Best Quotes from Complicated Women by Mick Lasalle with Page Numbers

"She understood public taste as well or better than did Thalberg, at least when it came to her own career."

"The mass migration of the population from rural areas to the big cities ... was allowing women, for the first time, to get jobs and support themselves."

"They have an amazing combination of wisdom and youthfulness, of humor and ability, of innocence and self-reliance..."

"The flapper has forgotten how to be simple; she seldom blushes; it is impossible to shock her."

"The fantasy is tied up with the idea of a complicated woman’s depth and dignity."

"She had a fire inside that could not be concealed, that she did not want to conceal."

"The only way I could bring the tears was to think about something horrible happening to me."

"Only their circumstances are different—very different."

"What Shearer was becoming ... was a kind of Platonic ideal of young American womanhood—not an example of perfection but rather a 'perfect example.'"

"With a fearless and ever-increasing audacity, she would take the good woman to a place that only bad women ... had seen: the bedroom."

She was beautiful. She was really beautiful. She was really really really … Descriptions have never done her justice.

It was a way that made viewers suspect their whole lives had been a farce.

Her beauty was a function of the screen.

It was a face with a riddle to it.

Spirituality, an aspect of all beauty, is inseparable from Greta Garbo.

Passion is passion. Ecstasy is ecstasy, and love is religion.

The high stakes were and are an essential part of Garbo’s appeal.

Garbo was, at heart, dead serious. She was a true believer.

This connection between the alluring and the otherworldly should come as no surprise.

It’s as if there was something so otherworldly about Garbo’s beauty that it had to be balanced and accounted for in her movies.

‘I really wanted to play a bad girl. I begged and begged two months for a chance to be declassé.’

‘It would be easy to pretend to you, but I won’t do it.’

‘By not cheating, Mr. Galway.’

‘There is more than one way of being a good woman.’

‘If the world permits the husband to philander, why not the wife?’

‘You’re the only man in the world my door is closed to!’

‘What is a wife but a good mistress?’

‘Whatever she got from these roles, professionally or personally, she gave something back.’

‘She understood and made the public understand the passion of the reckless women she played.’

‘The movies had grown up, and, for a while at least, nothing could stop them.’

"The modern girl is like Lindbergh, built for speed. We have tremendous vitality of body and complete emancipation of mind. None of the old taboos ... mean a damn to us. We don’t care."

"The world had changed in a way that each of us can only hope will not happen in our own lifetimes."

"Things started heating up in late 1929, early 1930. With talkies entrenched, the studios were on the lookout for new talent."

"Actresses who were first became last, while those on the bottom and middle moved to the top."

"Beginning with the talkies, and especially following The Divorcee, illicit sex became the movies’ favorite subject, and at the beginning of the era, the fallen woman was the movies’ favorite character."

"Women needed money. What else could a poor girl do but trade what she had for what she needed?"

"Get over it. Goodness and chastity are no longer synonymous. Celibacy is not the same as virtue."

"Like The Trial of Mary Dugan, the prostitute movies were almost invariably on the woman’s side, consciously and unconsciously. They depicted strong, appealing women of easy virtue and made honest women of them."

"In a world that had turned upside down, movies began to resonate with the complicated lives of women, reflecting deep changes in society with a surprising tenderness."

"It wasn’t poverty that made Shearer do it ... It was lust. As we’ll soon see, Norma did it because she felt like it."

"I’m in an orgy, wallowing, and I love it!"

"Women aren’t human things to you. They’re either wives or sweethearts."

"A man shouldn’t need it."

"I feel that the morals of yesterday are no more; they are as dead as the day they were lived."

"A woman of today is good, or she is bad according to the way she does a thing—and not because of the thing itself."

"What I heard about you in Paris... He didn’t believe the stories, he says, until he heard them 'six or seven hundred times.'"

"You think women should all be shoved into a coop like hens."

"Men of action are better in action. They don't talk well..."

"She knows it."

"There’s not a particle of you I don’t know, remember, and want."

"No one decided to make Joan Crawford a star; Joan Crawford became a star because Joan Crawford decided to become a star."

"What’s inside—the character stuff—has a way of coming out."

"The flip side of cynicism is hope, and Crawford knew how to convey the hope of a woman in need of rescue."

"That Crawford herself shared those fantasies, with complete solemnity and no irony, was the bond between her and her audience."

"When Harlow complained about her roles and said she wanted out of her contract, she was willing to risk it."

"I want to live while I’m alive."

"Her body wasn’t all she had. It was just all she had to sell."

"The truth of Blondell’s reaction, her wild grief and sense of betrayal, underlies and gives dimension to the melodrama that follows."

"No matter that in a Crawford movie it was axiomatic that all a woman had to sell was her body."

"She is the more mature and womanly, and her ability to transcend sentimentality allows her to see and appreciate her surroundings."

“What a life. She is orphaned. She grows up on the street.”

“Other murderesses were more lighthearted.”

“But if they were really imaginative, they made careers of crime.”

“With the world stacked in a man’s favor, anything a woman did was justified.”

“Survival required compromise, even for a good girl, so why not compromise all the way and live on velvet?”

“The pity is that, after the Code, one of the screen’s great beauties never got to play as seductive a role again.”

“There’s no pity for the working woman.”

“What about your girl? She’s gonna do all right.”

“To see West is to come away energized, as if touched by the wand of some weird and wonderful mother goddess.”

“In such moments, Dietrich is both wonderfully comic and wonderfully hip.”

The loss was real and profound.

Movies provided a rich variety of socially responsive women’s pictures.

Abortion may have been taboo, but stories about marriage were fairly common.

The ghastly job of living together.

The hard edge was replaced by sentiment; the frank expression, by propaganda.

Nothing else will pull a man and a woman through the ghastly job of living together.

You’re not worth a minute of one anxious hour that either one of us has given you.

After the Code, crime films, adventures, gangster films, war movies, and comedies all continued to get produced, with some adjustments.

The film suggests that a marriage is not so much about lust as it is about a partnership of the mind and heart.

The best she can do is slip out a message, like a captive in a totalitarian land.

'They believed in the impossible. They believed they could close the barn door after the horse had run away, and that the horse would somehow be there in the morning.'

'Christina relishes her ambiguity. "I have no intention to, Chancellor," she answers. "I shall die a bachelor."'.

'Queen Christina ranks as one of cinema’s close calls. It is also the era’s most sophisticated examination of gender and identity, and Garbo’s masterpiece.'

'By showing Christina’s sexuality as earthy to begin with, by placing her in a world of everyday human emotion and passion, Garbo held out the possibility of transcendence to every member of her audience.'

'The film presents Christina’s decision to leave the throne as a victory of the self.'

'Breen was driven. He wanted to save America from the movies and movies from the Jews.'

'The Production Code ensured a miserable fate—or at least a rueful, chastened one—for any woman who stepped out of line.'

'Always with Garbo, if love is in the room, so is God.'

'He wanted to cut everything from the point where Christina and Antonio are first in the room at the inn— all the way to the scene, three days later, in which Christina memorizes the room.'

'The sight of a great woman knuckling under is too galling, even when we know we should dismiss it.'

“Perhaps it’s better I live in your heart, where the world can’t see me. If I am dead, there’ll be no stain on our love.”

“Make no mistake, monsieur. Whatever I do, it’s nothing for you. It’s all for Armand.”

“It has the shape and form of life, but don’t be fooled by the upright posture. It’s dead.”

“Her instincts were not wrong. Anna could have been a great role for her.”

“If we remove these and any such references, I must challenge anyone to demonstrate to me how the picture of Anna Karenina can be made at all.”

“The expression on Shearer’s face as she takes her last ride is remarkable. She has the look of someone who has retreated to some inner space of total horror and total acceptance.”

“Independence, sophistication, adventure—those were the most consistent elements of Shearer’s screen image.”

“For about twenty years following her retirement, Shearer got a free ride from critics.”

“The film was an enormous critical success, and it made a substantial profit at the box office.”

“Shearer was dismissed. But then West’s pre-Codes had been shown on television repeatedly. Shearer’s had not.”

Evil must be punished? Fine. In noirs, everyone was punished—good, evil, dark, light, and every shade of gray.

A cold-blooded and often depraved cinema that gives us sex with no humanity, feeling, or tenderness is Joseph Breen’s most fitting legacy.

Like the Production Code itself, Garbo was a product of a religion-conscious culture that was only secular on the surface.

Yet however arresting and entertaining Greer and other film noir actresses may have been, it’s hard to think of their roles—throw-backs to the woman-hating imagination of the nineteenth century—as anything but a step backward.

Romance and sex were intertwined. It was the Code that wrenched them apart, and the divorce remains in effect today.

The basic premise at the heart of romantic films, that one person can be the doorway into everything wonderful, is something modern audiences have a hard time buying.

There are countless other examples, but love, once the movies’ favorite topic, is condensed into a sex interlude.

Her best film, one of the most fascinating of the nineties, was The Rapture (1991), in which she played an information operator with a sordid private life.

In modern films, the fascinating and complicated process of two people falling in love is of so little interest to filmmakers that it is commonly tossed off in a montage.

To realize that we live in a culture in which Garbo would have no place is akin to realizing that one’s era isn’t worthy of a benediction.

The kind of woman she first brought to the screen in the pre-Code days—partly by accident of timing, partly by luck, and yet largely by design—turned out to be very like the late twentieth century’s vision of American womanhood.

These films didn’t just disappear. They disappeared for decades.

Still, filmmakers had freedom by the sixties and seventies to tell women’s stories, and out of that freedom good things came.

The last scene of An Unmarried Woman was particularly satisfying.

Through Stowe’s passion, we understood Cora’s—that this is a woman who has coasted through a sheltered existence vaguely dissatisfied.

Actresses of the new millennium have to contend with a Hollywood in which there is little interest in women’s narratives.

The examples of Shearer might serve as a lesson: the last thing a vibrant actress needs is to start taking herself seriously.

As was the case with Shearer, the less Moore wore, the more powerful she became.

Costume dramas inevitably reflect the period of their creation.

It’s to stop time, hold the best of it in your hand.