The First Wives Club (Paramount, 1996)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched the 1996 movie The First Wives Club, a film I’d spotted in our backlog just next to The Gang’s All Here. I was mildly curious about this movie after a Right-wing op-ed writer dissed it in the pages of the Los Angeles Times when it was new and suggested it was a horribly socially irresponsible movie because it made dumped first wives engage in macabre revenge plots instead of accepting the inevitable and going gently into that good night while their husbands collect themselves younger, hotter, sexier trophy wives. The First Wives Club turned out to be a delight from start to finish, even though as a film it’s very dated and doesn’t buzz with the sheer feminist anger Colin Higgins brought to the movie Nine to Five 16 years earlier. The three women are actress Elise Elliot (Goldie Hawn), housewife Brenda Morrell (Bette Midler) and professional doormat Annie McDuggan (Diane Keaton). They are old college buddies (and different actresses play their younger selves, though the double castings are quite carefully matched) who reunite after a fourth friend of theirs, Cynthia Swann (a young Stockard Channing), commits suicide following the breakup of her marriage to financier and Wall Street master of the universe Gil Griffin (James Naughton).

The three have an extended lunch (director Hugh Wilson, working from a script by Robert Harling based on a novel by Olivia Goldsmith, shows how extended it is through a montage sequence in which the restaurant gradually empties over time until it’’s just the three of them and an increasingly exasperated wait staff) during which they hatch various plots for revenge, first against their own husbands and then to protect any women treated similarly. The film takes a bit too long to get to the good stuff of what we want to see – the women getting revenge (or, as they put it, justice) against their straying husbands, but once their plots kick into high gear The First Wives Club becomes a comedy gem. I was particularly impressed with the deadpan nature of much of the humor, despite the over-the-top acting of both Midler and Hawn (Keaton is more reserved, as befits her training with Woody Allen), and Hawn’s performance turns into a spoof of Sunset Boulevard as she tries to have herself cosmetically remodeled so she can play ingenies on screen even though she’s 45. There are plenty of references to old Hollywood, including a sequence straight out of the 1933 classic Dinner at Eight in which John Barrymore shows up for an audition and instead of being offered the starring role gets a cameo with just a few lines (and he responds by killing himself in a scene the director, the young George Cukor, stages like a love scene); in The First Wives Club Hawn goes to audition for the part of Monique in her ex-husband Bill Atchison’s (Victor Garber, best known for playing Liberace in the better of the two late-1980’s TV movies about him) new film, only Bill has groomhg Monique for his new flame, Shelly Stewart (Sarah Jessica Parker), and he wants Elise for the bitch role of Monique’s mother instead.

Brenda learns from her uncle Carmine (played by Philip Bosco as a standard-issue Mafioso) that both her husband Morty Cushman (Don Hedaya) and Annie’s husband, Aaron Paradis (Stephen Collins), are crooks – Morty began by stealing stock off trucks and Aaron has engaged in higher-end forms of skullduggery – but Elise looks in vain for her ex until she finds it: Shelly, it turns out, is a high-school dropout and just 14 years old. Along the way there are some slapstick scenes, including one in which Our Heroines have to beat a hasty retreat through a window-washer’s scaffold after stealing some of Aaron’s stash, and another scene set at Christie’s auction house in which the three are selling off Bill’s possessions to raise the money to buy out Aaron’s advertising agency and make themselves his boss. The auction scene evokes memories of the 1929 Paramount classic The Cocoanuts – the Marx Brothers’ first surviving film – but it’s still amusing. There are also old-Hollywood tie-ins like the use of old songs like “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Tangerine” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” for properly romantic high-end parties on the soundtrack. Overall The First Wives Club holds up surprisingly well, and it’s fun to see cameo appearances by such celebrities as New York’s then-Mayor, Ed Koch, as well as Ivana Trump, a first wife par excellence if there ever was one!