Marquee De Sade

Guy de Maupassant's The Private Affairs of Bel Ami is a film I've never seen (Bosley Crowther's review in The New York Times (June 16, 1947) was hardly kind; but it the film seems to have fans today, such as the folks at the Harvard Film Archive), but it matters not for my discussion of the film's posters/marketing materials, one of which I glimpsed at an auction recently.

These are examples I found on the web, the black & white looking like what I had briefly seen:



There were apparently (at least) two versions, each depicting a young Angela Lansbury fixed as firmly as a Chihuahua to a guest's leg (if not actually humping it), in desperate attempt to keep her man. This is as dramatic as film posters should be, and apparently in keeping with the story. But...

It's the taglines which draw my interest:

"All women take to men who have the appearance of wickedness"

"Are women too weak to be wicked?"

I suppose it's unfair to rile at such stereotypes when you have not seen the film nor read the novel, but from all accounts the story is that of a man who eschews love for power, willing to step on & then over women to get what he professes to want, which is money & social standing. How then does one feel free to label all women as drawn to the appearances of wickedness, an entire gender as weak? Wouldn't it be more fair to make the judgments about the man himself? Or at least use the word "some".

"It's to sell movie tickets," you say. But that's the part that bothers me.

If you want those who see the posters and read the ads to buy a ticket, you entice and seduce, not libel and offend -- or at least you do for an entertaining film, not a activist documentary. And so the point is that the taglines were not just accepting of such beliefs, but titillating -- indeed glorifying -- victimization, complete with damn-near titular advice on how to victimize women by exploiting the general gender gaffe.