There are no men in The Women, which is our first clue that screwball comedy is bowing out along with the decade that produced it. Adapted by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin from a 1936 stage play by Clare Boothe, it hints that something even more cynical than screwball, a little more perverse, something indeed worthy of Billy Wilder, is making an entrance. Here the wits of the screwball heroine are honed sharper than ever but shaved of the nuances and mystery. This is unadulterated savagery, in one of the most wittily literate scripts this side of Preston Sturges, taking giant gibes at the leisure class but leaving its middle-aged socialites so vulnerable they turn on one another. For mystery we substitute holy terror.