They say women make better wine tasters because they have better taste buds, or more of them. I know that is true in my home, where the wife is the one with the palate. When it comes to spices, she likes to say that I know which ones to use, I just don't know how much to use. I guess I tend to overdo it. In a movie, I don't think my wife would enjoy being called a "skirt" or a "frail," but she doesn’t mind "toots," even in real life.
The Women is a big movie from a big year for movies, 1939. The all-female cast stars Norma Shearer, Joan Collins and Rosalind Russell, so how could it miss, miss? By having no misters, mister. Every speaking role is played by a woman.
In a modern day update, perhaps the jilted Mary and Sylvia would end up together and buy a couple of dogs. Females, of course. But in the end, one of them rejoins her cad while the other sharpens her Jungle Red claws.
There are several hundred women winemakers in California alone, so it won't be hard to find a gender-appropriate pairing for The Women. A big wine writer once called Heidi Barrett the First Lady of Wine, and who am I to pick a fight with either one of them? Her La SirenaLa Sirena label takes a broad view of California wine, but we want the Napa Cabernet Sauvignon here, Aviatrix, at $75.
1933's Baby Face stars Barbara Stanwyck in one of the last films released before the Production Code was instituted the following year. In fact, many students of film history think Baby Face might be the film that broke the camel's back.
Stanwyck plays a young woman who was prostituted by her father since she was a teenager. See? That’s Pre-Code for ya. The only man she trusts is a shoemaker. I won't even wade into the irony that a woman's best friend is a guy who makes shoes. In addition to probably giving her the insider's discount, he gives her some advice. He tells her she should quit the small-time sex crimes and use her considerable attributes to turn the tables and become the exploiter instead of the exploitee.
This lifestyle gets her to The Big Apple and sends her quickly up the corporate ladder. But love eventually rears its adorable head, as it nearly always does in the movies, and she sees her material ways for what they are.
Oh, come on. Hooker Corner Winery? This wine pairing is like shooting fish in a barrel, although I never understood why anyone would do that. The Indiana purveyor makes mostly sweet wines with lurid names like Guilty Pleasures, Dark Secrets and Pucker Up. They don't ship, so the next time you're near Hooker Corner in Pine Ridge, Indiana, bring $15 and find out how the other half lives.
Theodora Goes Wild is the 1936 screwball comedy that turned Irene Dunne from a dramatic diva into a comedy queen. She's a member of an upright and uptight small town family. She has a secret identity as the author of a scandalously sexy book, the 50 Shades of Grey of its day. The nature of her secret eventually leaks and results in, guess who? Romance, that's who.
Theodora has a fine time living the life of a celebrity, but it's a tough act to keep propped up. It's hard out there for a Sunday School teacher-cum-secret sex writer who falls in love with the married son of a lieutenant governor. Scandalous! I don't know how Margaret Dumont managed to not be in this picture.
Theodora is one of the wine family members of Austria's Winerynull, as fictitious as that family may be. Her picture on the label smacks of the side of a milk carton, but she is said to be the vineyard prankster, so check behind the hay bales if you're looking for her. Her namesake white field blend of mostly Grüner Veltliner and Welschriesling runs about $40.
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