SISTERS IN CELLULOID : A WOMAN’S VIEW: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960, <i> By Jeanine Basinger (Alfred A. Knopf: $30; 528 pp.; illustrated)</i>

“Movies,” says Jeanine Basinger in her huge book, “were really only about one thing: a kind of yearning. A desire to know what you didn’t know, have what you didn’t have, and feel what you were afraid to feel. They were a door to the Other, to the Something Else.” She might well be defining all of fiction, certainly much opera and theater, or poetry itself, which aims to show, as the poet Marianne Moore once put it, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In the movies, perfect camera reality, like the ravishing music in an opera, serves to sharpen both complete belief and complete disbelief in the conjured world of the story.

Basinger, going on at considerable length, applies her description to the traditional woman’s film in order to demonstrate the particularly acute ambiguity embedded in the genre. Her aim is to defend it against those unimaginative film-scholars who have assumed that it mainly sold women a bill of goods.

The outrageous plots created for a woman’s picture such as “Shopworn” (1932), for example--in which Barbara Stanwyck “is sent to prison by her rich young lover’s mother and when she gets out and can’t find a job as a waitress, has no choice but to become a famous Broadway star overnight”--have frequently been seen as plain idiocy meant to numb the female mind in an unenlightened era.

Or take “Deception” (1946), wherein Bette Davis’ husband turns up after being presumed dead, and Davis decides to shoot her current lover because he might spoil the husband’s cello debut at Carnegie Hall. Far from seeing such stuff as perniciously ridiculous, Basinger finds a liberating value in it, not only for the women of their time, but for all female Americans still caught, and often still crunched, between conflicting ideas about the course and purpose of their lives:

“What’s astonishing is that these plots work,” Basinger writes. They “are cautionary tales of a particularly desperate stripe, but they contain real passion, real anger. The lunacy verifies them. . . . Although many women’s films are unquestionably demented, I salute their reckless plots, in which well-dressed stars act out the woman’s form of heroism: living outside the rules of correct behavior, which in story terms is realized by living outside the rules of logical narrative construction.”

First, however, she has to define the genre itself, which actually had no crystal-clear boundaries and qualities even though it is easily recognizable behind all its amazing range of flavors. In a “woman’s film” a woman is the center of the universe. Everything she thinks and feels and does is of sovereign importance, and moreover what she can do is often seen to be infinite--fly a spaceship to Jupiter, command troops, run corporations, foil enemies, do primary research, rule countries, star in cabaret, win elections, perform brain surgery, etc.

Nevertheless, the movie eventually makes clear that her real job at all times is being a woman; and what she actually tries to do is always at specifically female risk. Such a film sends the message that until “being a woman” has been figured out, nothing else will really work: the great rewards of effort and talent will ultimately be compromised.

In such movies, “love” is the name of the great obstacle and problem that being a woman entails, and the name of any woman’s actual career, however many millions she makes or how great her contributions to science, art and politics. “Love” takes various forms; it is not always synonymous with marriage, which often shows its own miserable aspects during the course of a woman’s film, and can prevent “being a woman” (that is, “love”), from properly developing.

Marriage can even be dangerous to the health, as in a film like “Dragonwyck” (1946), where Gene Tierney, playing a 19th-Century country girl who longs for something different and wonderful, marries wealthy and compelling Vincent Price, only to find herself being slowly poisoned by the flower he puts in her room. It shows what can happen when a romantic girl, blinded by courtliness and seductiveness, fails to perceive that they are no guarantees of “love.”

“Love” was actually, says Basinger, the female biological imperative, the real trap, the emotional or perhaps glandular disposition that eventually leads straight to laundry, floor-scrubbing and multiple pregnancies; but all of this was only secretly and wordlessly implied in the word itself. The career of “love” moreover clearly did not mean a life devoted to a series of passionate love affairs; it meant one man, or one child, a unique vessel for a unique personal devotion, a sort of female religion.

Before arriving at its particular final acknowledgment of this right path for all women--which often required sacrificing the operating theater, the Broadway stage, the boardroom or the Senate, and sometimes happiness or life itself--the woman’s film gave its heroine a liberating scope, a vivid milieu and set of circumstances in which to operate freely and very effectively. The story was usually built around a choice or set of choices posed only because the woman is a woman: “love,” or the right path, would be on one side, and some form of Other would be opposed to it--family, class, work, talent, success, goodness-and-niceness, wildness-and-badness (either one)--or indeed honor, although Basinger doesn’t talk about that concept by name.

“Love” must eventually be chosen even if it clearly destroys the perilous, carefully wrought structure of a whole life, and must be considered (in the movie, anyway) worth it. The heroine, for example, might make a different sort of wrong choice early in the movie: she might pick a man to love, only to have him drink, die or desert. Then she would have to struggle adroitly, transcend the disaster and painstakingly turn adversity into hard-won advantages that often included furs and jewels. Much later, another man would appear, the same choice would have to be made again--we knew what she would inevitably do. In the meantime “love,” although it might lurk below the surface and triumph at the very end, often stayed well out of the picture while the woman’s personal success, the result of her far-seeing ambition and her intelligent competence, her glamorous talent or perhaps simply her prestigious loveless marriage, was demonstrated in wonderful cinematic clarity, with emphasis on her fine wardrobe and the rapturous devotion of several extraneous men.

Women are also shown to take on decisive power in furthering the story, often by lying and otherwise using deceitful methods to determine the fate of the man for his own good, or to preserve his honor at the expense of her own. She may even secretly get together with her archrival the Other Woman, the Wife or the Mistress, the Mother or the Secretary, and go behind the man’s back to make a deal with her about how things will go. This is vividly done near the end of “Wife Versus Secretary,” which isn’t even mentioned in the book. A wonderful scene occurs between wife Myrna Loy and secretary Jean Harlow, who is secretly in love with Loy’s adored and adoring husband Clark Gable, her own very rich (and very unobservant) boss. A misunderstanding threatens to end the marriage of Gable and Loy, who has walked out; and Harlow, sacrificing a love that will only succeed if Loy leaves, persuades her to come back. Gable, naturally, never suspects a thing.

In such movies, women make the real decisions--men only think they do. In many situations, however, a woman needs to lie to accomplish this. She is therefore seen by audiences to be both right, in having the right aims, and wrong for lying--although Basinger does not emphasize her compromised moral position, only her unavoidable choice as a fundamentally oppressed person.

Basinger explores the possible effect of such woman’s films on actual women in the audience whose men may well have been abusive, weak or otherwise unsatisfactory, and who may themselves have lied to keep the peace, and wished to feel justified in practicing deception. Either the supreme nobility (the “niece” is really a daughter, but he must never know) or often the high comic virtues of cinematic female deception might well reassure real women of its necessity in actual life. Marriage in woman’s movies is almost always portrayed as a difficult state, but it is always portrayed as the universal female ideal anyway--if not immediately, then eventually; and women are shown to have real power in marriage only if they are prepared to be liars.

Alternatives to marital happiness and unhappiness are offered, however, in the form of “love” of other kinds, often maternal. Bette Davis can’t marry Paul Henreid in “Now, Voyager” because he’s indissolubly married; but amazingly she insists on replacing their happy clandestine love-affair with her new and noble love for his handicapped daughter, to whom she will transfer all her passion at the end of the story. The content of many women’s films shows that love for a man is quite easily superseded by love for a child, and an ideal situation is often portrayed as “love” without any sex at all.

Sexual relations in fact bring misery. Basinger finds it a consistent subtext in these films that all men in their sexual role are largely useless in other ways, troublesome and untrustworthy. Movie situations where a couple marry only for convenience are often shown to be quite jolly until the sexual element enters into the plot. Tracy and Hepburn, in “Without Love” (1945) undertake a perfect marriage based on mutual respect, a sense of humor, and a comic intelligence--but no sex. Once they develop a passionate relation, “they suddenly begin to behave like jealous idiots,” says Basinger. “This fresh and friendly relationship between two strong individuals changes into a silly mess that demeans them both. It looks as if to become truly married, two people not only have to have sex, but also have to make each other miserable.”

Meanwhile, plots with a mentor or father or doctor as the main male character offer great emotional and even material satisfactions without sex, although much eroticism may infuse such a man’s relations with the heroine. This can go very far if the heroine is in fact a child: Shirley Temple in “Curley Top” (1935) sits on John Boles’ lap, gazes flirtatiously into his eyes, sings love songs with him, and climbs into bed and bounces there with him; but then he marries her older sister at the very end, to placate the censors.

Motherhood, as difficult as sexual love, may also seem to have a purely theoretical emotional power: if the unwed heroine has a baby, she may very tearfully give it up for its own sake; but she will spend the rest of the movie as an untrammeled free agent, spending her money on her own clothes or her own business enterprise. If she is not punished by the plot, she will get the child back only at the end, when “love” has to win after all, having neatly skipped all the dentistry, schooling and outgrown winter coats.

Basinger throughout emphasizes the difference between what such films show and what they say. The plot will speak of the rightful power of “love” over the fates of women, and will also speak of it as a pure and absolute good, even if all it ultimately means is sexual relations with one man, followed by children, housekeeping and a speedy old age; but the movie will simultaneously display complete programs for living powerful and often luxurious lives as free women endowed with sexual as well as professional choices. Such lives are often shown to have twice the scope of men’s, since movie-women never have to give up the traditional privileges of femininity--well-tended beauty and flattering garments, but also warm-hearted sympathy and skilled social management, to say nothing of deception in a good cause--while demonstrating that they can outstrip men at most of their competitive worldly games. Thus women can be men, too, with increase of prestige; but men, of course, cannot be women without being degraded.

In a woman’s film, women are thus entirely superior beings, and all attention is riveted on them from beginning to end; but of course they have to give it all up, or else men won’t love them. Basinger might have added that men will indeed fear and loathe them, and strive to humiliate them; and then sometimes they will love them. Women can do anything; the question always is, should they? Modern films tend to assume that they should if they wish; and the difficult matter of the cost troubles the plot in quite straightforward ways. In the old films, the overt message was that women shouldn’t; but the movie showed them doing it anyway, often in a fine frenzy.

And so the general message in women’s films was about having your cake and eating it, having things both ways before the movie is over. Basinger insists that women got the entire ambivalent message, and that enough in women’s movies had real relevance to real lives to qualify them as serious fictions, not pure escapist nonsense.

Basinger emphasizes the importance of fashion in women’s films, treating this as if it were a distinctive and rather hilarious failing of the genre. She seems to forget that film is both a visual art and a performing art, and that all clothes must matter intensely in it at every moment. Dress has been defining character ever since theater began, or for that matter since painting began, and costume changes have been dramatically signaling character changes and mood shifts since the dawn of time. Basinger wishes to find the female hats and shoes and other garb of the movie-period she deals with unusually ridiculous; but what she is really responding to, I think, is their flavor of being costumes, the obvious concoctions of a wardrobe department, never simply a woman’s clothes as she might wear them. This very effect was a large part of their appeal then, and is now, if modern critics can refrain from the stock laughter regularly evoked in print by the demanding female finery of the past.

The themes explored in this book are provocative and the descriptions of films are often very funny--Basinger even tends to kid her material a bit too much, and she can verge on the flip. I would have liked more connections with other kinds of fiction--there is a great deal in woman’s movies that has real links with the old literary and dramatic myths that underlie modern assumptions about men and women. Some placement of these women’s movies inside the general continuum of what has always “spoken to women,” in Greek tragedies, say, or in French novels, might have been illuminating. But the main fault of the book is its excessive length, considering the simplicity of the idea it expounds. The elaborate analysis of many film plots and the anatomizing of many categories within the woman’s genre tend to weigh down the thesis and obscure it under many repetitions. The whole matter could have been dealt with in a brilliant essay of about a 150 pages.