Sandy Camargo comments: > The reasons for the confusion (and conflation) that you rightly notice is > historical, I think. Here's the quick and dirty version, as I understand > it: The first article to really talk about films dealing with so-called > women's issues (i.e., relationships with men, where the love story was the > main plot, not the subplot) was Thomas Elsaesser's "Tales of Sound and > Fury." In that piece he referred to the "family melodrama," which would > link it to and distinguish it from "western melodramas," "crime > melodramas," etc. In the subsequent, feminist-critical discussion of the > form, it came to be called "the woman's film" or the "women's melodrama." > The other distinction would be that, unlike the heroes of westerns > and other traditional melodramas, the female protagonist is most often > unsuccessful in realising her goals. As soon as she is successful, the film > is assigned to another genre. I think that, in popular usage at least, the conflation and confusion of terms occurs much earlier. "Melodrama" itself, of course, has its own long and complex history in theater (starting nearly two centuries ago, when "melody" really was a part of the "drama"), and that larger usage carried over into film as well. (Sometimes in self-conscious ways, as in the title of the last film John Dillinger would see before being--ummm--melodramatically gunned down: MANHATTAN MELODRAMA.) But in relation to academic discussion of the terms, Molly Haskell and Andrea Walsh, among others, have noted that the term "woman's picture" was in common use in the industry and among reviewers and audiences for decades before, often conflated with such (usually derogatory) terms as "tearjerker," "weepie" and the like. Such films were made and marketed with a female audience in mind--they were "women's pictures" because they were both about and for women. I expect that analysis of novels, short fiction in women's magazines, and radio soap opera would also give some further context for the interchangability of these terms (along with "soap opera" itself or its derogatory dimunitve in VARIETY and elsewhere, "sudser"). Consider, for example, how STELLA DALLAS was transformed from a popular (and rather Natualistic) novel through two film versions to a long-running radio serial that ultimately had such events as Stella taking on the captain of a German U-boat! In that case, "melodrama" as a descriptive term seems to come full circle. I think some qualification also has to be made about the protagonist being "unsuccessful in realising her goals" as a definitive aspect of the "woman's film." More to the point, perhaps, is that her initial goals are often displaced for new ones and/or tranferred to someone else, such as a daughter. That is certainly true of Stella herself, who becomes content with giving up social mobility as her daughter achieves it (while losing the daughter in turn). It is also true of Esther Blodgett/Vickie Lester in A STAR IS BORN, who reconciles the stardom that she did not finally abandon after her husband's suicide with the announcement, "Hello, everbody! This is MRS. NORMAN MAINE!" Don Larsson ---------------------- Donald Larsson Minnesota State U, Mankato [log in to unmask] ---- For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives: http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html