Rambling Rose
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
            For The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa, FL
                         March 28, 1992

     I try to see as many films directed by women as I can. In the
past that hasn't been too difficult because they have been few and
far between.  As Ally Aker points out in the Mar./Apr. 1992 Ms.
magazine, in the 40 years between 1940 and 1980 only 14 Hollywood
feature films were directed by women. But 23 feature films were
directed by women in 1990 alone and it seems that that number is
even higher for 1991. One film directed by a woman in 1991 that I
didn't see in the theaters is Rambling Rose. It has recently been
released on video, however, so I decided to check it out--not quite
knowing what to expect.

    All I'd heard about both film and director had led me to
believe that this might be a totally male identified film.  I'd
heard it was about a sexy young woman whom all the men fall madly
into lust with.  Furthermore, the director, Martha Coolidge, is
reportedly unwilling to call herself a "feminist" though in 1975
her semi-documentary "Not a Pretty Picture" about her own
experience of rape put her into the forefront of the feminist
filmmaking of that period.  But fifteen years of working in
Hollywood has seen Coolidge make a lot of compromises and a bunch
of undistinguished films, and has pretty much destroyed her
reputation as a feminist.  With all this background in mind I
wasn't expecting much feminist content here, until one of my male
feminist students urged me to see it, if only for one remarkable
scene.

   The film is set in small town Georgia in 1971 and narrated in
flashback by a man then in his mid-fifties about events that
happened in about 1928, i.e., the immediate pre-Depression era.  As
he returns to his childhood home to visit his father, he remembers
the arrival of Rose who came into their household as a hired girl
the year he was 13.  The major portion of the film is his long
reverie about Rose and how her arrival there "caused one hell of a
damnable commotion."  Rose, it seems, was shipped from one God-
fearing family to the next, by men who saw it as their Christian
duty to save her from the bad influences she had been falling under
but who, when she arrives, find it a severe test of their powers of
self control to resist the sexual desire she arouses in every man
who claps an eye on her from the 13 year old on up.  Rose herself,
played to perfection by Laura Dern, is a kind of an innocent even
while she comes on to everything in pants.  As she tells the boy at
one point, "women don't want sex they want love," and that seems to
be true of her, although sex is the only way she has learned in her
short, miserable life to seek the love she longs for.  As a result
of all this, the film gives you the sense of being in a roomful of
men and boys with constantly erect penises the whole time.  But
this is juxtaposed against the warm and genuinely loving bond
between Rose and Mrs. Hillyard (played by Laura Dern's real life
mother Diane Ladd) who is a sensitive, extremely intelligent woman
not afraid to speak her mind or confront those she thinks are
wrong.  Which brings me to the pivotal scene mentioned earlier.
Daddy (played with uncommon restraint and subtlety by Robert
Duvall) has been fighting the temptation that Rose presents and
trying to find another family to pawn her off on when she is
thought to be pregnant but turns out to have an ovarian cyst
instead.  The physician (who also has the hots for Rose) and Daddy
sit there in the doctor's office in Rose's absence and agree that
Rose has a psychological disorder, nymphomania, so she should not
only have the cyst removed but have a radical hysterectomy to
dampen her sexual appetite.  At which point Mrs. Hillyard stands up
to her full 5'2" and lets loose with a barrage of feminist
discourse that asks to what lengths wouldn't these men go to
protect their own illusions about themselves; the sheer fury of her
moral indignation over their presuming to have the right to make
such a decision for this absent woman shames them into retreat.
It's what feminist film theorists call a "pregnant moment"--and it
really is the pivotal point of the film.  For this scene alone, but
also for the beautiful ensemble acting and the predictably quirky
Southern characters, and the humor and good feeling of the film, I
recommend "Rambling Rose," now at your video store.

   For the WMNF-FM Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on
Women and Film.