Cinema: The Power of a Woman

Whenever Hollywood’s box office slips, as it did last month,* puzzled moviemen ponder such possible causes as the weather, the crops and the local bingo games. Last week a fledgling producer, Novelist Polan (There Goes Lona Henry) Banks, offered a fresher theory: Hollywood has been underestimating the power of a woman. Banks told the Motion Picture Herald:

“No other American industry, great or small, has forgotten that women own about 70% of the nation’s wealth and control an even greater percentage of its buying. More than 90% of the country’s advertising is directed at the woman . . . but postwar [motion] picture advertising has been plastered with maniacal killers, rapists, thugs of all varieties . . . The typical woman gets more than she wants of that in the news columns. She is not disposed to go to the [movies] for more of the same.”

In the good old days of Rudolph Valentino and John Gilbert, said Novelist Banks, the typical woman, “a creature of emotion,” found that the movies gave her emotions an enjoyable vicarious workout. Banks did not try to pin down the turning point, but many a student of the cinema thinks it was that shattering 1931 scene in which James Cagney pushed a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face. From that day on, the oldtime sleek romantic screen lover began going into eclipse.

As a result, Banks argued, the movies generally are not offering the little woman “the type of emotional experience she wants, and anybody who thinks the menfolk in the family are going to the theater if she’s opposed to the idea just isn’t being realistic.”

* Variety reported that a mid-October slump put U.S. cinemansion receipts off about 7% from last year, interrupting the gradual upturn evident since last spring.