JUNGLE RED! THE MAKING OF MGM'S THE WOMEN by Illeana Douglas
Book Review by John Larkin
Illeana Douglas’s talents don’t begin and end with her work as an actress, which includes memorable turns for Martin Scorsese in GOODFELLAS (1990) and CAPE FEAR (1991). She is also an author, filmmaker and film historian whose roots in classic Hollywood can be traced to her grandfather, actor Melvyn Douglas, whose career included NINOTCHKA (1939), HUD (1963) and BEING THERE (1979), as well as a standout turn in one of my personal favorites, THE CHANGELING (1980).
I’ve lately been steeped in films from the pre-Code era through the early 1940s, trying to educate myself on a period that, for far too long, has been a blind spot in my cinematic knowledge. The arrival of Douglas’s JUNGLE RED!: THE MAKING OF MGM’S THE WOMEN could hardly have been better timed. Here was an opportunity to explore that world through the making of a single film, with someone whose affection for the era was apparent from the outset.
Still, part of me was dubious about how engrossed I would become. I’ll admit that all the talk of catfights, fashions and feuds didn’t immediately strike me as my thing. I was interested in the period, but this wasn’t the sort of material that normally excited me.
Fortunately, those reservations disappeared quickly. I found myself absorbed in the environment Douglas so vividly recreates, including the very things I had wondered whether I would care about. This is one of the most thoroughly researched film books I have read, and what impressed me most was how naturally she incorporates that knowledge into a compelling narrative. THE WOMEN may not dominate conversations about 1939 quite as readily as GONE WITH THE WIND or THE WIZARD OF OZ, but its history proves remarkably rich territory.
Adapted from Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 Broadway hit, THE WOMEN follows Mary Haines (Norma Shearer), a wealthy wife and mother who discovers that her husband is having an affair with shopgirl Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford). Her circle of supposedly supportive friends, including Rosalind Russell’s inveterate gossip Sylvia Fowler, helps turn a private crisis into a social event. The film moves through salons, drawing rooms and the divorce circuit in Reno, where sympathy and malice are often difficult to tell apart. Men are the cause of much of the trouble, yet not one appears on screen.
The circumstances behind the camera give the story another layer. George Cukor came to THE WOMEN after being fired as director of GONE WITH THE WIND, and the project offered an opportunity to regain his footing. Douglas places that setback within the larger history of the production, giving us a director with something to prove and considerable pressure to deliver.
Who knew that F. Scott Fitzgerald had worked on an early version of the screenplay? He was among several writers involved before Anita Loos and Jane Murfin received the final credit. Douglas also explores his expansion of the role of Mary’s daughter, Little Mary, finding a resemblance between the mother and daughter’s closeness and Fitzgerald’s relationship with his own daughter, Scottie. It is an unexpectedly tender connection to encounter amid all the verbal bloodletting and the sort of detail that gives the production history a life beyond its succession of drafts and rewrites.
The rivalry between Shearer and Crawford is another example of how much history these personalities brought with them. Shearer’s marriage to MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, a brilliant producer who oddly never wanted an on-screen credit on the films he helped shape, had given her advantages that Crawford resented, and their appearance together carried the accumulated weight of years of competition. Douglas’s attention to that background makes their grievances easier to understand, even when the behavior itself is petty. In one of my favorite segments, Douglas recounts a story passed down from on-set witnesses about how Crawford would purposely knit loudly during a scene with Norma Shearer to distract Shearer and drown out her dialogue. The incident itself is surreal, petty and somewhat hilarious.
Douglas’s enthusiasm for the film and the period it belongs to is infectious. Cukor, Shearer, Crawford and Russell are such substantial figures in Hollywood history that following their lives inevitably leads to other films, other collaborations and other notable people whose paths they crossed. Those excursions are a large part of the book’s appeal. For someone trying to fill in the gaps in his knowledge of this era, there is considerable pleasure in discovering how people and films previously considered separately fit into a larger story. Douglas keeps those connections clear while giving the individual personalities room to register.
A look back through FILMS IN REVIEW’s own archives turns up some fitting connections to Douglas’s book. Our December 1970 issue featured a career retrospective on Rosalind Russell, illustrated with a photograph of her alongside Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer in THE WOMEN. The article traced the film’s influence on Russell’s subsequent career, noting that director Howard Hawks and writer Charles Lederer had “fashioned and tailored” HIS GIRL FRIDAY to the image she had projected in THE WOMEN. Seen in that context, her performance was an important step in the development of the comic screen personality that audiences would come to associate with her.
In addition, an especially fitting coincidence appears in the November 1981 issue, where DeWitt Bodeen’s career retrospective on George Cukor ends directly opposite the opening of MELVYN DOUGLAS: A FILMOGRAPHY. The director of THE WOMEN and Illeana Douglas’s grandfather thus share a spread in our pages, decades before her book would bring these strands of Hollywood history together. It is a pleasing discovery to make while reading an author whose connection to this world is both scholarly and personal.
Bodeen’s retrospective offers its own appreciation of THE WOMEN. Discussing Cukor’s replacement on GONE WITH THE WIND, he observes that “George went ahead and crashed through with a splendid production of The Women.” Elsewhere, he counts Joan Crawford’s Crystal among three of her most outstanding roles under Cukor’s direction, describing the character as “the amoral tigress.” These brief assessments suggest the film’s importance as both an achievement for its director and a showcase for the actresses working with him.
There is also an affectionate detail in Bodeen’s recollection of Cukor’s home. Among its photographs of the actors and actresses he had known was one from Crawford bearing the inscription, “Dear George, that offer of marriage still holds good.” Such recollections give these old issues a particular intimacy, preserving something of the personalities and relationships behind the films. Finding them while reading JUNGLE RED! adds another connection between the history Douglas explores and the history recorded in this publication.
JUNGLE RED! is a superbly researched passion project and an essential addition to the literature on classic Hollywood. I picked it up hoping to further my education and found myself caught up in the lives, ambitions and quarrels of people I hadn’t expected to become so invested in. Douglas’s affection for THE WOMEN shines through on every page, helping make this easily one of the best nonfiction books of 2026.
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