1. The Gentle Sex (1943) is a less graceful propaganda effort than the similarly encouraging Millions Like Us (1943), but I think I may have found it more interesting. It's Leslie Howard's last film, even though he's glimpsed only briefly at the outset of the story, the omniscient narrator surveying a crowded railway station from his God's-eye catwalk, choosing his subjects and commenting on them with an amused tolerance that it will be the film's entire business to refute. "Women! Women all over the place. This station's seething with women. They think they're helping, I suppose . . ." Like the male gaze personified, he assembles his cast with such teeth-grating condescensions as "Now there's a dear little thing. Oh, we must have her!" or "Good, is she? Well, let's have her by all means," but he is part of the same irony that picks out the opening credits in demure needlepoint with a sampler-like verse about the frailty of women before bringing up the writers' names, all female—indeed, the longer the film follows its seven new recruits to the ATS through their early training and into their various stations in the field, the more like a running joke the narrator sounds, admiring but clueless and crestfallen by his own expectations of women's places in war. Observing a young flying officer bidding his mother farewell, the narrator sententiously begins to quote Kingsley—"Well, men must work and women must weep"—and then, finding the scene abruptly cut to a convoy of lorries all staffed by female drivers and about to leave on a top-priority mission, has to finish halfheartedly, "At least, that used to be the idea." Yes, the leather-jacketed despatch rider on the Triumph is a woman, too. Don't forget the anti-aircraft spotters. That marching band and those radio operators know what they're doing.

A recruitment ad at the time, the documentary-style film now makes a striking record despite the fictionalization; it boasts that it was "made with the co-operation of the War Office and the Auxiliary Territorial Service" and a number of the boot-camp scenes especially look as though the camera simply followed a season of real-life recruits with a smattering of actors in speaking roles. I just can't decide whether I think it's more interesting for what it does or what it doesn't do. It passes the Bechdel test so naturally that the viewer actually notices when the topic of men is raised, because the expected love-in-the-time-of-war angle has been so far absent from the narrative. Some of the characters have romances, some don't. There is no suggestion of them being torn between their feminine desires and their military duties; that having a boyfriend or not defines their femininity. (We are treated to a pleasing moment of female gaze when the most forthright of the seven catches sight of a handsome Highlander at a dance: the camera lands first on his lean, fit legs in their piper's stockings and lingers its way up to his face, which is John Laurie's, dark-browed and beaky and bent in a matchingly appreciative smile. The film is not trading in stereotypical reversals of behavior, though. A boyish, generous joker of a Tommy on a crowded train at first looks like the lightweight contrast to the efficient women, but when he drops off to sleep we see the commando badge stitched on his sleeve: he mutters and twitches in his dreams, mission nightmares. This is not a film which wants its audience to underestimate anyone.) It was probably inevitable that one of the protagonists should lose her lover to enemy action, but it is explicitly not the be-all, end-all of her story any more than a marriage would have been: "You won't forget," the narrator says, for once understanding. "But you won't go under." There are no catfights. The character who clashes the worst and most often with her fellow-recruits is stiff-necked, standoffish, inclined to hold insufficiently thought-through political opinions, and—as her cabmate finally diagnoses—shy; she is not a bitch. And the film is not complacent; it acknowledges and endorses the social sea-change of the war, but it doesn't erase earlier contributions. When a newly promoted driver, herself the daughter of a professional soldier, declares proudly that "For the first time in English history, women are fighting side by side with the men," her prospective mother-in-law quietly reveals that she met her husband while recuperating from injuries she sustained in the last war, when she was an ambulance driver hit by shrapnel and he was a flyer like his son. The only real down note is unintentional: the egalitarian future all the characters assume they're moving toward, straight on into peacetime when the contemporary viewer knows it wasn't—isn't—as painless or as reasonable as that.

Honestly, rare as it shouldn't be, it's nice to see a story where women are competent without being flawless, funny without being ridiculed, and allowed to hold a variety of opinions and attitudes, even if it's all in service of getting more women into uniform so that more men can join up. They're still living in a man's world—the narrator doesn't mention that women in the ATS could expect two-thirds the pay of their male counterparts in the armed forces. The film's intended audience is a little confused, as it seems sometimes to appeal to women who might worry that operating heavy artillery is beyond them and sometimes to men who might doubt their wife/sister/mother's right to give it a try at all. But it is never saying, look how neatly they drill for girls, look how impressive it is when a woman changes a gasket. Maybe it's just the optimism of propaganda, but it is taken as read that the protagonists are not exceptional: they are simply doing their bit. And not subserviently, either: "The world you're helping to shape is going to be a better one," the narrator muses as our seven heroines share sandwiches in the aftermath of a successfully repelled air raid, "because you're helping to shape it."

All right, he still salutes them as "you strange, wonderful, incalculable creatures." But he's kind of an ass. And at least Leslie Howard knew it.

(Since I'd taped it with the other two, I also rewatched The First of the Few (1942). It's still the least of Howard's war movies, but it has wonderful footage of the Supermarine S.4. Not so good on gender, though.)

2. Speaking of women, I forgot to mention that I received my contributor's copies of The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Science Fiction Poetry, containing my poems "Madonna of the Cave" and "Matlacihuatl's Gift" and work by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin. Nice, nice book. You should get one.

3. I said derspatchel had taken a picture of me which I didn't hate. Proof below the cut.



I don't like most pictures of myself. I don't like them even (or especially) when I'm smiling; I think most of my expressions are funny-looking, which I blame on the basic structure of my face. The two best pictures I've ever taken of myself were in rear view mirrors; one was by accident in Italy and in the other you can't so much see me. That said: I'm smiling in this one and I think I like it. Maybe the sparkler helps. The photographer didn't hurt. That's my brother in blur behind me, apparently doing his best Vulcan impression.

4. Goodbye, Ernest Borgnine. When I was in seventh grade, I had to read a scene from Marty opposite a boy whose name I can't remember now; I didn't watch the movie then, but I think I should. And then The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), because you're in that and I'll take any excuse.

5. A character in today's Skin Horse used the acronym TARFU. It is my favorite of that family of acronyms and the one that gets the least airplay. Huzzah.