7 - Wallace Fox and America’s “Career Girls”

Summary

Between 1930 and 1940, 11 to 13 million American women aged sixteen and older were pushed into the workforce by the Great Depression. Figures in the 1940 U.S. census show that 13 million, the high end of the estimate, amounted to 27 percent of all women in the country. After the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941, millions more women went to work. By the time the war neared its finish during 1944–1945, 35 to 36 percent of all American women—19.2 million people—were employed in the civilian sector. Another 350,000 women served in the U.S. armed forces, at home and abroad. The greater proportion of these civilian and military jobs were in manufacturing, service, or support rather than in positions oriented to careers. And yet as these currents of short-term or dead-end new employment manifested themselves, Hollywood, devoted to a fantasist’s notion of glamour and escape from the everyday, celebrated the plucky “career girl”—the unmarried young woman who aspires to not just a paycheck but fulfillment. If she served food or labored in a steno pool, the work was an interlude and not a destination. For the liveliest of Hollywood’s fictional career girls, the goal was stardom—a rarefied status assumed by Hollywood to affirm the woman’s value via the reductive quality of fame, and useful also as a signpost to romantic love.

During the 1930–1940 period mentioned above, thirteen features and ten shorts directed by B-movie workhorse Wallace Fox saw release across America. Engaged during that time mainly by Poverty Row stalwarts PRC and Monogram, Fox was in a professional rhythm that placed him at the center of Hollywood’s B-movie segment.

ASSEMBLING A PRODUCT

Formed as Producers Distributing Company by Ben Judell (a film-exchange manager) in 1939, and built on the physical plant of the failed Grand National Pictures, PRC endured a wobbly first year before dumping Judell, handing production responsibilities to Sigmund Neufeld, and changing its name to Producers Releasing Corporation. Mid-war, as women’s employment rolls swelled, the tiny studio assigned Wallace Fox three light film projects designed to perpetuate the “career girl” convention. The Girl from Monterrey (1943) concerns a vivacious Mexican warbler who develops her nightclub career while her brother and boyfriend pursue careers as boxers.