“The Women” has been declawed.

Released in 1939, “The Women” is one of the cinema’s grand catfights. The movie revels in backstabbing and gossip with such glee that some have called it sexist. Certainly, it doesn’t shoot the fairer sex from its good side.

Tabloids pit actresses against each other in cellulite contests. “Mean girls” cause havoc in our high schools. Working moms sneer at stay-at-home moms and vice versa.

The original “The Women” reveled in such female spite – it was a feature-length catfight, and proud of it. Though in black and white, you had no trouble imagining the nail color that its characters favor – Jungle Red.

Norma Shearer starred as Mary Haines, a seemingly perfect New York socialite who discovers her husband has been cheating on her.

As if reclaiming her man from Joan Crawford’s vindictive other woman wasn’t enough, Mary’s “friends” – including a maliciously motor-mouthed Rosalind Russell – respond to her crisis with their own little betrayals.

It’s as if they were vultures feeding on carrion.

No such vindictiveness exists in “The Women” of 2008. Whereas Crawford and company went after each other’s throats (and husbands), Meg Ryan, Annette Benning, Debra Messing and Jada Pinkett Smith mostly share giggles and tearful hugs. These women haven’t only been declawed, they’ve been spayed and neutered.

Writer-director Diane English, making her feature debut, has subtracted much. Everything “new,” meanwhile, has been shamelessly borrowed from “Sex and the City.” There is an early joke about a knockoff purse, but this movie is faker than any pleather handbag.

Consider the four central characters, who are supposed to be dear friends even though they each exist in an entirely different social universe.

Ryan’s Mary Haines is Martha Stewart without the control issues – she tends her own garden and cooks her own meals without having to remind herself to smile.

Aside from a lot of money, Mary has nothing in common with her best friend Sylvia (Benning), who runs a women’s fashion magazine with an iron, immaculately gloved fist.

Then there is Messing’s Edie, a flighty mother of four, and Smith’s Alex, a hard-drinking, night-prowling lesbian. The sight of this group at a table together – especially making nice – is downright laughable. I’ve seen college brochures with more naturally paired foursomes than this.

As for the casting of Eva Mendes in Crawford’s home-wrecker part, the move is a revealing instance of contemporary’s Hollywood’s emphasis on appearance over personality.

Mendes is certainly easier to look at, yet her purring sounds like the coquettish come-ons of a too-old-for-her-age schoolgirl.

English even has to alter one of the original film’s best lines – that Crawford had “eyes that run up and down men like a searchlight” – because Mendes couldn’t live up to that sort of billing.

As a remake, “The Women” is a disaster, but on its own terms the movie has its moments. English is best known for her writing on television’s “Murphy Brown,” and there are some lines – especially spoken by Candice Bergen, Murphy Brown herself, as Mary’s acid-tongued mother – that spark.

These are, tellingly, the movie’s feistiest bits – the very few that remind you of the original film’s bite.

Overall, though, “The Women” sanitizes its sex. The movie doesn’t want to bite anyone. It would rather be petted.

Jada Pinkett-Smith and Debra Messing have a unique yin and yang quality onscreen. Their chemistry in The Women, is inescapable. When SheKnows spent the day with the cast, imagine our thrill when Pinkett-Smith and Messing were paired together.

An eloquent ensemble

SheKnows: First of all, such a pleasure to speak to the both you. I wanted to ask the two of you because you have anchored films and your own projects, how the process is different when you’re preparing for a movie when it’s an ensemble piece like The Women? If it even is different.

Debra Messing: I don’t think it is very different. For me, it’s responding to a script. If the script is spectacular as an ensemble, you just want to contribute and create that character. And being an important peg in the wheel to make the whole work.

SheKnows: Regardless of how many characters are in the story…

Jada Pinkett-Smith: Absolutely…

SheKnows: It’s the same mission every time. That’s interesting, I’ve always been curious. For you two, being part of this particular picture, I heard about the rehearsals and how much fun you had bonding. You all stayed at Diane’s house. How much, for you as actresses, did that contribute, to what, you think we see onscreen?

Wonderful women

Debra Messing: Huge.

Jada Pinkett-Smith: Absolutely, that time is a time when we can bond and get to know each other. We establish a foundation of being able to identify with one another as friends and trust each other.

Debra Messing: We spent hours and hours just talking about what it is to be a woman in 2008. What it is to be a mother and a friend. We’re very different women and we’ve had different experiences and different perspectives. It was fascinating. It was also, just in terms of going into shooting, I think it put us all on the same page in terms the world of the movie, totally understanding, what are we making? It was fantastic.

SheKnows: Did it ever feel while you were feeling like a project that was 14 years in the making?

Debra Messing: I don’t know what that would feel like.

SheKnows: There was a feel of a longstanding effort to get it done. It just feels so fresh. It doesn’t seem like that at all.

Jada Pinkett-Smith: Yeah, no, never once.

Debra Messing: I think it’s a testament to Diane’s writing. It’s a modern adaptation. She has made it fresh and relevant. We all knew how long it took. I think put a fire all of us one way or another knowing that this great writer-director, this great script, has been sitting. She’s been trying to get this made and people were saying, ‘It’s women. No.’ ‘It’s women. No.’ Well, now it’s like, OK, we’re here. We’re going to do it. Guess what?

Jada and Debra both laugh.

Diane’s determination

SheKnows: Was it inspiring in a sense to you too that she was so persistent and got it done?

Jada Pinkett-Smith: Oh, absolutely. That’s what it takes when you have a passion for anything. Diane, she was like ‘this movie will get done.’ Because that was her mission, it happened.

Debra Messing: She’s a role model.

Women of many lives

SheKnows: She is something else. The other thing, is when I was speaking to Eva (Mendes), she was saying how many of you were bonding about children and how she felt a little out of that.

Debra Messing: Ahh….

SheKnows: Other than that, she said it was such an experience. As a group, what was it working with her not being a mom when you’re talking about women in 2008. Is it just another spoke in the wheel?

Jada Pinkett-Smith: Yeah, you know. For me, it was refreshing. Eva’s…she kind of has this free kind of attitude…

Debra Messing: Yeah…

Jada Pinkett-Smith: Just her perspective on things, it was refreshing.

Debra Messing: And also, I think it ties into the way Diane approached the film in terms of all of our characters. Each one of us has made a different choice whether we’re going to be a mother or be a wife or be a career person. All of them are great choices.

This summer, two mediocre female-centered movies — “Sex and the City” and “Mamma Mia!” — drew huge crowds because they appealed to an underserved audience.

Will ladies of a certain age also flock to see a pallid remake of “The Women,” which opens Friday via Picturehouse? If they do, it will be further proof that women are so eager to see their concerns depicted onscreen that they will tolerate very clunky filmmaking.

Clare Boothe Luce’s play was a hit on Broadway in 1936, and audiences loved the bitchy 1939 movie version directed by George Cukor and starring Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford. This time, Diane English’s script and direction let the actresses down. (The “Murphy Brown” creator produced with Mick Jagger and his production partner, Victoria Pearman.)

English’s update keeps the basic story — contented wife and mother Mary Haines (Meg Ryan) is shattered when she learns her husband is having an affair with shopgirl Crystal Allen (Eva Mendes) — as well as the all-female cast; there isn’t a single man on camera.

A few of the best lines from the play and old movie are retained along with the name of Crystal’s favorite nail polish, Jungle Red. But English tones down the catfights in order to celebrate sisterhood. The changes particularly hurt the character of Sylvie Fowler, played by Russell in the original and Annette Bening here. The gossipy, high-powered Sylvie has become less devious and more of a true-blue friend. This might please feminists, but it undermines the drama.

The film repeatedly sacrifices dramatic punch for political correctness. Bette Midler has a delicious cameo as a much-divorced Hollywood agent known as the Countess, but her role is badly truncated. In the original, the countess helped Mary take revenge against Crystal, but that final payoff is missing from the new “Women,” which sags when it should snap.

There’s another major problem. It’s impossible to understand how the four main characters — Ryan, Bening, Debra Messing (as a housewife with a brood of kids) and Jada Pinkett Smith (as a haughty lesbian columnist) — ever became friends. They all seem to come from different worlds. Mary and Sylvie are supposed to be college pals, but Ryan looks a decade younger than Bening.

The actresses all have moments when they show what they can do. Ryan is engaging, and Bening does get a chance to deliver a few zingers. Messing is wasted until the final childbirth scene, when she reveals her flair for physical comedy. Candice Bergen, who played Murphy Brown for English, also contributes a stylish cameo. (Trivia buffs might remember that Bergen and Ryan played mother and daughter once before — in Ryan’s first movie, “Rich and Famous.”) As Mary’s crusty housekeeper, Cloris Leachman steals every scene she’s in. Yet they are all poorly served by the flat pacing. These women are ready for action, but the fur never flies.

he Women behind “The Women” hit the Hub last night to premiere the $16 million, made-in-Mass. comedy starring Annette Bening, Meg Ryan, Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett Smith and Eva Mendes.

Sadly, none of the leading ladies led the parade on the red carpet. And we’re just sick about it.

But director/producer/screenwriter Diane English - who tried for 14 years to remake George Cukor’s 1939 hit with an all-women cast – and producer Victoria Pearman, the head of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger’s production company, made the special screening scene at the AMC Boston Common.

“Boston was really wonderful,” English told the Track.

And in a salute to movie-supporting House Speaker Sal DiMasi, the grateful Hollywood gal said, “The tax credit was great and the people were really supportive.”

The main Woman of “The Women,” who introduced the film last night by joking that “no men were harmed in the making of this movie,” told us before the screening that, “Boston was a perfect stand-in for New York City because it had it all.”

Well, well, isn’t that interesting!

Post-applause, the movie mob repaired to The Liberty Hotel where, BTW, the actresses and their fams bedded down while filming in Boston in the summer of 2007.

“The Liberty was great. The cast just loved it,” said the Emmy Award-winning English. “It was a brand-new hotel so everyone felt very pampered. And the cast hung around on the weekends, going to Red Sox [team stats] games and taking Duck Tours.”

Which they couldn’t do in New York!

During the local filming, cameras rolled in the Prudential Center, on Newbury Street, in the Fort Point Channel, at 33 Restaurant in the Back Bay, in a Newton neighborhood and at a private home in Dover.

However, some members of “The Women” ventured to New York to shoot scenes at Saks Fifth Avenue, a pivotal location for the film.

“The Women” opens nationwide Friday.

Want to see a great movie with your girlfriends?

Enter to win two tickets for Picturehouse’s upcoming release of “The Women.” Twelve lucky readers will each win two tickets.

The film, in which a wealthy New Yorker bonds with other society women after leaving her husband, opens Friday. It stars Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes (below), Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett Smith, Bette Midler and Candice Bergen. The tickets can be used any time.

One lucky winner will also receive a gift basket compliments of Nars Cosmetics (narscosmetics.com). Enter to win by sending an e-mail to detroitmovies@hotmail.com. Write “The Women” in the subject line and include your name, address and telephone number. Winners will be notified by Sept. 14. Good luck!

Source: Freep.com