Colleen Moore, a silent film actress, commissioned a nine by twelve foot dollhouse called “The Fairy Castle”. Some of its furnishings were so small the current curators wear masks so they don’t inhale them. During the Great Depression, she exhibited it to raise money for children’s charities.
There are famously no women at all in the cast of Ice Station Zebra (1968).
Conversely, there are no men in 1939’s The Women, and even the pet dog of one of the characters was female.
Or in
The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)
The Thing (1982)
Twelve Angry Men (1957)
…and a lot of other films (Interestingly, the original The Thing had two women in it, both with speaking roles, and the remake of Flight of the Phoenix has female roles)
This has long been a recognized item. Look up “Bechdel Test”, which is relevant.
It’s still around, at Chicago’s Museum of Science & Industry. Not far from a German U-Boat, captured at sea during WWII, that had to be rolled across busy Lake Shore Drive to reach the museum from Lake Michigan.
Actually, that makes me think of another random fact: the Fairy Castle @ MSI makes two Chicago museums with doll-sized miniature rooms on display in the basement. The other is a set of miniature rooms in various historical architectural styles in the basement of the Art Institute.
I may have posted something along these lines before but I’m not able to check right now, so what the hell eh?
In Dartmouth in Devon there is a gallery called Whistlefish. A plaque on the wall records that back in 1951 a book shop called Harbour Books was started there. Unusually the proprietor had previously been the subject of several books himself.
His name? Christopher Milne. Better known by his given names only: Christopher Robin.
Greetings from Devon, by the way.
j
Yes, he was there for quite a long time—I know my husband met him in that context, though I’m not sure if that was in the 1980s or early 1990s.
And also two women singers; one of whom was Edith Mathis, who we lost a few days ago. May the Heaven she’s entered be as beautiful as the one she’s describing here:
Yeah, I knew your three examples, but they all have small casts of a few men trapped by the circumstances at one restricted place, while “Lawrence of Arabia” is a 4 hours epic with a cast that must’ve been in the thousands and plays at many different locations, and yet there are almost no women in it, and if you blink you will miss those few. That’s remarkable.
And yes, I know the Bechdel test.
That would be an extraordinarily rare event in filmmaking. Whereas films without women are everywhere. The Bechdel test has become something of an institution. For those not familiar, to pass it, a film has to have two women in it, who have a conversation with each other, that isn’t about a man. This is a very primitive test, but only about 50% of films pass it, and that number has not improved since the test was invented (in a comic strip), in 1985.
In another thread I learned some interesting facts about the first female pop star:
- She was born in 1937 in the U.S.
- She sold over 100 million records
- She’s still alive
- She’s not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
- Anyone under 50 has probably never heard of her
More info on her Wiki page
I’d estimate that the number is much less than 50%.
Oh - if that’s your point, you didn’t make ir very well.
If you want films with maybe one or two women (except for non-speaking, pretty much background roles) that are in long , sprawling films you’ve got
The Message(1976) – two female roles
Metropolis (1927) – One major female roles, plus a lot of courtesans who stand around looking pretty
Gunga Din (1939) – One woman
The Great Escape (1963)
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) one major female role
She (1935) , oddly enough, considering the title and story – two major female parts
2001: A Space Odyssey – really minor female roles only
Ad Astra – similar
Destination Moon – one really small role, unless you count the voice of Woody Woodpecker
One of which was played by Irene Pappas and a major role at that, a dynamic character who planned and directed an assassination, and then has a redemption arc. The Message does not qualify as womanless.
Here’s a listing of almost-no-women movies from IMDB
I’d forgotten about Khartoum
Which mentions that she speaks Yiddish, which I wasn’t expecting. (It doesn’t say clearly that she speaks Italian, though other sources do.)
The way I heard it was a little more detailed:
- Is there more than one woman in the film?
- Do they have names?
- Do they talk to each other?
- About something other than a man?
It would be a lot more interesting to list the films that pass the Bechdel test AND are good films (this isn’t a criterion for the test), rather than ‘your favorite films that, oh! don’t have any significant women in them’. Because the latter could be just ‘films I like’.
…which disappointed in its aspiration to be another Lawrence of Arabia.
George Bernard Shaw, who knew both of them, filled an fond, avuncular role in Lawrence’s life (post-war, around the time when Lawrence was in the RAF pioneering the development of speedboats to rescue downed flyers - something history has overlooked about him), whereas Shaw dismissed Gordon as a charlatan.
There is a rare breed of pig called the Husum Red Pied that was bred in Jutland( now Germany near the Germany/Denmark border). It looks sort of like the Danish flag(missing the horizontal bar though)
It was purportedly bred by the Jutes when the area was invaded by the Prussians, who forbid the flying of the Danish flag.