The Women

After Sylvia bites Miriam on the leg, Miriam's line, "Yeah, gotta be careful of hydrophobia!" is her veiled way of calling Sylvia a bitch (hydrophobia is a synonym for rabies, referring to a late stage of the disease, in which the victim has difficulty swallowing, even liquids, and simultaneously becomes very thirsty, while panicking at the idea of trying to drink water). Also, near the end a second allusion to the word "bitch" is used when Crystal says, "There's a name for you ladies, but it isn't used in high society . . . outside a kennel."

When Mary is on the phone with Stephen during the lunch party, she puts a cigarette in her mouth and strikes a match, lighting it, the cigarette doesn't light, and she holds the unlit thing through the rest of the conversation. When they cut to long shot of her hanging up the phone, the cigarette is smoking, and she stabs it out in an ashtray.

In the opening credits, before the photo images of the actresses are shown, their characters are revealed by images of various animals.

At the start of the Technicolor Adrian fashion show, the video and TV versions have traditionally shown a Technicolor stage in the middle of the screen surrounded by pure white (this always struck me as odd but I never thought too much about it). The original 1939 version of the scene shows the Technicolor stage surrounded by the rest of the room IN BLACK AND WHITE, using a stenciling process developed for (but ultimately unused in) The Wizard of Oz (1939). Presumably, because the reel starts right BEFORE the transition, it was either too much trouble and expense to process the small bit of stray black and white footage for television (it would have to have been printed separately onto each release print in 1939)or, more likely, the footage has been lost. The new video and cable versions show The Women (1939) in a reconstruction of the original version, with the Technicolor stage printed over a black and white still from later in the film. The image, as now presented, is much less jarring than the original video release. The fashion show was also shot in black and white, with the models interacting with the stars as they move throughout the boutique. After principal photography ended, MGM decided to re-shoot the fashion show in Technicolor (this color footage was not shot by George Cukor)and the models no longer interact with Norma Shearer, 'Rosalind Russell', etc. The original black and white footage, saved in the MGM vault, can now be seen as a special feature on the Warner DVD. Older television prints often showed the fashion show in black and white, but it was not this alternate footage, just the color sequence printed without its tints.

Featured in From the Ends of the Earth (1939)