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GOOD-BYE, MY FANCY (1951) will not be everyone's cup of tea, but Joan Crawford as a congresswoman fighting for female students' rights to be exposed to real issues in the world rather than being coddled and sheltered is actually pretty great
Of course there is a love triangle, and at first I dreaded that the film would have the opposite message, with Joan Crawford settling into mediocrity as she chooses love over her career, but it ends up being surprisingly complex.
Directed by the great Vincent Sherman (THE DAMNED DON'T CRY, HARRIET CRAIG, THE HARD WAY, NORA PRENTISS), and written by Irving Goff (WHITE HEAT, PORTRAIT IN BLACK, CHARLIE'S ANGELS).
The film is in direct resistance to the way in which girls' education was neglected, because educators assumed they would drop out and get married and that they weren't worth educating.
Betty Friedan's book "The Feminine Mystique" contains several harrowing chapters about this phenomenon. And Crawford, with all her success, is still being sucked into a subordinate role, partly through her own desire to be "normal."
For a woman, it wasn't normal to want a career. It was normal to want children and to keep a house, and wanting a career was a neurosis. This is when Freud's concept of "penis envy" was raging strongly in popular conversation.
Penis envy in the '50s was not seen as a desire to be a man, but to have a man's social freedom - i.e., to have a career. So, education itself for girls was a form of penis envy - a neurosis, an abnormality. Seen in this light, it's kind of a radical movie.
What's amazing, too, is the realism of Joan's character, who grows up at the age of 40, shedding her girlhood concepts of passive femininity and truly growing into her own fierce self.
In "The Feminine Mystique," there are heartbreaking stories of college girls fearing that the intense ambition and curiosity that's being awakened in them will only make them restless and unhappy, because they won't have any creative outlets for it.
That's what worried the educators too - that suddenly there would be a bunch of restless, ambitious, unhappy housewives sitting around yearning for something more fulfilling than changing diapers and scrubbing the counters spotless.
In both SUDDEN FEAR and GOOD-BYE, MY FANCY, a successful middle-aged Joan slips into the warm bath of love in a desire to finally be "normal" and subordinate herself to a man...in both films, it's a trap that almost causes her to erase herself (or, to be erased by others).
Joan slipping into that warm bath on both films will make your skin crawl, because it seems so pathetic. But she does this on purpose, so that when she snaps back to herself it's all the more powerful.
Or...she could have held this conflict deeply within herself, as all successful women of the time seemed to do. In her book "My Way of Life" she sold the housewife fantasy so hard it hurt. Her audiobook narration is really something.
