Ordinary Lady is...Cary Grant??

 Our current film series (as you probably know) has been focusing on Ordinary Ladies. 

The films I have selected thus far have all explored this idea in various ways. From the housewife of The Reckless Moment (and its remake) to the little old lady of The Lady Killers, the convicted murderer of Yield to the Night and the grieving widow-turned-politician of The Years Between, these ladies have all, in their own disparate ways, been ordinary. They do not have super-powers, they are not seductresses or vixens, and they are not content to exist on the margins of their stories, as merely the objects of central male characters.

Beyond all of that, it must be said that the Ordinary Ladies we have seen thus far have all had one additional thing in common.

They are all female.

I am not saying this to be funny or snarky or provocative. I am acknowledging that the concept of gender is a lot fuzzier than you might think. J. K. Rowling got herself into serious trouble in 2020 (she received death threats) after she reacted to an article that referred to one moderately popular gender as "people who menstruate".

I myself have stopped short of referring to our current film series as Ordinary People Who Menstruate because 

(a) it's not accurate (I'm pretty sure Mrs Wilberforce in The Lady Killers had been through menopause long before the film begins) and 

(b) because I enjoy talking about films more than I enjoy talking about grammar. 

One of the dangers of the current emphasis on "labels" is that arguments about naming conventions can be seductive. It is very easy to get dragged in to an argument about the definition of "lady" or indeed the definition of "gender" and we have been seeing many such (very public) arguments in the past few years.

The term "LGBT" was adopted in the 1980s as a "catch-all" term for the non-heterosexual community, but it was gradually expanded to LGBTQ and more recently LGBTQIA+. 

One hesitates to speculate about what the term might look like in future years...

This growing tendency to divide the community into ever smaller sub-categories can sometimes run the risk of marginalising groups that were already being marginalised (or persecuted) by the larger, mainstream community. 

It also risks confusing people who might discover (sometimes to their cost) that well-established and supposedly settled terminology no longer means quite what it used to mean.

Which brings me very neatly to our next film.

Director Howard Hawks is famous for his very strong and independent female characters. Once, when asked whether he considered himself a "feminist", he just shrugged and said, "Not really; I just like strong women."

Yes; he certainly does.

I Was a Male War Bride (1949) stars Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan. It's a very sharp and hugely enjoyable comedy, and one that fits perfectly into our Ordinary Ladies series, but not because of Ann Sheridan.

The "Ordinary Lady" in this instance is Cary Grant. He plays Henri Rochard, a French army officer stationed in post-war Germany who falls in love with an American Lieutenant (Ann Sheridan).

Unfortunately, the US Army does not seem to have considered the possibility that their female personnel might choose to marry in Europe and then bring their new husbands back to the US. While they have plenty of regulations concerning "War Brides", there is nothing to accommodate "War Husbands".

A society cannot consider itself equal if there are different laws for different groups of citizens (men and women, in this particular discussion). The situation depicted here is moderately trivial, but just imagine how awful it would be if an entire section of the population were to be barred from voting, or forced to attend separate schools. What a brutal country that would be (but I digress).

Second-wave feminists spent years fighting for men and women to be equal under the law. The legendary (notorious!) Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued a very similar case in her first appearance before the Supreme Court (long before she sat on that court herself). This is one of the biggest differences between gender-warriors of that generation and those of the present-day: while the modern agenda seems to be all about breaking society down into ever-smaller categories (that's why the "LGBT" label keeps expanding) campaigners of the mid-20th Century were more concerned with eliminating the need for categories at all.

The relationship between Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan in this film does not conform to mainstream gender conventions, and as a result, the existing laws prove to be inadequate for them. But then, that is the point of the story: what purpose is possibly served by a law that applies to men marrying women, but does not apply to women marrying men?

If all of this sounds portentous and off-putting, I should stress that I Was a Male War Bride is a comedy (and a very funny one). It's not a comedy about gender identity or LGBT rights or even marriage equality. (It's also not remotely offensive, so please don't throw your internets at me.)

It's a comedy about bureaucracy, and about what happens when gender roles are decided by bureaucrats.

We will be screening I Was a Male War Bride at 7.30 on Thursday, the 29th of September at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.