolution is retarded through Mary’s self-sacrifice (and later, through her realization that Jim has married another woman). The discrepancy is overcome only after Mary writes a letter to Jim on her deathbed.
Moreover, we must remember that the discrepancy of
knowledge in the film is overlaid by an illicit sexual relationship that resulted in a pregnancy. Such a transgression must be punished, according to the censor’s logic of compensating moral values. Punishment is realized in the melodrama of the unknown woman in the woman’s death and/or in the death
of the illicit child. Here we can note a fundamental difference between Max Ophuls’s 1948 film Letter From an Unknown Woman and Only Yesterday (films which are otherwise quite 132
similar to one another). In Ophuls’s film, both the unknown woman and her illegitimate child die, whereas in Only Yesterday, the child lives but the mother dies.
This difference between the two films is crucial for
understanding the role of the father in the melodrama of the unknown woman. Because both the illegitimate child and the unknown woman die in Letter From an Unknown Woman, these two deaths can be compensated for only through the father’s death and Letter From an Unknown Woman ends with the father preparing to fight a duel he will surely lose. In Only Yesterday, however, the illegitimate child lives, permitting the father to redeem himself by looking after the child, since the mother has recently died (as is common in melodramas, the father has arrived ‘too late’). Mary’s death at the end of Only Yesterday is a compensation for her illicit sexual transgression (as well as her success as a businesswoman). At the beginning of Letter From an Unknown Woman, we see the father, Stefan, preparing to leave Vienna, after being challenged to a duel.
But after reading the letter from Lisa, the unknown woman, Stefan changes his mind and decides to fight the duel which will lead to his death. The opposite happens in Only Yesterday.
Jim is just about to commit suicide after losing all his money (and all the money of his friends) during the Wall Street Crash.
But after reading Mary’s letter, Jim finds new hope and rushes off to see his son. The letter in both films therefore initiates a turning point in the film’s narrative, for it dramatically changes the course of events for the male character. This is all the more noticeable in Only Yesterday, because it takes over 16 minutes of screen time before Mary’s letter is discovered.
The film has taken over a quarter of an hour to introduce a number of characters who have been affected by the Wall Street Crash, which leads us to believe that the rest of the film will be concerned with the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and its effects on these characters. But then Mary’s letter dramatically changes the course of the film by introducing a long flashback.
We need to return to the moment when the film communicates Mary’s pregnancy to the spectator. The illicit affair and subsequent pregnancy is represented in an indirect manner, 4 Film genres: defining the typical film 133
as is the potentially offensive material in Blonde Venus. But unlike Blonde Venus, Only Yesterday contains moments that are simultaneously under-represented and over-represented. The illicit love affair and Mary’s pregnancy is under-represented in the sense that it is never explicitly stated in the film that Mary is pregnant. The film openly acknowledges Mary’s condition only when the baby is born. Nonetheless, Mary’s condition is over-represented in the sense that, throughout several scenes, the film continually hints at Mary’s illicit love affair and pregnancy.
As Mary and Jim walk towards the lake in the moonlight, there is a several second fade out. After the fade in, Jim and Mary are seen hurriedly walking away from the lake. They pause while Jim re-ties Mary’s sash; the camera then cuts to a medium close-up of Mary’s face, emphasizing her guilty expression. In effect, this part of the film – or, more precisely, the fade and Jim’s action of re-tying Mary’s sash – is indirectly saying that Mary and Jim have just had sexual intercourse.
After the scene in which Mary learns that Jim has gone to war, we cut to a scene in which Mary argues with her mother as her mother talks about the family being disgraced. Mary decides to stay with her broad-minded aunt Julia in New York, who talks about ‘it’ being just another one of those biological events.
In total, Mary talks about her pregnancy with her mother and aunt Julia for over three and a half minutes of screen time, without actually mentioning the word ‘pregnant’. Compare this long-winded form of indirect representation with the extremely short, elliptical narrative elisions in Sternberg’s Blonde Venus.
Additionally, like Blonde Venus, Only Yesterday is representing the problems and difficulties that women experience in a patriarchal society, but in the case of Only Yesterday, the difficulties involve pregnancy out of wedlock.
theparanoIDWoman’SfIlm
In the paranoid woman’s film, a subgenre identified by Doane in her book The Desire to Desire, the active female character is inflicted with mental states such as paranoia. In addition to possessing some or all of the attributes of the melodrama, the paranoid woman’s film also contains one or more of the following three attributes:
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33 It is based on a wife’s fear that her husband is planning to murder her (the institution of marriage is haunted by murder).
33 The husband has usually been married before, and his
previous wife died under mysterious circumstances.
33 It contains a space in the home not accessible to the female character.
The narrative structure of the paranoid woman’s film derives from the gothic novel, from Ann Radcliffe to Daphne du
Maurier and beyond. Indeed, the first paranoid woman’s film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca of 1940, is based on du Maurier’s novel of the same title. Other films belonging to the genre include Gaslight (Cukor, 1944), Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1943), The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1945), The Two Mrs Carrolls (Peter Godfrey, 1947) and Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947).
In terms of the first attribute, how does the wife begin to fear that her husband is planning to murder her? It is precisely from the other two attributes of the paranoid woman’s film, the death of the first wife and the secret that the husband keeps locked behind closed doors (both attributes refer to the folk tale Bluebeard). In Hitchcock’s film Rebecca, Rebecca was the first wife of the male lead Max de Winter. Like the first wife of the male leads in most paranoid woman’s films, Rebecca died under mysterious circumstances. In Secret Beyond the Door, the first wife of Mark Lamphere, called Eleanor, also died under mysterious circumstances. In The Two Mrs Carrolls, the first Mrs Carroll suddenly dies when Mr Carroll (Humphrey Bogart) decides to marry Sally (Barbara Stanwyck). But after one and a half years of marriage, Sally falls ill and at the same time discovers that Mr Carroll has fallen in love with another woman. After the husband tells her a number of lies, Sally finally realizes that Mr Carroll is planning to murder her.
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