Women Screenwriters in 1920s Hollywood: Slang, Vernacular and the Coming of Sound Event

In 1929 Mary Borden published The Forbidden Zone, a book of poems and short stories drawn from her experiences as a volunteer nurse with the French Army. The title referred to ‘the strip of land immediately behind the zone of fire’ where she worked.

In 1930 Rebecca West wrote four monthly instalments for Cosmopolitan about her experiences as a nurse on the Western front under the title "War Nurse: An American Woman on the Western Front.” MGM produced it as War Nurse, released in November of 1930.

The following year another war nurse film, The Mad Parade, was released. Both were scenarios based on the experiences of frontline nurses written by women.

This paper will focus on writers Becky Gardiner on War Nurse and Gertrude Orr and Doris Malloy on The Mad Parade. These scriptwriters incorporated the vernacular associated with the flapper and the ‘wise-cracking dame’ to produce emotional restraint, and to provide the ‘realism’ required in depicting war experiences.

However, this did not play well with many contemporary male critics, who took exception to the banter of women, declaring that it detracted from the sanctity of the memory of the war.

These critics’ exclusion of women’s war experiences coincided with broader shifts in the language of the war’s memory by 1930 and point to a recuperation in this period of women scriptwriters’ attempts to redress the gender imbalance of the war film.

In effect these films demonstrate, in their production and reception, a gendering of the ‘forbidden zone’ of frontline experiences.

Speaker Bio

Dr Michael Hammond is Emeritus Fellow in Film at the University of Southampton. He is the author of The Big Show: British Cinema Culture and The Great War (Exeter University Press 2006).

His latest book is The Great War In Hollywood Memory 1919-1939 (SUNY Press, 2018), an in-depth study of the aesthetic practices of the Hollywood studios in the inter-war period.

He is co-editor with Prof. Michael Williams of Silent British Cinema and the Great War (Palgrave/MacMillan 2013). His latest edited collection is The Cambridge Companion to The Great War and British Theatre (Cambridge University Press 2023) co-edited with Prof. Helen Brooks.