The ladies take over: female-centred film series in studio-era Hollywood. Introduction

This dossier examines a set of four Hollywood ‘B’ film series of the 1930s and 1940s – anchored by the figures of Hildegarde Withers (six films between 1932 and 1937), Torchy Blane (nine films between 1937 and 1939), Nancy Drew (four films from 1938 and 1939) and Blondie (28 films between 1938 and 1950) – which have come to be understood as an ‘empowered women’ cycle.¹ In looking back at this relatively marginalized cycle from a point in time nearly 90 years after the first film appeared, this dossier gives some productive historical perspective to two contested themes that the discursive practices of popular online media commentary tend to present as unique to the current cultural moment. The first is the practice of media serialization, which visibly underpins American popular culture’s preferred formatting choices of serials, sequels, remakes, reboots and other ‘multiplicities’ at the end of the 21st century’s second decade.² The practice is popularly regarded with some ambivalence, from a straightforward perception of creative exhaustion³ to more nuanced reflections that consider the cultural function of nostalgia and revisionism in this historical period.⁴ The second theme, contextualized in important ways by the mainstreaming of sexual politics that has developed out of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, is focused on the increased number of female protagonists acting with heightened agency in Hollywood films of the past few years, and debates whether this represents the triumph or the mere commodification of feminism.⁵ Looking back to a set of films from the studio era that are simultaneously defined by seriality and female agency provides an opportunity not only to show that these themes are far from new production strategies for Hollywood, but to demonstrate how the two might productively be thought together – that is, to investigate how seriality actually enables the gender politics of the historical cycle.

A key aspect of this dossier’s contribution to the field of seriality studies, then, is its focus on the issue of gender. Broadly conceived, the objective of this field is to contest and complicate the mythology of the first theme described above, where media serialization is automatically regarded as a conservative over-reliance on bankable properties at the expense of original storytelling. Seriality studies instead emphasizes the possibility of serialization as an industrial and aesthetic principle, showing ‘the dependency of culture on serial reproduction’⁶ and tracing how various formatting practices ‘[do] not simply follow an original but [recognize] new versions as free adaptations or variations that actualize an implicit potentiality at the source’.⁷ There is obvious potential for political commentary within the practice when conceived in this way, and over the past decade many valuable essays have focused on gendered issues within collections devoted to different types of serial media.⁸ This dossier represents an effort to begin consolidating this area of seriality studies by collecting together four essays devoted to studying how gendered themes develop in a single cycle of film series. Here the operationality of serialization as a narrative structure – the primary concern of much seriality scholarship – is put in direct engagement with women-centric narratives.

The crux of this enquiry lies with the theme of ‘empowerment’, which in each historical film series under consideration here is perceived as an effect of the protagonists’ unusually high level of agency and relative independence from the domestic sphere. Each character achieves this state as a result of her liminality – existing between two modes of being that were each, in the 1930s, rigidly coded to be normative or non-normative for women: Hildegarde Withers is at once a schoolteacher and an amateur sleuth; ‘lady newshound’ Torchy Blane exists in an endless engagement, neither single nor a wife; Nancy Drew is a child who takes on and succeeds in the role of adult detective; Blondie’s domestic identity is complicated by the way in which she effectively functions as the head of the household, continually stepping in to take responsibility for her husband and his comic mishaps. These liminal identities locate the female protagonists of these films, as well as others that fit with the cycle, such as the Maisie series from 1939 to 1947,⁹ as early and important examples of the American tradition of the ‘independent’ or ‘liberated’ woman. The terms connote a style of liberal feminism in which women are empowered through the mobilization of personal choice to push against – but never break – social norms, and where the process of their representation is credited with modulating these norms over time. While liberal feminist narratives in American popular culture are most commonly associated with the period following the second-wave movement of the 1960s, the fact that the ‘empowered women’ cycle of the 1930s and 1940s is so historically isolated in its presentation of female agency makes the framework relevant to how they were, and are, understood.

Between the 1970s and 1990s the ‘independent’ type finds consistent expression in feminist television sitcoms such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), Laverne and Shirley (1976–83) and Murphy Brown (1988–97), where the protagonist’s liberation as a single working woman is defined in relation to women’s traditional place within the nuclear family.¹⁰ Looking further into the future, and coinciding with the current interest in women’s participation and representation in American popular culture noted above, the post-2010 iteration of this type is characterized by the specific quality of unruliness. Here a sense of empowerment arises out of the contestation of the ever-shifting boundaries associated with ‘acceptable’ female behaviour, bodies and comportment, as evidenced, for Anne Helen Petersen, in the ‘fatness’ of Melissa McCarthy, the ‘nakedness’ of Lena Dunham and the ‘grossness’ of Abbi Jacobsen and Ilana Glazer.¹¹ In a broader sense, Sarah Banet-Weiser uses the term ‘empowered’ as an overarching term to describe the popular feminist discourses that highlight confidence, positivity and individual achievement as qualities that women require in order to survive neoliberal capitalism – a system from which it is now arguably impossible to find any independence.¹²

The substantially different connotations of empowerment in each of these contexts show the extent to which the independent female type is shaped by both the social and screen industrial conditions in which it occurs. The norms that are broached by the characters are specific to different social systems, and the manner in which they are raised – and delimited –for critique is specific to the industrial and ideological priorities of the time. In the cycle of 1930s and 1940s films under consideration here, the protagonists’ agency both reflects and shapes the changing roles of American women during the Depression and World War II, a time when norms surrounding gendered divisions of labour, as well as those relating to socio-economic class and race, were in flux. As in the other periods, though, the perspective of popular culture on this world is determined as much by market as social concerns, with the particular identity of the 1930s and 1940s ‘woman’s films’ designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. As Jennifer Forrest has noted regarding the Hildegarde Withers series, these films combine two narrative perspectives: they make women the centre of the action, but they do so overwhelmingly within the frame of the male-oriented detective genre.¹³ In the tradition of liberal feminism this gender-swap – literal in the case of Torchy Blane, who in the Black Mask stories by Frederick Nebel, upon which the film series is based, is a male reporter – allows for the expression of a feminist critique but represses the potential for real social change. Traditional gender roles and norms are noted as such but are ultimately upheld, both in the way the women’s agency is coded as male – something routinely and directly commented on by other characters within the films – and in the way the presence of actual patriarchal figures (Torchy’s fiance, Hildegarde’s boss, Nancy’s father, Blondie’s husband) authorizes their independence to keep them in place.

The novelty of the film cycle, over and above its female representation, lies with how this struggle over agency finds expression through serialization. As each of the following essays details, the impression of each character’s independence is largely an effect of seriality, insofar as the conclusion of each film delivers them into a normative gender role that they once more break away from in the next instalment. As Forrest has discussed in reference to the Maisie films, the effect is specific to film series as opposed to continuing forms such as serials or sequels – it is the operation of the series, where each film is complete on its own, that enables the pattern whereby ‘the reintegration and the regulation of certain behavior are cancelled out by the incongruities that these integrations and regulations elicit by their very repetition’.¹⁴ In the following essays, this ‘incongruous’ effect is analysed in terms of how each female protagonist manages to sustain a liminal identity – contested, contradictory or paradoxical – across a number of films.

In the dossier’s first essay, Helen Hanson introduces the empowered woman as an agentic, self-determining force through the figure of Torchy Blane, the ‘lady newshound’ protagonist of nine films produced by Warner Bros. between 1937 and 1939. Demonstrating how the film series draws upon conventions common to situational comedy in other media, Hanson interrogates the relationship between the series’ stable story situation – in which Torchy is betrothed to ‘long-suffering’ police lieutenant Steve McBride – and the novelty of each film’s plot, in which obstacles repeatedly delay their marriage. Torchy’s independence is curtailed by the stabilizing frame of engagement but, as an effect of the serial identity of the films, she consistently escapes a domestic future. With seriality comes a liminal sense of female freedom, as well as a pronounced example of how film series exaggerate the interaction of progression and delay that typifies all narratives.

In the next essay, Thomas Leitch examines a series that Hanson argues arose in the wake of Torchy Blane – the four Nancy Drew films that Warner Bros. produced between 1938 and 1939. Taking into account the entire Nancy canon – from the books first published in 1930, bearing the byline ‘Carolyn Keene’, up to the 2019 film production of Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (Katt Shea) – Leitch argues that the 1930s films present a unique instance of the character as a ‘contradictory’ figure. Where the books show duality in their simultaneous standards of adventure and domesticity, and in Nancy’s concurrent feminine attributes and masculine traits, the four Warners films emphasize her liminal status as a little girl and a professional woman. Tracing how the narratives both enable and contain this contested identity – depicting Nancy succeeding in empowered detecting roles, but ultimately being returned to a disempowered childhood role, most often by patriarchal figures – Leitch again shows how liminality is facilitated by seriality.

Jennifer Forrest engages with a further notion of duality in her discussion of the Hildegarde Withers film series of the 1930s, the first in the ‘empowered women’ cycle and the only series to have released entries before the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934. Providing a theory for how the open suggestiveness of The Penguin Pool Murder (1932) is enabled in the post-Code work, Forrest describes how the films employ a process of ‘desemantization’ – detaching signifiers from signifieds to upset social norms. The series is able to evade the overwhelmingly conservative worldview of the ‘B’ detective genre film, she argues, through visual and verbal jokes that divest appearance from social station, often to create an impression of gender reversal. Forrest thus shows how it is not just the films’ serial identity that structures Withers’s agency, liberating her from schoolteacher to sleuth in each instalment, but also the constraining conditions of the ‘B’ genre film.

In the dossier’s final essay, Constantine Verevis examines the longest series of the cycle, the 28 Blondie films released by Columbia between 1938 and 1950. Arguing for the ways in which this series provided a template for television sitcom families such as those of I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver, Verevis demonstrates how each film instalment repeats rather than extends typical domestic situations. As a long-running series, though, this pattern of continuity is able to reflect how this domestic situation itself changed over the tumultuous period of the 1940s. The series demonstrates a liminal identity distinct from, but in keeping with, the other films in the cycle, insofar as its signature effect is a playful challenging of conventionally gendered divisions of labour and authority. Always grounded in the protagonist Blondie’s agency, this effect is, throughout the 1940s films, put to the direct service of episodes that reflect upon, and experiment with, questions of whether women’s drive for victory is better situated in the workplace or the home.

Footnotes