Everything about Pictures and Movies

   
Even if she had never heard of the novel by her former assistant, Anna Wintour would have known that the odds were against a flattering portrayal of a fashion-magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada. While the empress of Vogue remains cool and collected after seeing Meryl Streep (right) portray her as a boss-lady with liquid nitrogen in her veins, the blood of other women may boil on hearing Streep’s character confess to the standard film punishment for successful females - a wretched love life.

Movies have always shown women magazine editors as inhabiting the narrow spectrum between daffy and dykey. Kay Thompson, super-chic but sexless in Funny Face (1957) was practically certifiable, caroling, “Red is dead, blue is through, green’s obscene, and brown’s taboo! And there is not the slightest excuse for plum or puce! Or chartreuse!”
 
Telling the world what to wear was such a strain on Ginger Rogers, the eponymous, pinstripe-clad Lady in the Dark (1944), that she had to see a psychoanalyst and learn that she was thwarting her natural urge to be dominated. Bette Davis, in June Bride (1948), drops her hysteria when she learns doglike submissiveness to Robert Montgomery. 13 Going on 30 (2004) showed that grown-up Jennifer Garner was not just more feminine but more human when she acted like a silly, naive little girl.

Devil, however, stands apart from this tradition of ridicule - while the other films were written by men, it is based on a book by a woman. Progress, right?