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Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland) -The Heiress. Did you know that the more conservative and repressed a society gets, the nastier its pornography becomes? It’s a historical pattern. If you believe me, then it should come as no surprise to you that the absolute sickest porn in history was created during the Victorian era, roughly defined as the late 19th century, when it was actually really important that women blush all the time, balance books on their head, and other things like that. And that nobody like sex, ever. I'm not making this up.

(Another fun fact-Did you know that the largest repository of porn in the world is the Vatican library? You can tell someone did a paper on this. I’m seriously not making this up)

To distill a complex era into a convenient generalization, the Victorian era is directly responsible for every sexual problem you’ve ever had. You ever feel like you weren’t getting the proper education on contraceptives? Ever feel like every child’s sexual education shouldn’t come from Maxim magazine? Ever wonder, you know, where certain things are? All of these issues and more are the direct result of a bunch of prudish people in Britain making arbitrary rules that everybody suddenly had to follow, and we, being the young nation that we were at the time, were still eager to impress our mother country. So we went along with it, even while chanting, “1776, muthas” any time the feeling struck us. I still do that.

Which brings us to The Heiress, which is based on a really boring novel by boring old Henry James about Catherine Sloper, a girl whose father disapproves of her new young boyfriend. Over the course of the movie, both men belittle, demean, and ridicule her, and she, being the pristine model of Victorian virginity, is largely helpless to defend herself, alone in a world run by men, both of whom have financial and social matters (a 'what would the neighbors think' kind of thing) foremost in their mind. The film is set in New York, so you can see how much this garbage spread to our shores.

And then she takes revenge on both of them. Cold, nasty badass revenge. I don’t want to give anything away for those of you who might see this (please don’t judge this by Washington Square if it any point you were unfortunate enough to read that book), but it’s exceptionally well-done. When told that she’s being cruel to the young man trying to fight his way back into her life, she responds, “yes, I learned from masters.” Just see if you don’t get chills.

As an evisceration of the hypocrisy of the Victorian period, it is perhaps exceeded only by Alan Moore’s brilliant From Hell (by far his best book, better than Watchmen). And if this sounds like a man-hating entry, just remember that the Victorian era was named for the queen who presided over it, and who was responsible for a damned lot of the problems that we’re facing now. Just saying.