Reel Appeal for Women : This Summer Offers Films That Females Can Embrace

The studio readers’ plot synopses must have looked great to the guys in the production offices. One story was about a wimpish 13-year-old boy who wishes himself into a man’s body and charms a worldly career woman out of her three-piece suit. The other a yarn about a couple of minor-league baseball players vying for the off-field position of designated lover for the team’s most beautiful and most grateful fan.

Whoever gave the green lights to these films--”Big” and “Bull Durham”--have doubtless had their assigned parking spaces moved closer to the office and are now permitted to table-hop at Morton’s.

Both films are winners, critically and commercially, the dream parlay that is the production executive’s equivalent of leading the league in both home runs and stolen bases.

But how much did these executives really know, and when did they know it? Specifically, did they know that these stories would be particularly appealing to women, and were they actually aware of the buying power women now exercise at the box office?

For the last decade, Hollywood wisdom has insisted that two groups control moviegoing habits in the United States: Teen-agers and men. Therefore, “Porky’s” and “Rambo,” breasts and biceps, bimbos and bozos. Whenever a script aimed at the brain got made, it was usually labeled an “art house film,” as much to say box-office poison, and played only at theaters where unfiltered apple juice was served.

Movies like “Cross Creek” and “Tender Mercies,” distinctly smart American-themed movies with strong appeal to women, put most of patriarchal Hollywood’s chiefs to sleep and were eventually dumped on the market with little advertising support by Universal Pictures.

Occasionally, a movie with apparent interest to women would break through and become a blockbuster. But the only ones that studios would acknowledge were commercially helped by women were those in the “relationships” genre--”Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Ordinary People,” “On Golden Pond,” “Terms of Endearment.”

There have been other mainstream not-artsy, not-intellectual films whose commercial success could reasonably be credited--at least, partially--to women who found them particularly appealing. “Romancing the Stone” comes to mind. Also, “Outrageous Fortune” and “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee.”

But the commercial hit that was openly discussed as a “woman’s movie” was last year’s “Fatal Attraction,” the story of a married man who indulges in an athletic one-weekend stand with a woman who afterwards comes to terrorize him and his family.

It would be generosity in excess to assume that anyone involved in the making, financing or distribution of “Fatal Attraction” intended the social messages that audiences eventually gleaned from it--that it demonstrated to men the inequities and accountability of the lingering double standard, and served as a cautionary tale for both sexes about the consequences of recreational sex. Some people even managed to link the film’s success to AIDS.

“Fatal Attraction” was a simple psychological thriller, and one that had been done before--almost scene for scene--by Clint Eastwood in the relatively obscure 1971 film “Play Misty for Me.”

Film buffs can debate the merits of the two movies--they’re both available on videotape--but it seems apparent that the changes that have occurred between 1971 and 1987 to enlarge the commercial audience for the films’ themes are the general changes in women’s attitudes; their declining tolerance for the boys-will-be-boys double standard and their assertiveness at the box office.

Paramount’s executives must have been as surprised by the talk show frenzy prompted by “Fatal Attraction” as they were grateful for it. The movie did serve a social service, inadvertent or not, and cocktail hour flirtations may never be the same. But the economic message for Hollywood profiteers was that films of special appeal for women can rack up grosses with the best of the he-man epics, slob comedies and special-effects pec taculars.

The evidence is available in the summer box-office charts. It hasn’t been too many years since summers went by without a single film of interest to adult women being released by a major studio. This year, there are several--” ’Crocodile’ Dundee II,” “Big,” “Big Business,” “Bull Durham”--and what would traditionally have been the surest thing on the summer schedule--”Rambo III”--lost its legs long before the season was half over.

While none of the new-breed summer movies figures to advance Western civilization, they may help slow the decline. “ ‘Croc’ II’s” Mick Dundee won’t inspire many children to a college education, but the humanity of his character is at a level that would give Rambo nosebleeds, and the simple themes and humor of the movie appeal to more productive sides of our nature.

So do the simple themes of “Big” and “Bull Durham,” both of which appear to be benefiting from their attraction to female moviegoers.

In “Big,” Tom Hanks plays a 13-year-old boy who awakens in the body of a 30-year-old man and, because of his boyish, unworldly innocence, becomes the pride of a toy company magnate and the lover of a woman executive. “Big” is as preposterous as “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” but Hanks’ inventive physical comedy and his goofy boy-man sexuality is irresistibly effective.

Particularly, it seems, for women.

“(“Big”) fulfills a fantasy of what women would like, a 30-year-old body with the child side of a man inside,” says Dr. Carol Lieberman, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who often consults with studio executives on film scripts. “It’s a theme you see more and more. Women want more of the boy side of men, not the side that is preoccupied with work or career.”

There are several things going on with women that are being expressed by their appreciation of these movies, Lieberman says. Women are reacting in some ways against the image that has come with women’s liberation. Professional women particularly have attempted to cover up their more feminine aspects, she said, feeling that in the work place they have to be stronger than men to compete with men.

In both “Big” and “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee,” women renounce the outer trappings of their lives in choosing men of innocence over men obsessed. It’s a theme that Lieberman says is part of a larger desire by women, in their growingly complicated lives, to simplify their relationships with men.

The Hanks character’s transformation is a magnificent fantasy for both genders in the audience.

For men looking back, there was no more frightening adventure than the onset of puberty, the battles we fought--and lost--against those unsentimental hordes of hormones. To be able to wish yourself past that period, into an adult body, and buy directly into an advanced love-sex relationship is a notion that makes Rambo’s adventure in Afghanistan about as nostalgic as an old game of kick the can.

For women, as Lieberman says, Hanks’ character is the idealized man. Lieberman says women are drawn to Hanks’ character in “Big” and to 48-year-old Paul Hogan’s character in the “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee” movies for the same reason. As unrealistic as they are, the men are free of ego, of competitive concerns, and are uncalculating in their relationships.

“Women want the child-like side of men to come out,” Lieberman says. “It’s not that the side isn’t there, it’s that men are afraid to show it. There is a strength in vulnerability that appeals to women. There is more power in that.”

Hanks’ and Hogan’s characters remain child-men in their respective movies. The fantasy works a little differently in Ron Shelton’s marvelously entertaining “Bull Durham.” By far the most thematically contemporary of this summer’s movies, “Bull Durham” takes its fantasies much closer to the brink of reality.

The central character of the film is Susan Sarandon’s Annie Savoy, a bright and sensual part-time schoolteacher who recruits one of the young players from the town’s Triple A baseball team as a sexual companion and spiritual protege each season. This season is particularly tough on Annie because her two finalists include a true manchild (Tim Robbins), a wild-armed rookie pitcher with major league speed, and a veteran catcher (Kevin Costner) who exudes control both on and off the field.

“Bull Durham” points up the dilemma faced by many post-liberation-era women. Annie can maintain control over her sex life, have the same revolving door policy about airhead bedmates as men have had, without the risks of either commitment or ostracism. But this summer is complicated for Annie by the presence of a man who won’t accept her no-strings deal.

On the surface, “Bull Durham” reverses the familiar theme of the male philanderer brought to rein by true love. For men, the transformation was called maturation. For women, it was reform. Men sowed their wild oats; women were vamps. “Bull Durham,” in its unapologetically sympathetic treatment of Annie, seems to mark a new maturation in Hollywood.

But not to make too much of a trend. The film industry is neither anti-women nor anti-intellectual; it is simply pro-profit. The male-operated studios will make whatever sells (Orion Pictures, which made “Bull Durham,” also made the unconscionable “Colors”) and women’s money is good with them.

We’ll know they’re acquiring a conscience when they start seriously hiring women.