What do Dame May Whitty and Marie Dressler have in common? To credit a veteran Boston University researcher, these two movie stars of past decades stand out because they played roles that showed older women as different from the prevailing Hollywood stereotypes.
Starring in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller “The Lady Vanishes,” Dame May Whitty fools viewers and her enemies alike. As researcher Elizabeth Markson says, “She first looks like the innocuous music teacher but then turns out to be the arch-spy who gets away from people who are at least symbolically the Nazis.”
Marie Dressler, acting in the 1930 film “Min and Bill” with Wallace Beery, became a star despite weighing over 200 pounds and looking homely.
These are just two of the almost 250 films chosen at random from more than 3,000 made during the period 1929 to 1995 that Professor Markson has reviewed. She focused on those actors and actresses who were at least 60 years old who had been nominated for Oscars at least once in their careers.
What surprised this researcher was “the persistence of gender stereotyping through so many decades of filmmaking.” Referring to her previous study, Markson says, “I had originally predicted that we would see a lot of changes.” Unfortunately, in her view, these changes have simply not happened.
As she views the films, Markson finds that “older women become either invisible or we project our fears of aging on women rather than men whom we continue to portray as instrumental and powerful to the very end.”
Women’s place in American society has surely changed in recent decades but not, it seems, Hollywood’s vision of that place. “We still see older women as spinsters, wives, mothers,” Markson points out. She observes that this is not the case with men: “How few older men in films are married or you can’t tell if they are married or not!”
Her review of films also reveals that “family relationships are totally neglected.” This strikes her as particularly strange because research has shown that such relationships become more important as we get older, especially for men.
Markson does not expect the situation to become better any time soon. She admits that Hollywood reflects American attitude, so that you might think that change would happen. But, as she points out, Hollywood shapes our attitudes as well; the movie industry seems to have a vested interest in presenting women as young, thin, and conventionally beautiful.
This process starts with the scripts. Hollywood studios are reported to have a “gray list,” whereby screenwriters over age 35 do not get hired. “Overage”actresses such as Meryl Streep and Faye Dunaway find themselves offered few roles.
Markson does not have much confidence that women themselves will become aware of the situation and pressure Hollywood for change. She tells of showing films to women graduate students and having them not notice the stereotypes until their attention is drawn toward them. And there seems to be no group of older people that currently scans Hollywood films critically, the way the Gray Panthers once did for American advertising.
If, as Markson judges, “some of the best portrayals of women characters were in the 1930s,” that is getting to be long ago. You might expect by now that American films might have caught up with the creativity shown by many older women.
Markson believes that the stakes are higher than one might think. That’s because demographic changes in the future will multiply the number of older women in American society. If films do not present us with better images of this part of the population, the temptation will become greater to regard old women as nuisances rather than people deserving of dignified care when needed.
But older women as they really are, in their great variety and magnificent diversity, are appropriate subjects for the creative arts such as film. To ignore who they are and what they are doing is to miss much of the American story.
All of us ordinary Americans know family members, friends, and neighbors who are doing interesting projects in retirement. Many of them are finding their later years, in the words of another Hollywood classic, “the best years of our lives.” And yet we see precious little evidence of this in the movie theaters.
Outside the scope of the research project discussed here, a new independent film titled “Innocence” does give a convincing portrayal of people in later life who fall in love and carry on a passionate illicit affair. They had known one another when young and, only after 50 years’ absence, rediscover each other.
And a 1990 Canadian film, “Strangers in Good Company,” portrays a group of older women much the way real people are, skillfully revealing their inner life,
Maybe it’s time for a new burst of cinematic creativity in Hollywood that will show older women and men, not in stereotype, but as we have become in reality.
Richard Griffin