The Women

Perhaps The Women was not meant to translate to modern times. After all it's based on a 1930s play by Clare Boothe Luce where the lead character, a woman whose husband cheated on her, reunites at the end with her sorrowful hubby. A movie was made in 1939 with an all femme cast of the biggest stars of the day, directed by George Cukor who had the right touch even though it's not his best film. Cukor's last film was 1981's Rich and Famous starring Candice Bergen with Meg Ryan appearing as the daughter in her first film role.
Flash forward to the present day and now Ryan stars and Bergen makes a brief cameo as her mom. This version of The Women has been in development so long that the end credits mention New Line Cinema, now defunct, who was at one time going to make the film with Julia Roberts. The current version was helmed by Murphy Brown writer Diane English. If you want to compare the two versions, TCM is running the original next Monday. Hollywood has already slyly observed that women will turn out in force to make genre specific films a success: witness the grosses on The Devil Wears Prada, Mama Mia or Sex and The CIty. The good news is that The Women has so much more wit and oomph than Sex and The City there's not even any comparison. SATC was not particularly written well whereas The Women provides non stop laughs and has a distinct directorial style. That may not matter to its core audience - I heard one female audience member say at the end of The Women that it was Sex and The City without men.
When a group of affluent women get wind that one of the group has been cheated on they all band together for support. Annette Bening has the best grasp on the fraility of their situation. She betrays another friend thinking it will save her job. The look on her face as she talks up her superior on the phone shows the obvious pain of a person selling their soul. In the end a resolution brings everybody closer together even while putting on a kick-ass fashion show. In the original film, a black and white affair, the fashion sequence was in color. By contrast in The Women the fashion show starts out with black and white dresses before it explodes with color.