Ruth Hussey, Virginia Weidler, Butterfly McQueen, Theresa Harris, and Hedda Hopper also appear in smaller roles.

Set in the glamorous Manhattan apartments of high society evoked by Cedric Gibbons, and in Reno, Nevada, where they obtain their divorces, it presents an acidic commentary on the pampered lives and power struggles of various rich, bored wives and other women they come into contact with.

In 2007, The Women was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

On the train to Reno, Mary meets three women with the same destination and purpose: the dramatic, extravagant Countess de Lave; Miriam Aarons, a tough-cookie chorus girl; and, to her surprise, her shy young friend Peggy Day, who has been pushed into divorce by Sylvia.

Two years later, Crystal, now Mrs. Haines, is taking a bubble bath and talking on the phone to her lover, Buck Winston, now a radio star and married to the Countess.

Crystal resigns herself to the fact that she will be heading back to the perfume counter, adding: "And by the way, there's a name for you ladies, but it isn't used in high society—outside of a kennel."

In January 1937, producers Harry M. Goetz and Max Gordon bought the film rights to the play for $125,000 and planned on turning it into a Claudette Colbert vehicle, with Gregory LaCava as the director.

[9] The same desert shot had been used appropriately three years before, in After the Thin Man, as Nick and Nora Charles near the end of their two-day trip to California.

When interviewed by TCM host Robert Osborne, director George Cukor stated that he did not like the sequence and that he wanted to remove it from the film.

"[10] In 2018, British critic Peter Bradshaw describes the “remarkable” technicolor fashion show as “a mesmeric, wordless interlude that appears to allude to the nature of these women’s lives.

It starts with jolly outdoor scenes, almost pastoral, but then descends into moody nightclub darkness, a world of metropolitan chic and brooding sensuality.

The New York Times critic Frank Nugent praised the film with characteristic wit:"...(G)oing and coming to syrupy movies, we lose our sense of balance...Miss Boothe...has dipped her pen in venom.

And, instead of gasping and clutching at their throats, the women—bless 'em—have downed it without blinking, have gone on a glorious cat-clawing rampage and have turned in one of the merriest pictures of the season...(Boothe's) sociological investigation of the scalpel-tongued Park Avenue set...is a ghoulish and disillusioning business, and the drama critics, when first they saw the play, turned away in chivalrous horror...Possibly some of that venom has been lost in the screen translation...The omissions are not terribly important, and some of the new sequences are so good Miss Boothe might have thought of them herself.

...The most heartening part of it all, though, aside from the pleasure we derive from hearing witty lines crackle on the screen, is the way Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard and the others have leaped at the chance to be vixens.

"[13]Leonard Maltin gave the film 3 1/2 out of 4 stars: "All-star (and all-female) cast shines in this hilarious adaptation of Clare Boothe play about divorce, cattiness, and competition in circle of "friends.''

Crawford has one of her best roles..."[14] In 2018, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave five out of five stars to "this extraordinary, almost Daliesque comedy...the absence of men has its own kind of ethical implication.

Around this drama of duplicity and infidelity, Cukor creates a brilliant spectacle, halted by Shearer's moments of stunningly serious emotional devastation.

The site's critics consensus reads, "A feast of sharp dialogue delivered by an expertly assembled cast, The Women makes the transition from stage to screen without losing a step.

On his November 5, 1939, radio broadcast, Jack Benny presented a sketch parody of The Women with all the male cast members in female roles and Mary Livingstone as the announcer.

[16] The Women was remade as a 1956 musical comedy titled The Opposite Sex, starring June Allyson, Joan Collins, and Ann Miller.

Although nothing ever came of this, it would have consisted of the following ensemble: Jeffrey Hunter (Martin Heal), Earl Holliman (Christopher Allen), Tab Hunter (Simon Fowler), Lew Ayres (Count Vancott), Robert Wagner (Mitchell Aarons), James Garner (Peter Day), Jerry Mathers (Little Martin), James Stewart (Mr.

Heal), Ronald Reagan (Larry), Troy Donahue (Norman Blake), and Stuart Whitman (Oliver, the bartender who spills the beans about the illicit affair).