More, Please: Female Characters and Stage Door

My wife attended a women’s college, but the closest I ever came to the same experience was sometimes living on an all-girls floor of a dorm. There’s a difference between not bumping into a guy when you blearily make your way down the hall to brush your teeth and spending years seldom bumping into a guy at all. I don’t regret the option I went with, but I’m occasionally drawn to stories in female-dominated settings. It’s not that I don’t want any male characters to be there. It’s that I want the female characters to get to settle into some of the roles and archetypes they usually occupy.

It’s still rare enough to get ensembles where women make up even 50% of the cast.¹ When you do, it’s nice, and it helps, but—depending on the size of cast you’re working with—there’s still usually a certain narrowing and gendering of the kinds of characters they are. We’ve thankfully hit a point where I can name women who are assholes (with or without soft underbellies), goofy comic relief, cold-blooded killers, honor-bound strivers, etc., etc., but we haven’t yet hit the point where I stop being grateful for every example who doesn’t feel like the creative brainstorming process started off with “woman” and then struggled to go from there. There’s a particular version of this I especially hate, where you can feel a well-intentioned writer is trying so hard to dodge various pitfalls that they create the dramatic equivalent of greige. (A modest proposal: when in doubt, at least let her be funny.)

The best way around this, as people across a variety of underrepresented demographics have been saying for years and years, is the numbers game. Have a lot of women, and if you have any dramatic or comedic sense at all, you’ll almost have to wind up with a lot of different women, and none of them will feel like they represent Woman: The Concept. They’ll just be in the story, doing story things. Having archnemeses. Breaking down. Being dashing swashbucklers. Getting stoned. Raising the dead.

Or, in the case of this sparkling 1937 film, breaking onto Broadway, feuding, dancing, acting, having affairs, going without dinner, despairing, lashing out, committing to art, giving it all up, wearing a cat around like a stole, and bantering a mile a minute. Ginger Rogers’s Jean Maitland is not Katharine Hepburn’s Terry Randall, who is not Lucille Ball’s Judy Canfield, who is not Andrea Leeds’s Kay Hamilton, and none of them are the lively, bustling chorus of the rest of the Footlights Club, a theatrical boarding house where up-and-comers, has-beens, and wannabes all jostle around, grumble about the lamb stew, and vie for roles (and well-connected suitors).

The core relationship of the film—this remains unusual—is between two women, Jean and Terry. Jean is a struggling, smart-mouthed dancer, her glamour (she is Ginger Rogers, after all) not entirely counterbalancing a certain gum-snap scrappiness; she’s a long-time resident of the Footlights Club and of Broadway’s margins. She can fall into fantasies—it’s almost a requirement, when you have to spend this long trying to make a dent in your would-be stardom—but she sees vulnerability clearly. The wealthy Terry, arriving in Jean’s room at Footlights with trunks and trunks full of luxury furs, is like a more sympathetic spin on “Common People,” and therefore so seemingly impervious to the slings and arrows of shabby showbiz fortunes that she’s guaranteed to immediately get on Jean’s nerves. Terry is straightforward and honorable, and she and Jean fill in the gaps on each other’s cynicism and canniness in an appealing way, each seeing things the other misses, but Terry can’t break through to Jean because Jean can’t break through to her.

Hepburn was always good at playing women who seem, at least for a time, like they’re wrapped in a thin layer of Teflon. Sometimes, that quality stays, and gets admired; sometimes it erodes, and invites compassion and reciprocity. Either way, whoever is responding to her is usually a man. Here, though, it’s Ginger Rogers, who wears openness and toughness and comedy all on her sleeve.

There are bits of Stage Door that don’t work as well as they might. As plot-necessary as Kay Hamilton’s storyline is, for example, and as luminously as Andrea Leeds suffers, Kay is a familiar type, so designed to tug at your heartstrings that the most effective evocation of emotion about her fate actually comes from someone who doesn’t even know it (“She’s still around”). There’s a tonal shift there that the movie can’t completely pull off, and I’m not convinced by its lasting effect. But I come back to this film over and over again because its occasional missteps don’t mar a charming whole. And there’s nothing greige about it.

1. And obviously the percentages are even lower when it comes to genders besides men and women, and the roles nonbinary characters get to play are even more limited. Someone should make a nonbinary Stage Door: I’d watch it. ↩︎