The Women (Picturehouse, Scion Films, Inferno Distribution, Jagged Films, New Line Cinema, Shukovsky English Entertainment, Ultimate Media Group, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, October 2) my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d been curious about since I first learned about it while researching the 1939 film The Women, directed by George Cukor and written by Jane Murfin and Anita Loos (they were credited in reverse order but that’s not the sequence in which they worked), for a previous blog post on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-women-max-gordon-plays-and-pictures.html). The film was a 2008 remake of The Women written and directed by Diane English in 2008 after a 15-year struggle to get it green-lighted. Diane English actually took up the project in 1993 during a hiatus on her hit TV series Murphy Brown and got nibbles from Sony Pictures Studios (nèe Columbia). English first got stars Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts interested in it, but those plans fell through apparently because they both wanted to play the same character. English was unable to get the film made for a major studio and ended up doing it independently through a company called Jagged Films owned by singer Mick Jagger. How the man who co-wrote such sexist songs as “Under My Thumb” ended up bankrolling a feminist movie seems a bit of a stretch, but he did. English originally marketed the film to director James L. Brooks (which would have been a snooze-fest; the late John Gabrish and I watched Brooks’s most famous film, Terms of Endearment, together and joked it should have been called Terms of Emborement), but when he bailed on the project English decided to direct it herself. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, “She wanted to present a version in which the female characters were strong and self-reliant and supported and defended each other rather than resort to treachery and catty remarks to achieve their goals.” If that was her intent, she certainly succeeded. The 2008 The Women got savaged by most of the critics but actually did decently at the box office, grossing $50 million on a budget of $16 million. After a large number of actresses had cycled in and out of the project, including Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, Uma Thurman, Whitney Houston, and Queen Latifah, Meg Ryan finally ended up with the leading role after all.

She plays Mary Haines, wife of financier Stephen Haines, who as in Clare Boothe’s original 1936 play and the 1939 film (in which she was played by Irving Thalberg’s widow, Norma Shearer) learns from a gabby manicurist, Tanya (Debi Mazar), that Stephen is having an affair with Crystal Allen (Eva Mendes here, Joan Crawford in 1939), a perfume salesgirl at Saks Fifth Avenue. (Saks is referenced so often in the dialogue that one critic called the 2008 The Women an infomercial.) Mary’s mother Catherine (Candice Bergen) tells her to ignore it, pointing out that her father had an extra-relational affair of his own, she learned about it, ignored it, and eventually it ended and they moved on and stayed together. But Our Mary can’t stand the thought of living with, and even worse sleeping in the same bed with, a man who’s getting his ashes hauled by someone else. She throws him out of the house and visits a lawyer to prepare to sue him for divorce. One of the reasons I was interested in watching the 2008 The Women after I’d caught the 1939 version on TCM recently was to see how Diane English had adapted Boothe’s story and the Murfin/Loos script to the very different social realities of our time. In 1939 it was expected that women, especially women at the upper-middle to upper-class level of the characters in this story, would retire from the workforce once they got married and let their husbands support them. (A frequent plot line in 1930’s movies is of the poor but honest couple who want to get married but can’t because they can’t live and support themselves on just the man’s income.) Today it’s taken for granted that women who get married can still continue to work; Mary Haines is a designer for her father’s clothing company and Sylvie Fowler (Annette Bening; she was called “Sylvia” in the 1939 version and was played by Rosalind Russell) is the editor of a fashion magazine called Cachet, a rival to the real-life Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Sylvie is trying to upgrade Cachet by getting “name” writers to contribute to it, including Bailey Smith (Carrie Fisher), who had quit the fashion mags for a regular gig at The New Yorker until Sylvie tricks her into writing for Cachet by confirming that Mary Haines’s marriage is indeed on the rocks.

The closest thing the 2008 The Women has to a comic relief character is Edie Cohen (Debra Messing), who’s on her fifth pregnancy and announces to her friends that she’s going to keep cranking out kids until one of them is a boy, since her previous four have all been girls. There’s one added character, Alex Fisher (Jada Pinkett Smith), a Black Lesbian who published a book of social-comment essays six years previously but has been beset by writer’s block ever since. Alex shows up on the scene with her girlfriend de jour, a punkish white woman named Natasha (Natasha Alam), and preaches the joy of the same-sex-loving lifestyle to all her friends who are constantly complaining about their struggles with men. One plot element from the original that English had to eliminate is the whole story arc about the women having to move to Reno, Nevada to get their divorces. In the 1930’s many states, including New York (where the characters of The Women live), required proof of wrongdoing, usually adultery, to grant a divorce. So Nevada marketed itself as a divorce mecca in which you could end your marriage as long as you lived there for at least six weeks and made some effort to make it look like you were permanently relocating there. Today, with no-fault divorce a regularly accepted fact of life throughout the U.S., the business of having to go to Reno to end your marriage obviously wouldn’t work as a plot element, though English threw in something similar. Instead of a dude ranch, she put in a New Age treatment and therapy camp in which the women take canoe rides at 5 a.m. She even got Cloris Leachman to play the Führerin of this establishment in as close as she was going to get to Marjorie Main’s terrific performance as the dude-ranch proprietress in the 1939 version. Ironically, the 2008 The Women ended the way Charles had said, when we watched at least part of the 1939 film together (he came home from work midway through), that one would have. Mary Haines, fired by her own father from his clothing company, decides to strike out on her own and launch her own boutique fashion house. She gets her capital from her mom, who’s been sitting on a nest egg for years and offers it to her daughter to start a business of her own.

Mary also learns via her daughter Molly (India Ennenga) that Stephen and Crystal are living together but in a really tiny apartment and Crystal is spending much of her time in the bathtub talking to people on the phone. Molly is disillusioned with her mom for breaking up with her dad, and she gravitates to Sylvie for emotional support – even though Mary is very upset with Sylvie for having let the world know that she and Stephen had broken up. (It even appeared in the infamous Page Six column in the New York Post, which like a lot of the real establishments featured in this movie got an acknowledgment in the credits.) Nonetheless, there’s a great scene in which Molly confronts Crystal in the bathtub (ironically, in the Code-era 1939 film it’s made clear that Crystal is calling real or potential alternate boyfriends in the bathroom, while it’s not all that clear whom she’s talking to in this one – and as Charles pointed out, it took a lot more work in 1939 than it did in 2008 to have your bathroom outfitted with an extension phone, let alone a second line!), Crystal demands that Molly call her “Aunt Crystal,” and Molly not only refuses but tells her point-blank, “I don’t like you.” The film ends with Mary’s triumphal fashion show (ironically the 1939 film also contained a fashion-show sequence, though it had nothing to do with the main plot, didn’t feature any of the principals, and was apparently stuck in over the protests of director George Cukor just so they could advertise a Technicolor sequence in an otherwise all black-and-white movie), which is such a hit she gets an offer from a representative of Saks Fifth Avenue to merchandise her clothes there. Instead of jumping at the chance, Mary holds off because she’s scared of the challenge of manufacturing clothes at the scale Saks would need to sell them, and she gives them a wait-and-see attitude. She also receives a letter from Stephen asking her for a date and enclosing the engagement ring she gave back to him the night they broke up and she threw him out. I found myself mentally remixing the ending so that Stephen and Mary would end up as both professional and personal partners, since with his Wall Street expertise he could presumably find her the capital she’d need to expand her operation and produce enough clothes to fill the needs of Saks (and presumably the other big chain stores who’d also want to sell her line).

There’s also a party to celebrate the debut of Sylvie’s new magazine, Sylvie – like Mary, Sylvie responded to being fired from her family’s business by starting one of her own – and an amusing climax in a hospital maternity ward after Edie Cohen’s water breaks and she’s suddenly about to give birth. The other women race to get her there and ultimately, after an extremely stressful delivery, the baby is born and it’s the long-awaited boy. He's the first male character we’ve seen in the film because, like Clare Boothe and George Cukor, Diane English was careful to keep the all-female casting intact. She even made sure that all the extras and bit players on screen were female. (The published literature on the 1939 film says that Cukor was so into the gynocentrism of the material he insisted that all the animals in the film be female and all the books on the various characters’ bookshelves be by women authors.) English also threw in another Page Six reference that at least hints that Crystal Allen changed sexual orientations and ended up with Alex Fisher’s ex Natasha (though I didn’t believe that for a moment, if only because Crystal had been drawn as so relentless a gold-digger that if she ended up in a Lesbian relationship, it would be with a far more well-to-do woman than Natasha). There’s an ironic line early on in which one of the women says to another, “I feel like I’m in a 1930’s movie” – and both Charles and I joked, “You are.” But I’m quite glad I caught up with the 2008 The Women and give Diane English a lot of credit for thinking through her adaptation and making this story work in a contemporary setting while retaining its original values. English’s imdb.com page contains a quote from her: “I was determined to get The Women done because I wanted to see our great A-list actresses working together as an ensemble – the way they did in the original 1939 version. I was told over and over that it could never be done. But we did it.” The other quote from English on the page is about her overall orientation as a filmmaker: “My work tends to have social or political undertones. I like to tell a smallish story that plays out against a bigger picture, and I find that a woman’s point of view in the world is not very well represented. They say write what you know, and I believe that.” Unfortunately, The Women appears to be Diane English’s only feature-film credit as a director (her imdb.com page lists her as a writer and producer but not director), a real pity because she showed a flair as a filmmaker for telling a story that honors women without too much male-bashing (only what we deserve).