When a movie really absolutely was a marriage film and nothing else, the advertising still skirted the issue. The 1940 movie Penny Serenade, starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, is the story of a marriage gone on the rocks; it’s a marriage movie if there ever was one. Yet Photoplay labeled it “a romantic love story … a Dunne-Grant co-starrer.” The original sales trailer made for a Clark Gable/Myrna Loy/Jean Harlow film about marriage, Wife vs. Secretary (1936), also totally avoided its main subject. “In this gay story of love and laughter,” says the copy, “which one did he choose?”—there’s no mention of the fact that he’d already chosen one of them several years before the story began. Wife vs. Secretary was sold as “an ultra modern story about three people in love.”
Reading about these movies, and noting how they avoided the label “marriage,” I remembered back to when I worked in a small-town movie theater in the early 1950s. We showed up at 5:45 p.m. to pop the corn, vacuum the rugs, lay out the candy bars, set up the ticket machines, and prepare to open the house at seven. My job was always to answer the phone and wrangle the twenty or so chatty calls about that night’s “show” (as we called it). Nobody needed to ask what time the feature started. It had been starting at 7:30 p.m.—in boiling heat, torrential rain, and below-zero cold—for well over twenty-five years. Callers had only two questions: “Who’s in the movie?” and “What kind of movie is it?” They weren’t hard to answer. All I had to do was nail down the star (Betty Grable = songs, legs, and Technicolor) or the genre (western = horses, guns, and cowboy hats) and I was home free. Stars and stories were all I needed to know.
As I thought about those days and those conversations, I realized that there was one word I had never used in explaining or selling a movie: “marriage.” I never described a “show” as a “marriage movie.” What’s more, neither did anyone else. I didn’t remember—then or now—anyone claiming they’d just seen the latest “marriage movie” or “the best marriage movie ever made.”
Why would everyone—in both the movie business and the audience—want to avoid the label “marriage”? Marriage was presumably everybody’s business. People were either born into one, born outside of one, living in one, living outside of one, trying to woo someone into one, divorced from one, trying to get divorced from one, reading about one, dreaming about one, or just observing one from afar. For most people, it would be the central event—the biggest decision—of their lives. Marriage was the poor man’s trip to Paris and the shopgirl’s final goal. At the very least, it was a common touchstone. Unlike a fantasy film or a sci-fi adventure, a marriage story didn’t have to be explained or defined. Unlike a western or a gangster plot, it didn’t have to find a connection to bring a jolt of emotional recognition to an audience. Marriage was out there, free to be used and presented to people who knew what the deal was. Perfect!
But evidently not so perfect. Capra and Briskin and the movie ad men were onto something. Marriage, after all, was the known, not the unknown: the dull dinner party, not the madcap masquerade. It was a set of issues and events that audiences knew all too well offscreen. Unlike the wide-open frontier of the western, offering freedom and adventure, or the lyrical musical, with its fantasy of release through singing and dancing, or the woman’s film, with its placing of a marginalized social figure (the woman) at the center of the universe, or the gangster movie, with its violent excitement and obvious sexual freedom, the marriage film had to reflect what moviegoers already had experienced: marriage, in all its boredom and daily responsibilities.
Although marriage seemed at first glance to be a natural movie story form, I began to realize that it wasn’t that easy to deal with. Indeed, even on the simplest level, a marriage story was a screenwriter’s nightmare. Telling the story of a marriage meant somehow being able to unlock a secret—the vast mystery that explains what She sees in Him and why He should put up with Her. Such a movie had to show what happens when a couple close their doors at the end of the day and the unexplained dynamic between them—partly about sex, which couldn’t even be shown—would unfold. And there were bigger problems. When most marriages go downhill, it’s because the partners, for whatever reason, have begun to turn against each other. Screenplays, therefore, had to make a marriage kill itself—and then find a way to rush in with some trumped‑up emergency, wipe the blood off, and resuscitate it.
Marriage was both a rigid social contract and a state of mind. When turned into a movie, its goals became restrictive and evasive. They were hard to quantify and demonstrate. “Happiness” may seem like a straightforward goal for a story’s characters, but only if they’re moving toward it, not when they’re supposed to be already there. Happiness is no easier for a film to define and pursue than it is for an individual in real life. Unlike a war film, a marriage film couldn’t win. Unlike a woman’s film, it didn’t offer an adventure or experience of freedom that most women couldn’t achieve in real life.
Worst of all, marriage had no story arc. It just went on, day after day, month after month, year after year. Marriage took time, and movies had no time to give to it.3 A good movie was usually a story in a hurry—good pacing being one of its best characteristics. Marriage took years to develop and mature. Novels could be written about marriages, and plays could crystallize their tensions into significant scenes of dialogue; but movies … what were movies to do in ninety minutes?
In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers interviews Joseph Campbell about marriage: “What is marriage? … It’s different from a love affair … When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment.” In the movies, all love affairs supposedly ended in marriage, which by Campbell’s definition meant all movie marriages would begin in disappointment. If we stayed in our seats, we’d be let down. Since marriage was the “You stayed in your seats, you fools” variation of a love story, what could moviemakers do with their fundamental problem: telling an entertaining story about disappointment and failure? It was obvious that to tell such a story—and to give it oomph, get it out of the house, as it were—a problem would have to be created that might threaten, destroy, undermine, question, or somehow subvert the status of wedded bliss. Mates would have to die. Houses would have to burn down. Wars would have to sweep over cozy and secure little worlds. Lovers would have to fall out, and new lovers would emerge. Children would have to disappear, never appear; die or run away. Was any of this going to be entertaining? Perhaps … if set to operatic music, or justified by literary credentials. Or goosed up by costumes and settings, fortified by star power. But the bottom line for the business was apparent: in a movie that told the story of the recognizable workings of a marriage, the problem that motivated the plot might upset audiences, because it might depict the circumstances of their own lives too negatively to be entertaining. A marriage movie would have to sell disappointment to be credible—and would then have to demonstrate how that same disappointment was bogus and restore order.
And there was more than disappointment to think about. American moviegoers liked action—some kind of forward movement that glued them to their seats. They liked the chase, not the capture. They preferred the excitement of solving a problem to the smug satisfaction of a dubious solution. From the very beginning of the silent era, audiences responded happily to physical complications: runaway trains and cars, dancing bears and charging bulls, exploding cookstoves, sinking ships, and marauding crooks. In a slapstick comedy, everybody had to go on the run to resolve little daily problems. They would run and run and run—and then fall into the water, or off a cliff, or out of a car, or just into the bushes, after which the fun was over. The End. This “run for fun” was not unlike a romantic quest for a life partner, in which case the ending could be called the happily-ever-after tradition. After some charming romantic shenanigans, the couple could fall not off a cliff, but into love—and that “fall” would clearly imply the next step: marriage. But nobody needed to see the marria
ge. After the fall, the fun was over. Time to go home.
The romantic-chase movie, whether comedy or drama, reached fulfillment with the capture of the desired love. It was boy meets girl, boy gets girl. Finis. Courtship—defined as a forward-moving romantic romp—provided endless variations and was about winning, not losing, and most of all about finishing and resolving. This became the traditional bargain Hollywood made with audiences, and it was an arrangement most audiences were happy to accept. And why not? Did anyone want to imagine that Ilsa and Victor Laszlo’s plane would crash? That they would divorce? That Captain Renault would step on a land mine and Rick would go back to America and open a hot-dog stand in Jersey? Of course not. Everyone wanted to leave them all in a glamorous fog on the Casablanca tarmac, hat brims pulled down low, morals ramped up high, no future necessary.4
It was quite another thing to keep the fun going into the other half of the equation—the married part. It was a bigger challenge to keep the magic alive after the couple said “I do,” to keep the story from turning into a very bitter and disillusioned “I don’t.” A movie about marriage—not a movie about the quest for love that could lead to marriage—was automatically in opposition to the terms of the romantic-moviegoing bargain.
I began to understand why “marriage” was not a term that was used to lure audiences into theaters. A tale about marriage was a story form in which filmmakers could not easily dictate an escapist path. It was the dangerous business intersection where moviemakers and the moviegoing public faced off as equals. A poet wrote that to an ordinary housewife, the darkness of the movie theater was “the fur she could afford”—but what if the story was about the rabbity old thing she brought in with her? Any housewife might accept that she wasn’t ever going to get the jewelry, the yacht, or the champagne seduction. She’d know it was too late to “meet cute” with Jimmy Stewart, thrill to a moonlight coupling with Clark Gable, or undergo a lively wedding process with Cary Grant. She understood she’d never dance with Fred Astaire, her feathers floating slowly to the floor around his feet. She was willing to buy those dreams anyway, because accepting the con was worth it. But what if a movie tried to convince her that a perfect world of happily-ever-after was true? It was hard to know what the customer wanted when you were selling her a product she had already bought.
For audiences, marriage was like Mom and apple pie, a signpost to their own reality in the way that churches, stores, streets, fur coats, fireplaces, and roving cattle could be. Such things located audiences in time and space. Marriage said, “Something you know is here, something you’ve experienced.” For anything believably exciting to happen, it was best used only as an end goal and kept offscreen; otherwise, the leading man and woman were locked into their positions, already defined in their sex lives, their romantic lives, and their relationships. Popular movies wanted to lead men and women to one another—also to salvation, Europe, outer space, the Wild West, parts unknown, and possibly to hell and back, but really to one another. Such quests suggest to an audience that there is more for them in life—another, better quest if they are already married, or something fabulous if they’re not. More: that’s what movies always offered the public. It could be more in terms of adventure, romance, heartbreak, money, satisfaction, wardrobe, whatever—but something more. It was that something more that American movie audiences went to the movies to get. And because of that something more, the business of moviemaking found it a better idea to sell love rather than marriage and never to call the marriage movies they made what they actually were.
The sense of marriage as a problem did, though, become a much-discussed issue inside many movies. All through film history, then and now, there’s a constant yammering about marriage, and not much of it is positive. A book could be constructed out of nothing but quotes about marriage that were uttered in movies. “Marriage,” says Robert Benchley in Janie Gets Married (1946), “is being locked in a boxcar with a mad horse.” In Living on Velvet (1935), Kay Francis realizes she wants a solid, simple home life (in her furs and jewels) but has married a footloose airplane pilot. “Same old story,” she muses: “young romantic girl marries a man in order to reform him.” Rosalind Russell in Craig’s Wife (1936) thinks that’s a good plan: “No man’s born ready for marriage. He has to be trained.” In Latin Lovers (1953), Ricardo Montalban says that if he tells his fiancée everything, “once we’re married, there’ll be no surprises.” His uncle (Louis Calhern) tells him, “Believe me, once you are married, there never are.” In Boom Town (1940), Claudette Colbert wears an apron in a cheap shack in a Latin American oil field and muses about her married life: “Happiness doesn’t come easy. I’ve learned that.” Playing Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel, in The Gorgeous Hussy (1936), Beulah Bondi thoughtfully puffs on her corncob pipe and informs Joan Crawford, “Marriage ain’t a party dress. You gotta wear it mornin’, noon, and night.” When handsome architect Robert Young starts spending all day with his chic client Mary Astor in Claudia and David (1946), he snaps at his jealous young wife, “Do you think marriage means the end of all other human contact?” Danny Thomas begs his wife (Doris Day) in I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951), “Please, please let me make one decision … a man’s gotta be a man in his own house … Stop running my life!” Even unmarried characters yak about it. Road to Singapore (1940) opens with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby all set to begin the first of their seven successful road trips. They’re on a ship’s deck, watching a seaman’s wife give him a quick embrace, grab his pay envelope, and tuck it safely into her blouse. “There you are, Josh,” says Hope. “That’s married life for you.” Crosby replies, “You know, if the world was run right, only women would get married.”5 This opening dialogue was a surefire joke, designed to grab the audience and make it love the two carefree, rootless heroes. As they watch a sailor wheel a baby carriage, surrounded by his nagging wife and three other kids, Crosby warns Hope, “Let that be a lesson to you.”6 Hope and Crosby give the male view; and a radiantly Technicolored Rita Hayworth sings the female variation to not one, but two, leading men (Larry Parks, Marc Platt) in Down to Earth (1947): “I want to marry the two of you … I will have a man for lovin’/And a man to fix the oven too/One with endurance/the other with plenty of life insurance.” Marriage, as Hollywood understood it, was clearly a problem, as articulated by the venerable Judge Hardy in Judge Hardy and Son (1939). (The Hardy series was famous for its “man-to-man” talks between father and son, the judge portrayed by Lewis Stone with Mickey Rooney as his youngest, Andy.) Calling marriage “the biggest responsibility a man can undertake,” the judge offers Andy his definitive observations: “In all the relationships between a man and a woman, both before and after marriage, it’s one series of adjustments after another with each other in which each one must adjust their whims to the other’s liking and help each other realize what will prevent friction.” Andy’s response? “Dad, you don’t make marriage sound like any picnic.”7 Playing the dully married title character in H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), Robert Young summed it all up: “When you come right down to it, why does anyone marry anyone?” The answer comes from one of a group of convicts in You and Me (1938): “Some chump ate an apple once and the rest of us chumps have been gettin’ cramps from it ever since … regular.”8 And as for the romantic notion that the perfect mate awaits out there somewhere in the ozone? When Katy Jurado (in 1956’s Trapeze) tells Burt Lancaster, “Someday you’ll find the right woman and get married,” he wastes no time in snapping back, “Nobody finds the right woman.” The story of marriage was discussed in popular art forms as a failed enterprise, with everyone seemingly in agreement on the issue. The popular song “Makin’ Whoopee,” written in 1928, had lyrics that laid out a plot progression for the average marriage. At first “he’s” a happy groom, and “she’s” another bride; they’re off on a sunny honeymoon and then ensconced in “a little love nest.” Soon enough, she’s “neglected” and he’s “suspected.” There’s no money, and in the divorce court he finds out he’ll owe more
alimony than he earns. He thinks it’ll be cheaper to keep her, and that’s what he gets for “makin’ whoopee.” It’s the story of a marriage set to music, infused with comedy, but all too accurate in its sense of doom, all too familiar in its story. Who would want to pay money to see it acted out in all its discouraging detail?
The challenge to movies was to find a way to link the desire for marriage—or the desire to escape marriage—directly to the audience in a way the audience wanted to experience it. As a business, Hollywood concerned itself with what it termed “audience values.” When questioned about the über-stardom generated by her dramatic and unusual beauty, Joan Crawford once famously commented that if audiences wanted to see the girl next door, they’d go next door and not out to the movies to spend their hard-earned money. A lot of things might be said about Crawford (and they have been), but no one ever suggested she didn’t understand what the Hollywood game was all about. For her, the studio system and its business practices were a college education, and she was an A-plus student. She knew movies needed someone like her—someone who wasn’t living down the street, someone to lure them into the theater. Crawford knew that no matter how much money she made or how much jewelry she bought, she was still a highly paid shill created to help fulfill what Hollywood euphemistically called “audience values.” In his book Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince, Mark A. Vieira quotes the famous MGM producer as calling “audience values” the “most important element in a motion picture script.” Admitting that the concept was difficult to define, Thalberg added that without these elusive qualities “no picture has audience appeal or greatness. I might say that almost without exception, every great picture has audience values.” “Fulfilling the audience’s values” sounded noble, but it was only camouflage for what they really meant: “picking the public’s pockets.”
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