THE LADIES WHO LUNGE

By RICHARD CORLISS

Bette Midler, the designated frump in The First Wives Club, stares at Goldie Hawn's body with mixed feelings: envy for its sleekness and disdain for the work needed to maintain it. All those hours logged on the Stairmaster: "You climb and you climb, and you don't get anywhere." Why, Midler might be referring to women movie stars and women's pictures. In Hollywood it's one step up, two steps back, and sometimes you fall off.

To stand in line outside a Santa Monica multiplex on a Monday afternoon waiting to see The First Wives Club is to see women climbing the movie Stairmaster and getting someplace. The queue is long and homogeneous. Nearly everyone is female; these are the ladies who lunch taking a movie aperitif. Inside, the audience laughs along with the gags about women's fear of aging ("If I give you one more face-lift," Dr. Rob Reiner warns Hawn, "you're gonna be able to blink your lips") that make the movie a more genteel version of the misogynistic She-Devil and Death Becomes Her. And the audience applauds when Midler, Hawn and Diane Keaton take comic revenge on their duplicitous mates. In movie theaters around the country, similar crowds registered similar approval for the movie--enough to set Hollywood to scratching its (male) head and to give women moviegoers cause to hope for more films like it.

Sixty years ago, no one needed hope; the screens teemed with movies about women. Strong women, saintly or desperate ones, but always smart. Greta Garbo drove men to their doom; Barbara Stanwyck did the same and went along for the ride. Carole Lombard traded quips and punches with her co-stars. Rosalind Russell ran giant corporations from her perch as executive secretary to some very soft plutocrats. Katharine Hepburn, a cool goddess, came to earth to cuddle with Spencer Tracy. Bette Davis strutted her sensationally neurotic hauteur. Joan Crawford played the unapologetic gold digger, which is how she leveled half a dozen other star actresses in The Women. These actresses played characters who didn't need to take revenge. They had sexual equality, emotional superiority.

Yet Hollywood was also attentive, as The First Wives Club is, to a brutal supposition in popular psychology: men tend to homicide, women to suicide. In the traditional view, this is the only heroic violence suitable for a lady--to die with dignity. In the 1932 Three on a Match, society wife Ann Dvorak leaves her loving husband for a small-time gambler, neglects her child and, realizing the error of her ways, kills herself. Best friend Joan Blondell marries the husband, and Bette Davis moves in as nanny. The 1937 Stage Door has an array of dazzlers (including Hepburn and Ginger Rogers) as young actresses angling for Broadway stardom. They fight over powerful men, choice roles and new stockings. And amid the lightning comedy, the most sensitive creature (Andrea Leeds), having lost a plum part, commits suicide.

In the '40s, with men off at war and women taking their place in the factories, Hollywood turned paranoid. Film noir made the black widow an embodiment of evil as seductive as she was destructive. What man wouldn't want to go to hell with Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice? What man wouldn't prefer hell to two days in a motel room with the spectacularly shrewish Ann Savage in Detour?

When film surrendered its mass-medium primacy to television in the '50s, it bequeathed to TV most of the female audience. For the next 40 years the small screen would be a comfortable home for women stars, from Lucy to Roseanne. Those actresses who stayed in films found themselves playing caricatures. Davis devolved into a harpy, sharing the horrific What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with Joan Crawford and a rat. Younger actresses took the bimbo route. Both groups were deprived of the intelligence of the '30s, the malefic grandeur of the '40s. Movies were now a man's world. If women wanted to survive as more than sluts or nutty aunts, they had to be as burly and aggressive as men.

The '90s has given us the butch heroine--at once babe, district attorney and driving-men-crazy. She can be a victim, in, say, Thelma & Louise, an outlaw fantasy in which the women's suicide is seen as a magnificent screw-you gesture. Or she can be a victor, in Waiting to Exhale, where most of the guys are so lame and preening that there's little triumph in outsmarting them. The set piece in both films was blowing up an automobile: sexual revenge as car-nage. But that was not nearly so explosive as the smoulder of Sharon Stone's sexual menace in Basic Instinct. In elevating or degrading the '40s femme fatale to pansexual sociopath status, Stone showed that a gorgeous woman's predatory stare can be as piercing as an ice pick.

Hollywood wants women to fit these stereotypes (even feminist stereotypes), if only to prove the rules of its game: that films must be tailored to the appetites of young men; that women will go to male-oriented movies but men can't be dragged to women's pictures; that an actress's bloom as a box-office icon (Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster) can soon fade, while the appeal of male stars (Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman) stays solid for decades.

This year's stats support that argument. Of the nine 1996 films that earned $100 million or more at the domestic box office, the No. 1 hit, Independence Day, is about three guys saving the world. Six other films are vehicles for men (Robin Williams, Tom Cruise, Connery, Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Travolta) who've been stars for at least a decade. That leaves two films whose top-billed actors are women. But even Helen Hunt wouldn't say she's the main reason for Twister's success. And Sandra Bullock, who has her name above the title in A Time to Kill, plays in support of hunk du jour Matthew McConaughey. It's a lousy year for movie women when the meatiest femme role--the comedy, the pathos, the earrings!--is Nathan Lane's in The Birdcage.

But to read only the current grosses is to see Hollywood with blinkers. Last year there were a handful of strong female roles in popular films, not just Waiting to Exhale but less reductive fare: Pocahontas, Dangerous Minds, While You Were Sleeping, The Bridges of Madison County, Waiting to Exhale, Clueless, The Net, Sense and Sensibility. First Wives is in the generous spirit of those films. It takes a subject whose painfulness might not automatically attract middle-aged females ("Now playing at a theater near you: your husband left you for a younger woman!") and cannily repackages it as cathartic comedy.

There are more mundane reasons First Wives is a hit. It has three stars playing to their strengths: Midler the canny yenta, Keaton mining lodes of pruney anguish, Hawn a glorious hoot encased in her collagenized lips and sprawling ego. And before the film gets haggard in Act III, it's pretty darn funny, thanks to director Hugh Wilson (who wove a camaraderie of losers in his TV show WKRP in Cincinnati), screenwriter Robert Harling (Steel Magnolias) and rewriter Paul Rudnick (The Addams Family).

First Wives is only a movie, and not nearly a perfect one. And its makers are, darn it, men. But it restores a little balance to phallocentric Hollywood. It says women can thrive in the good old '30s way: by being smart, sexy, human. Best of all, it doesn't stand alone, a defiant Thelma without her Louise; instead, it mingles with its sister films in a proud, growing community. If women can create, star in and see more movies like this one, that will be their sweetest revenge.