“Anybody may look smart!”: the smart aesthetic and women film stars in 1930s Hollywood

Abstract

ABSTRACT As Maria DiBattista has shown (2003, 332), the ascendance of figures like Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn during Hollywood’s depression decade (1930–1939) marked the rise of a new breed of woman film star: the “smart girl.” These stars were smart in two senses. Yes, they were quick-witted and quick-tongued—proto-feminist fodder for the newly egalitarian vision of (re-)marriage peddled in 1930s screwball comedy. Yet they were also smart in a new, aesthetic sense, embodying a “smart aesthetic” that marked a shift away from the formal, affective, informational and gendered logics of glamour. For contemporary commentators on 1930s Hollywood, these stars’ smart mouths and their equally smart dresses were in clear accord—and, in part as a result of this apparent accord, the smart aesthetic earned a reputation as a progressive aesthetic formation that both expressed and reinforced the feminist potential of the new strain of “smart girls” on screen. This essay, however, complicates this view by at once elaborating and unpicking the links between these two registers of smartness. Through an analysis of the smart aesthetic as it emerged across coverage in 1930s fan periodicals, it contends that the smart aesthetic’s progressive promise may have been more apparent than actual.