Jungle Red!: The Making of MGM's The Women

The year 1939 produced such outstanding film classics as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Wuthering Heights. No less critically acclaimed that year was The Women. A largely forgotten masterpiece, The Women is a glamorous but stinging satire about women forced by society to be defined by men. Jungle Red! The Making of MGM’s The Women restores this classic to its rightful place in Hollywood history, and its lasting legacy as a template for later female-driven projects like Sex and The City, and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Four MGM screenwriters, including a failing F. Scott Fitzgerald and an on-the-rise Donald Ogden Stewart, fought over their vision of The Women. Jane Murfin was completing her script when Anita Loos was brought in to work with her on a new draft for George Cukor, then recently fired from Gone with the Wind and determined to use The Women to get his career back on track. He became, as one newspaper called him, the lion tamer to the ladies. With sophisticated direction by Cukor, lavish fashions by Adrian, and gorgeous sets by Cedric Gibbons, its all-star cast was led by Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and Joan Fontaine. Not a single male actor appeared, proving that women didn’t need men to rule the box office. Gossip columns were filled with stories about fierce on-set rivalries, which proved fairly combustible, leading one columnist to refer to the set as “a female kennel,” with behind the scenes antics as fierce and flamboyant as the film itself. The Los Angeles Times wrote, “The Women is a vitriolic masterpiece!” Now, it’s time to fall in love with The Women all over again! In Jungle Red! The Making of MGM’s The Women, and using never-before-seen photographs, memos, and script notes, Douglas writes not only how the film came together, but captures how the lives of the people who made it intersected before, during and after, and how the conflicts on-set and off resulted in the greatest film ever made about women . . . by a man! Read more