1970's

1970’s – Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry – movies started getting very violent.  Network (Faye Dunaway) played studio executive, powerful character.  Watergate, ending the war, Nixon -   the country was still in upheaval about the state of its affairs.  An outspoken feminist, Jane Fonda was the most dominant and important actress of the 1970’s to play powerful female roles.

1971 – Jane Fonda wins an Academy Award for Best Actress for the movie Klute, where she plays a prostitute.

1972 – Liza Minnelli won best actress for Cabaret which not only featured a prominently powerful female star, but had lots of homosexuality.

1972 - Diane Keaton starred alongside Al Pacino in The Godfather, simultaneously making really funny movies with her boyfriend at the time, Woody Allen.

1978 - Jane Fonda starred alongside John Voight in Coming Home – both Fonda and Voight won academy awards for best actor/acress.  This is one of the first movies that a woman has an orgasm in, alongside a tender, lovemaking scene.

1975 – One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest featured Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who was a cold tyrant and battleaxe nurse who has Randal McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) lobotomized.  Mc Murphy’s permanent damage renders him a vegetable, but before the surgery, he was able to mess up Nurse Ratched’s vocal cords, requiring her to often resort to writing notes to communicate.  Thus, he diminished her control over the other patients.

M*A*S*H  the movie premiered – it featured lots of nudity and sex scenes.  Sally Kellerman played Houlihan.

Taxi Driver – Jodi Foster (who was only 13 at the time),  played a 12-year old prostitute, nominated for an academy award for it.

1978 – Jane Fonda wins Best Actress for the movie Coming Home.  Throughout her career, Fonda made a drastic transformation from celebrity kid to a serious actress.

1978 – Meryl Streep won an academy award for best actress for the movie Deer Hunter and the movie  won best picture.

1979 – Meryl Streep won an academy award for best supporting actress in Kramer vs Kramer, a movie that reflected a cultural shift that had occurred during the 1970’s, when ideas about motherhood were changing.  The film was widely praised for the way it gave equal weight and importance to both Joanna (Meryl Streep) and Teddy’s (Dustin Hoffman) points of view.

1979 – Sigourney Weaver played strong warrior style fighter in the movie Alien

1970 – William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band – First film to show gay men as a friendly community of people, but it also shows the other side: “vindictive queens”.  As a result of this film and others like it, a “gay liberation” begins both onscreen and offscreen.

1972 – Bob Fosse’s Cabaret seen as first film to officially “celebrate homosexuality”. 

1975 – Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village is one of the first films to feature homosexuals in a supporting role.

1960's

1960’s – Hayes code over – everyone started cussing and taking their clothes off. Women were liberated – still secretaries making crap!!

1960’s – International stars Bridgette Bardot and Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Vanessa Redgrave gained popularity

1960 – Pronounced dead at one point because of her benign brain tumor during the production of Butterfield Eight, Elizabeth Taylor won an academy award for best actress for playing a prostitute in love with a married man.

1962 – Joan Crawford filmed What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with her arch-rival Bette Davis.  By now, their feud was well known.  No one is certain how the quarrel got started, but one time Miss Davis said of Joan “she’s slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie.”  In return, Joan said “I don’t hate Davis, even though the press wants me to.  I resent her.  I don’t see how she built a career out of a set of mannerisms, instead of real acting ability.  Take away the pop eyes, the cigarette, and those funny clipped words and what have you got?  She’s phony, but I guess the public really likes that.”

1963 -  Women were much more liberated as the country went crazy after the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.  Elizabeth Taylor was paid $1,000,000 as Cleopatra in the movie Cleopatra.   She was the first woman in film history to make a million dollars.  The producers just called her up and asked her how much she wanted and she told him them a million dollars and they gave it to her!  Taylor set the stage for powerful women.

1966 – Elizabeth Taylor won another academy award for best actress in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

1967 – Faye Dunaway made her TV debut before landing the lead role of female bank robber in Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty.  It was this film which catapulted her to stardom.  Dunaway is only one of the four actresses to win both Academy Awards for best actress and the Razzie Award for worst actress.

1967 – The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman.  This movie was very controversial.  Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is trapped into an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who just so happens to be the wife of his father’s business partner.  He then finds himself falling in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine.  Mrs. Robinson is portrayed as a powerfully manipulating horny woman in this movie, a far cry from the innocent virginal Lillian Gish at the beginning of the century.

1968 – Jane Fonda plays a highly sexualized and powerful woman in the movie Barbarella, a space action-adventure story.

1969 – Midnight Cowboy was released.  This movie had lots of implied sexual scenes, including a male rape scene.  Ratso (Dustin Hoffman) and his sickly friend Joe Buck (John Voight) are male prostitutes trying to survive in New York City.  Ratso finally gets hooked up for sex with a rich woman named Cass (played by Sylva Miles) and she rescues him from the horrors of the streets.  This woman also has much more power and money than the two prostitutes.

1969 – Jane Fonda wins an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (dance marathon-people trying to win money in dance competition, Fonda wants him to shoot her in the head and put her out of her misery like a horse because she couldn’t dance in the competition anymore).

Barefoot in the Park – girly, newlywed.  Barbarella (sexualized woman).  In the 70’s she made movies like Klut (played prostitute), Julia (played Lillian Hellman) radical woman who went to medical school in the 30’s and got involved with the Nazis.

1961 – Basil Dearden’s Victim, a British film which features the first homosexual male protagonist, a lawyer who fights for gay rights. 

1961 – William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour filmed and released in an effort to subvert the Hays Code and the Legion of Decency and compete with foreign films, which regularly explores sexuality. 

1962 - Otto Preminger’s film Advise and Consent, which features a character being blackmailed for having a homosexual past

1962 - Edward Dmytryk’s Walk on the Wild Side as first film to feature homosexuality as not shameful, which films up to this point mostly had, and the result was a generation of gays and lesbians who felt even more ashamed because of what they saw in films.  Lesbian filmmaker Jan Oxenberg says, "These images magnify the sadness, the hatred of us, the prediction that we will not find love."  Additionally in films such as Dracula’s Daughter, Caged, Rebecca, and The Children’s Hour, sexually-ambiguous characters died at the end.  Films will start to veer away from this pattern.

MESSAGE BOARD :-)

Greetings, Ladies!

I updated my posts about women all the way until 1945 - I color coded it in pink for women.  Do you guys want to color code yours?

1890's:

1896 – Footage of two men dancing together at Thomas Edison’s studio.

FYI - Info about homosexuality in film here and throughout blog taken from:

http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/celluloid/misc/history.html

http://www.imdb.com

1900's:

 

1909 – Mary Pickford appeared for her first screen test for the movie Pippa Passes, with Biograph company director D.W. Griffith.  Even though she didn’t get the part, he was immediately taken with her because of her virtuous face and charming curls.  From that point on, Pickford appeared in fifty-one films – almost one each week!  She was cast in roles such as: scrubwoman, secretary, and woman of any nationality.  Throughout the 1910’s, Pickford was believed to be the most famous woman in the world.  Her appeal was summed up two years later in the February 1916 issue of Photoplay magazine as “luminous tenderness in a steel band of gutter ferocity.”  Pickford’s closest female box office rival at this time was thirty-one year old Marguerite Clark.  Marguerite also had a whimsical/girlish charm to which audiences responded.

1910's:

 

1914 – July 28^th – World War I begins

1915 – The Birth of a Nation debuted.  African Americans are prohibited from being in the film, and are portrayed as horny, ignorant monkeys by white actors in black face.  Actors’ faces, especially Walter Long who plays Gus, the renegade negro, are purposely exaggerated to have big eyes and big lips and their some of their butts look like they’re stuffed.  Gus’s face and actions are especially exaggerated to highlight the animalistic qualities that D.W.Griffiths saw the African Americans having at that time. The women in this movie are portrayed as virginal, innocent, and sweet – not a far cry from the Victorian “angel of the house.”  The three central female characters of this movie, Lillian Gish as Elsie Stoneman, Mae Marsh as Flora Cameron, and Miriam Cooper as Margaret Cameron all exemplify these qualities. 

Also in 1915, the first femme fatale (French for deadly woman), movie debuted.  Theda Bara starred as a vampire who uses her charms to seduce and corrupt a moral Wall Street lawyer in A Fool There Was.  This film was considered controversial for its risqué intertitle cards as “Kiss me, my fool!”

1918 – November 11^th – World War I ends

1910s – Homosexual behaviors such as same sex dancing partners (The Florida Enchantment) and effeminate men in macho cowboy films (Wanderer of the West and The Soilers) seen as humorous.

1916 – Charlie Chaplin’s Behind the Screen – Chaplin plays a stagehand who falls in love with a female assistant who poses as a male (other characters believe Chaplin’s character is homosexual). 

1920's:

 

1920 – As a result of World War I, the new female archetype of the shop girl emerges.  The movie Underground features two men, an electrician named Bert (played by Cyril McLagan), Bill an underground porter (played by Brian Aherne), and the shop girl who they both fall in love with named Nell (played by Elissa Landi).  Landi was an Italian born actress who was rumored to be a descendant of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and was famous for her aristocratic bearing. 

1929 – Harry Beaumont’s The Broadway Melody – The convention of using effeminate males for humor has become acceptable.  Gay screenwriters express mixed feelings:

Screenwriter Jay Presson Allen: "There were sissies, and they were never addressed as homosexuals. It was a convention that was totally accepted. They were perceived as homosexuals just subliminally. This was a subject that was not discussed, privately. Certainly not publicly."

Screenwriter Arthur Laurents: "[Homosexuals] were a cliché... like Steppin Fetchit for the blacks."

Actor/Screenwriter Harvey Fierstein: "I like the sissy. Is it used in negative ways? Yeah, but... I'd rather have negative than nothing. That's just my own particular view -- and also cause I am a sissy!"

1927 – William Wellman’s Wings – First film to win Academy Award – shows two men kissing on the lips in celebration of victory.

1930's:

 

1932 – Mae West appears in her first film role after an extensive stage career.  Her appearance in the movie Night after Night as Maudie Triplett launched her into an eleven year stint as a femme fatale who wrote all of her own scripts.  She brought sexuality out of the closet with her controversial roles and self-written lines.  In her very first scene of Night after Night, a hat check girl exclaims, “Goodness what beautiful diamonds!”  West replies, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.”  Her co-star George Raft is said to have remarked, “She stole everything but the cameras.”  By 1933,West was the eighth largest U.S. box office draw.

To contrast the sex appeal of vixen Mae West, the innocent little Shirley Temple made her debut in her film career in 1932 at the age of three and found international fame in Bright Eyes, the first film to be written and developed specifically for Temple, and the first in which her name was raise above the title.  She had a very sweet, wholesome image that toy makers capitalized on by making dolls, tea sets, and clothing.  However, her popularity waned as she approached adolescence and she left film at age twelve to attend high school.  Temple was the top box office draw from 1935-1938 according to the Motion Picture Herald Poll. 

1933 – Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade made use of one of the largest sound stages ever built to choreograph beautifully dressed women to create innovative and often sexually charge dance numbers.  He arranged and displayed the female form for entertainment purposes, therefore sexually exploiting them.  As a result of the depression, these films were a good distraction for an audience to take their minds off of the seriousness of their problems.  

1939 – Gone With the Wind actress Hattie McDaniel won the Best Supporting Actress role for her role of Mammy.  The Atlanta, Georgia premiere was at the Loew’s Grand Theater on December 15, 1939.  During the approach of the date, all African American actors were barred from attending and excluded from being in the souvenir program as well as southern advertising for the film.  Producer David Selznick had attempted to bring Hattie McDaniel, but MGM advised him not to because of Georgia’s segregation laws.  Clark Gable angrily threatened to boycott the Atlanta premiere unless McDaniel was allowed to attend, but McDaniel convinced him to attend anyway.  Vivien Leigh who played Scarlett O’Hara also won a Best Actress award. 

Also on September 1, 1939, World War II started

1930 – Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco – actress Marlene Dietrich caused a stir when she kisses another woman on the lips

1932 – John Francis Dillon’s Call Her Savage – features first and only gay bar until Otto Preminger’s film Advise and Consent (1962)

1933 - Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina – Biography of Swedish monarch who was also a lesbian.  The film constructs a heterosexual relationship for the queen (Greta Grabo), but homosexual undertones pervade:

Chancellor: "But your Majesty, you cannot die an old maid."

Queen: "I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor!"

1933 – Gay director George Cukor’s Our Betters and Al Boasberg’s Myrt and Marge

1934 – Warren G. Harding, Postmaster General Will Hays (“The Hays Code”), and the Catholic Church (“Legion of Decency”) begin censorship of films, including homosexuality, and change plots of films in movies like Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend (1945) and Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947), which originally both contained plots that relied on homosexuality.

1934-1950 – Films comply with Hays Code of 1934, but suggest homosexuality, such as Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948).  These films use subtle hints of homosexuality to create more dynamic characters and villains while escaping censorship.

1940's:

 

1940 – World War II changed everything.  Women’s roles get more serious in the home.  They begin to become nurses to help with the wounded, and the strong wife holding the fort down at home while their husband is away at war.  The 1940’s also signal the beginning of film noir.  This term, French for “black film” was first used in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank.  Before this time, film noir was unknown to the American film industry and audiences.  Film Noir is a cinematic term used to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations.  The genre, popular in the 1940’s and 1950’s is associated with a low-key black and white visual style whose roots reside in German Expressionist cinematography.  Some key women film noir actresses include:  Lizabeth Scott, Nadia Cassini, Marlene Dietrich, Jane Greer, and Gloria Grahame.  This same year

1945 – September 2, 1945 – World War II ended                                                                              

1950's:
 

1950’s -  musicals- Elizabeth Taylor, Marliyn Monroe, Deborah Kerr, Betty Davis, Judy Garland.  War was over and people wanted happy stuff.   Vivien Leigh – A Streetcar Named Desire.  Glamorous clothes and wardrobes.  Beginning of “B” horror movies – Creature from The Black Lagoon, The Blob.  Hitchcock’s females were all blondes, strong but vunerable because they were always punished for their crimes.

1950s – Films use homosexuality to promote sexual conformity, reminding woman to be feminine: John Cromwell’s Caged (1950) depicts lesbian inmates and Michael Curtiz’s Young Man with a Horn (1950) stresses the role of women as homemakers.  For men, the struggle between masculinity and sensitivity is explored (subliminally) in films like Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956), Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and William Wyler’s Ben Hur (1959). 

Comedies—Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk (1959) and Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959)—include jokes that allude to homosexuality.



1980's:
 

1981 – Body Heat with Kathleen Turner took sex to new places as well as women’s roles in the movies.  Turner is allowed to be bold and devious in this movie.  Her entrance announces that she is the film’s center of power (of course because the movie is about sex).

1983 – Helena Bonham Carter premiered in a made for TV movie, A Pattern of Roses, which led her to be cast in A Room With a View in 1985, and then her first major role in 1986 in Lady Jane.  Even though she gives her audiences magnificent performances in her versatile roles, she has never won a major American film award.

1984 – Sally Field won Best Actress for Places in the Heart, where she plays a strong woman who keeps her family together after her husband dies.

1986 – Isabella Rossellini Blue Velvet – nominated for best picture

1987 – Cher won Best Actress in Moonstruck, where she plays a thirty-something star crossed lover willing to risk it all for true love.

1988 – Jodi Foster won Best Actress for The Accused, a movie in which she plays a woman named Sarah Tobias, who breaks up with her drug dealer boyfriend and goes out to a bar for a drink, scantily clad.  She ends up getting gang raped by a group of men who take her flirtations as an invitation for sex.  Jodi’s character shows that although a young woman may act inappropriately, even recklessly, she still has the right to say no and be heard.

1980 – William Friedkin’s Cruising (and others like it) in which gays are depicted as murderous and sadomasochistic spark riots. 

1982 – Casting for Arthur Hiller’s Making Love brings to light how Hollywood actors fear playing gay characters, thinking that doing do will ruin their careers.

1980s-1990s – Films emerge with lesbianism, which is deemed acceptable because it portrays women as intimate friends, which is not threatening to men.  These include Robert Towne’s Personal Best (1982), Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), Stephen Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985), Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), and Jon Avnet’s Fried Green Tomatoes.  During this time period, few films about homosexual men emerge. 



1990's:
 

1990 - Kathy Bates won Best Actress for Misery, a movie where she plays a psychotic woman who switches from sweet solicitude to savage scorn in the blink of an eye.

1991 – Jodi Foster wins Best Actress for Silence of the Lambs for her role as Clarice Starling, an untried young female FBI trainee who appeals to the monster Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins).  She experiences  a lot of unwarranted sexual pressure and attention from most of the men in this movie.

1993 – Holly Hunter won Best Actress for The Piano (written and directed by Jane Campion).  In this movie, Hunter shows the audience that there is eroticism in the slowness and restraint of the forming of a sexual relationship.  The power that her character Ada gains by pretending to care nothing for Baines (Harvey Keitel).  Hunter’s character is not a victim, but a woman who reads a situation and responds to it.

1997 – Helen Hunt won Best Actress for As Good as It Gets.

1998 – Gwyneth Paltrow wins Best Actress for Shakespeare in Love, where she plays Viola De Lesseps, a strong willed Elizabethan rich man’s daughter who prefers Shakespeare to Marlowe.  She defies traditional gender roles in this movie by dressing in drag to audition for one of Shakespeare’s plays.

1999 – Annette Bening (Carolyn Burnham) starred in American Beauty alongside Kevin Spacey as her husband, Lester Burnham.  In this movie, she is so perfect that her garden shears coordinate with her footwear.  She plays Mantoramian music at every agonizing family dinner to juxtapose the angry, silent family with the lush and reassuring music.  Carolyn is also cheating on Lester.  Lester finally meets the catalyst for change he so desperately needs in a teenage cheerleader played by Mena Suvari (Angela).

1993 – Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia – film which features gay man with AIDS as the hero.



2000's:
 

2000 - Hilary Swank won Best Actress for Boys Don’t Cry.  In this true story of Brandon Teena, Swank portrays him as a warm, gentle, romantic lover in which Lana (Chloe Sevigny), at some point, suspects is a girl, but she just doesn’t want to know because their romance is such a lovely illusion.  Swank pulls this role off beautifully, almost to where the viewer forgets she’s a girl.

2002 – Chicago – starring Rene Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Queen Latifah.  Zellweger plays Roxie Hart, a misunderstood heroine who has a dreamy infatuation with herself.  Zeta-Jones plays Velma Kelly, a singing and dancing star who is every bit of powerfully graceful.  Queen Latifah plays Mama, a strong and empowered black woman who runs the jail.

2003 – Charlize Theron won an Academy Award for Best Actress in Monster, where she plays Aileen Wuornos, a damaged woman who committed seven murders.  Wuornos is said to be America’s First Female serial killer.  Theron epitomizes Wuornos in this movie as an emotionally stunted thirteen year old living inside of a grown woman’s body who always tries to nervously shake out her anxiety and look at ease.

2004 – Hillary Swank – won an academy award for best actress in Million Dollar Baby.

2004 - Cameron Diaz – becomes one of the highest paid actresses ever, making up to $10,000,000 per film

2009 - Sandra Bullock won an academy award for best actress for The Blind Side.

2009 – Katherine Bigelow – finally won best director for The Hurt Locker.

2010 – Natalie Portman won best actress for The Black Swan.  Portman plays Nina Sayers, a young and virginal professional ballerina who strives to do nothing but please her instructors and her mother.  This perfectionism drives her to sheer insanity.

2011 – Helena Bonham Carter plays Elizabeth, Bertie’s wife in The King’s Speech.  In this movie, she is filled with mercy, tact, and love for her husband.  She plays the woman who is very loved by the audience.

2011 – Meryl Streep wins an academy award for best actress for The Iron Lady.