Year Five of Scarecrow Academy brings an ambitious discussion series titled “Women in Trouble: Great Melodrama in Film,” an in-depth look at an often-derided, but frequently glorious genre sometimes called “women’s pictures.” In these ten weeks of free online conversations, we explore the way imaginative filmmakers have put women at the center of their hothouse creative universes. David Lynch refuses to describe his films, but has sometimes summed them up with the phrase “A Woman in Trouble.” In this series we’ll see how potent that situation can be.

Discussions are led by National Society of Film Critics member Robert Horton, author of the Seasoned Ticket column at the Scarecrow blog and Scarecrow’s “Historian-Programmer in Residence.” The Zoom sessions are free and open to all; there’s no homework, but we ask that you register online in advance. We’ll be meeting on Saturdays at 2 p.m., beginning March 4, 2023.

March 4

THE LETTER (1940)

William Wyler – Bette Davis

At a sultry rubber plantation, a bored wife forcefully shoots a man to death—and this is just the first minute of a powerhouse melodrama, a showcase for one of Davis’s mightiest performances (the movie itself is like an inquiry into the nature of “acting”) and for Wyler’s impeccable directing.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

 

March 11

MILDRED PIERCE (1945)

Michael Curtiz – Joan Crawford

The “women’s picture” meets stylish film noir as Crawford (in her Oscar-winning turn) goes through the paces of upward mobility in a man’s world—a story that can only end in murder. Based on a James M. Cain novel.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

 

March 18

BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945)

David Lean – Celia Johnson

From Noel Coward’s wry, heart-tugging scenario, Lean fashions a typically British story—its passions contained under a stiff upper lip—about two lovers (Johnson and Trevor Howard), married to other people, who fall for each other in a civilized manner.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

 

March 25

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (1955)

Douglas Sirk – Jane Wyman

Sirk was the master of the glossy ’50s soap opera, and this story of a small-town widow falling for a younger gardener (Rock Hudson at his prime)—much to the consternation of her grown children and tongue-clucking neighbors—is one of the director’s greatest, rich in color and full of nonconformist spirit.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

 

April 1

MARNIE (1964)

Alfred Hitchcock – Tippi Hedren

Sometimes shrugged off as a “problem” Hitchcock picture, this story of a kleptomaniac drawn into a strange marriage (with newly Bond-ed Sean Connery) is a difficult but brilliantly directed psychological study, with Hedren’s icy blonde the embodiment of Hitchcock’s fear of and empathy with women.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

 

April 8

WANDA (1970)

Barbara Loden

For years a cult film, this remarkable, risk-taking project by director-writer-star Loden has been recently reappreciated. She plays a housewife who drops out of her life and into a dangerous road movie, a fascinating subject for an actress best known for her roles in Splendor in the Grass (directed by her husband, Elia Kazan) and the stage version of Arthur Miller’s reflection on Marilyn Monroe, After the Fall.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

 

April 15

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975)

Chantal Akerman – Delphine Seyrig

Akerman’s game-changing film recently upended the famous Sight & Sound Greatest Movies poll of by landing the #1 spot. The film’s meticulous survey of a woman’s domestic rounds is, under the right circumstances, an absolutely spellbinding experience.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

 

April 22

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)

David Lynch – Naomi Watts/Laura Elena Harring

Hollywood is the dark playground for Lynch’s jigsaw puzzle of modern noir, where two women—one a chipper would-be starlet, the other an amnesiac—find themselves trapped in an increasingly baffling mystery that could only come from the creator of Twin Peaks.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

 

May 6

THE SOUVENIR (2019)

Joanna Hogg – Honor Swinton Byrne

A young film student falls in with the wrong man, a familiar soap-opera scenario given fresh life in Hogg’s brisk, unsentimental style. Tilda Swinton—star of Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter and the real-life mother of this film’s leading actress—does her customary superb work in support.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.

 

May 13

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (2020)

Emerald Fennell – Carey Mulligan

In this controversial modern take on vengeance, the gifted Mulligan plays a woman set on striking back at the men who destroyed her friend—a melodrama made tricky by the way Fennell (who won an Oscar for her screenplay) plays the material in black-comic mode.

Rent it from us or look for streaming options HERE.

Register HERE.