In 1967, Two for the Road has no need to protect the sanctity of marriage. It does not shy away from asking out loud serious questions like “Do you want a divorce?” It is full of frank unhappiness. “You don’t give me everything I want … you give me everything you want to give me.” In the early time slots, Finney constantly maintains “I’ve no intention of getting married.” Married people, he says, fight about money and sex, and “that’s marriage for you.” After they wed, Hepburn feels forced to take care of their child by herself, and Finney reminds her, “You were the one who wanted a child.” He says things went wrong between them “when the sex stopped being fun and became official. Sex isn’t personal anymore.” Although Hepburn has an affair and complains constantly, she is more mature than Finney. At one point, she tells him that Caroline’s on the phone. “Caroline who?” he asks, forgetting it’s his own daughter. Finney thinks he’s clever—he does Bogart imitations—but he’s selfish, career-obsessed, and unfaithful. (There’s an implication that among his numerous affairs might be one with Dauphin’s wife, but a specific one with a blonde he casually picks up on the road is depicted. As the audience watches this flirtation and its ultimate outcome, the bedroom, he’s heard in voiceover in a loving and duplicitous letter he writes to Hepburn, marking him as a real cad.)
Unlike Made for Each Other, Two for the Road has no simple resolution. The film ends with a sequence in which, at the swinging party at Dauphin’s house, one of the guests tells another couple to look at Hepburn and Finney: “If you can be as happy as those two over there … and have a marriage like theirs … ” The audience is asked to realize that a happy marriage is not only elusive but probably also an illusion. Back in the car, their natural habitat, Hepburn and Finney discuss their ongoing topic: their marriage. “What would you do if we got a divorce?” “Cry.” They go over their tired old issues, and he says he just can’t accept “that we’re a fixture … that we’re married.” She tells him to stop thinking, and kisses him. “I love happy endings,” she says, as they prepare to make love. The next day, at the end of the movie, they’re seen driving up to a border check. “You have to admit it,” she tells him, “we’ve changed.” Except they haven’t: he can’t find his passport; she has it. “Bitch!” he says to her. “Bastard!” she responds.
Two for the Road is the story of a marriage in a world in which marriage has grown unnecessary, featuring a couple adrift internationally in a world of easy money and sex. It’s too late for a marriage movie to tell a straightforward story in which everything can be changed by a plot event such as the death of a child. The cinematic format of Two for the Road, using editing across varying time frames, strengthens the fundamental idea of their marriage. A marriage story—for a 1967 audience—can no longer be simple and, thus, linear. Hepburn and Finney do love each other, but all their initial vows and promises have been broken. The old romantic notions about marriage are now unsophisticated. Male and female roles have changed. But for an audience’s sake, the couple will soldier on. There’s no resolution for this couple, only more confusion and uncertainty, and probably more affairs … and, ultimately, another new car, another road to drive, another journey across time. These two will always be on the road. And yet the movie shows, if constructed chronologically, a story of love and marital happiness established, destroyed, and, if not fully reassembled, at least maintained. The purposeful question—“What happened to us?”—has been asked.
The movie ends ambiguously, but only because it is the more modern way for a movie on this topic to conclude—but is it really any more ambiguous for a viewer than Made for Each Other? An audience of 1939 was leaving the theater without a real-life easy solution such as the one the screenplay provided for Lombard and Stewart. The constant marital discussions that Hepburn and Finney indulge in, questioning everything, seem honest, but they, too, are cover-ups, not unlike the new job for Jimmy Stewart. Both films are pure marriage movies, and both show how filmmakers made such stories both discouraging and uplifting, so that viewers could recognize in them what they knew to be true about marriage.13
The story of Hepburn and Finney’s marriage is not one in which they are preparing to divorce and are looking back on the “What happened?” It’s one thing to tell a story about a marriage by moving it forward through time, showing characters encountering difficulties and either solving them or becoming lost in them, or even to mix up time for ironic juxtapositions; it’s quite another to tell a marriage tale by beginning with a scene in which a couple have definitely already decided to divorce and then showing the audience why this decision was made by turning backward in time. The divorce format (the “I don’t” variation) sets up higher stakes, because the story begins at a point of unresolved crisis. The focus in the first method is positive, moving a story forward through happiness and across trouble toward a solution. In the second format, the story presents divorce as the solution already chosen and, thus, a darker situation. What the movie then explains is the negativity. On the positive side, a divorce film gives the audience a temporary release, an opportunity to fix blame, and the sense that serious marital troubles are common, but even when a film refutes the divorce at the end, it still has to visualize serious problems to get where it’s going. Audiences begin by viewing the relationship as a failure, becoming alert to little problems and differences that appear onscreen, less inclined to believe the love scenes or the promises made. Even if the divorcing couple reconcile, the viewing experience is shaped by negative forces. Audiences receive two different messages, and the successful pattern of “affirm, question, reaffirm, and resolve” is challenged. It is reconstituted as “question, affirm (in past tense), resolve, reaffirm.” It’s a difficult form to make work despite its initial honesty. It works against itself.
American movies never actually endorsed divorce. The June 13, 1934, Production Code guidelines did not mention the word, but did dictate (under the category of “Sex”): “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld.” This gave movies quite a bit of wiggle room. It was the tradition for canny motion-picture makers to shape marriage as sad, doomed, and threatened from many directions, but able to be brought back to life at the end to, evidently, respect the “sanctity” of the institution.
Despite the Production Code, Hollywood movies didn’t avoid divorce, or worry about audiences being offended by it. When, for complicated plot reasons, Fred Astaire is forced to marry Ginger Rogers in Shall We Dance? (1937) and needs to extricate himself from the union as quickly as possible, he asks a justice of the peace, “What are the grounds for divorce?” The reply is terse: “Marriage.” And, as far as the movies go, that’s pretty much it. To obtain the desired goal of divorce, first one marries. It’s Hollywood logic: the goal of marriage is divorce, but they didn’t have to endorse it or even actually show it onscreen—they just had to wink at the audience about it. Everyone understood.
Three movies illustrate the “I don’t” version of the marriage movie (which is really a divorce movie): Chicken Every Sunday (1949), Payment on Demand (1951), and The Marrying Kind (1952). Chicken Every Sunday, based on a best-selling memoir which was also a popular play, stars Celeste Holm and Dan Dailey in a story about a husband full of pie-in-the-sky financial schemes that never pan out, who’s supported by his hardworking and practical wife. Payment on Demand, with Bette Davis and Barry Sullivan, tells of a hard-driving, manipulative wife who pushes her more laid-back husband to the top. The Marrying Kind is the story of an ordinary couple (Aldo Ray and Judy Holliday) struggling to make a go of things. Chicken (a light comedy) tells an audience that Holm is right; Payment (a serious drama) says Davis is wrong; and Marrying Kind (a seriocomedy) says that it’s nobody’s fault either way. Significantly, all three films come out the same place in the end: the divorcing couple decide to stay together. All three are told in flashback.
Chicken Every Sunday is a fairly benign divorce movie, whose message, like those of “I do” movies, is reassuring. Th
e story concerns a turn-of-the-century couple living in Tucson, Arizona. It opens up on the leading lady, Celeste Holm, striding purposefully down a dusty street, a grim look on her face. As she passes a group of men who obviously know her, one of them asks the question the audience also wants answered: “I wonder what’s the matter with her?” The camera follows as Holm enters a building and goes directly upstairs and into a lawyer’s office. Her very first words as a character are “I just can’t stand it anymore, Charlie. And I don’t want any advice. I want a divorce.” Charlie refuses her, pointing out that her husband is one of his closest friends. Holm storms out and goes down the hall to a younger lawyer, who’s new in town. He agrees to accommodate her wishes, but asks her, puzzled, what the grounds would be. “Nonsupport” is her curt answer. She walks to the window, looks out, and begins to narrate her story as the audience is taken back in time to her wedding day … and told her marriage story.
Celeste Holm and Dan Dailey start out happy in Chicken Every Sunday … (Photo Credit 2.7)
… and end up older, wiser, and burdened with financial troubles. (Photo Credit 2.8)
Twenty years previously, Celeste Holm wed Dan Dailey. At the time of their marriage, they’d already known each other for four years, and she had ample time to learn all about him. One of the things she learned was his irresponsibility with money. “If you don’t throw it away,” she tells him, “you give it away.” Even though he’s currently (and only temporarily) vice-president of the bank, he’s had to “borrow money to pay the minister.” Holm’s voice-over narration tells viewers that her own attitude toward money is very different. As a child, she suffered because her southern parents owned a plantation that never really became profitable. Her family never really knew if the land was theirs or the bank’s, and this shaped her personal goals for marriage: “I want security. I’ve wanted it all my life.”
This immediately raises a key question: why, then, for heaven’s sake, is she marrying Dan Dailey? She already knows he can’t manage money, and subtle dialogue references indicate he’s also had plenty of other women in his life.14 Her character married for the wrong reasons. This establishes Holm as a strong connective figure to women in the audience, and the movie is built around her.
The flashback story of the union between Holm and Dailey unfolds cheerfully, as if there’s really nothing for an audience to worry about. This is largely due to the presence of Dailey, who’s better known as a song-and-dance man, partner to Betty Grable in a series of Technicolor musicals. Dailey found a solid stardom by playing charming cads who underneath it all were really good guys. He brings this positive persona to his role as Holm’s unreliable husband—with another actor, the balance of happiness might have been seriously impaired. What an audience sees in Dailey is a loving husband, a caring father, and a loyal friend to everyone in town … who just also happens to be totally irresponsible with money and who continually hatches a series of harebrained schemes that don’t pan out. There’s his hotel, his laundry, his streetcar line, his creamery, his general store, his theater, his hospital: all bear his name, but someone else took them over to make them work after he was forced to give them up. He’s earned no financial reward from any of them.
The couple’s family survives because Holm takes in boarders. She’s a fabulous businesswoman, slowly expanding the size of their house one room at a time (one room for each of his crazy failures). She keeps cows, chickens, geese—whatever it takes to make a buck. Slowly, she pays off their mortgage. It’s this mortgage that initiates the movie’s opening marital crisis. On the very day she has finally paid it off and planned a celebratory party at which she’ll burn the deed, Dailey has gone into the bank behind her back and mortgaged their home again. Furthermore, he’s hocked all their furniture, and the man who will reclaim it is planning to arrive that night during the party. (Furniture is always a big deal in the marriage movie. Owning it and losing it are the wife’s equivalent of the stock-market crash.)
By most women’s standards, Dailey is a pretty awful husband. He lies to his wife and has never earned a steady living, leaving her to scrimp and save and scrub and cook and keep the family solvent. However, as the movie plays out, the audience is asked to see such events as really quite charming (“Isn’t all this fun?”). The impending divorce introduced at the beginning is ignored, and viewers watch hilarious boarders, a loving couple, happy children (including a teenage romance for the daughter), and a town full of camaraderie and supportive friends. The most successful thing about Chicken Every Sunday is its portrait of a devoted couple: in other words, it’s a divorce movie that sells love. Except for a few sweetly remarked oh-no-you-don’ts from Holm to Dailey about spending on some new financial scheme, there’s no real tension and anger between them. (There’s also a strongly implied sexual chemistry, which endures over the passing years.) By the time the movie returns to present tense—where viewers rediscover the possible divorce, the new mortgage, and a set of furniture about to be reclaimed—it’s a jolt to be back behind the eight ball. The film has signaled the audience every step of the way that everything will turn out okay—and, in fact, it soon will. The furniture is taken away … but brought right back. Why? Because all of Dan Dailey’s male friends have chipped in to pay off his loan. When Holm asks why, the men carrying back the tables and chairs tell her simply, “Jim’s an old friend of ours.”
In the end, the starring couple, Holm and Dailey, directly tell the audience the simple and reassuring things about marriage that they wanted to know. Dailey goes first. All his life he’d been looking for Easy Street, and it was “right in front of him all along.” (His wife, his meal ticket, paved his way to Easy Street: he didn’t have to work, because she did.) When it becomes Holm’s turn, she tells her daughter that “house and furniture meant security to me” but she’s learned her lesson: she now knows that security is two people loving each other, “willing to go through anything together. With that kind of security, you’ve got everything. Without it, you’ve got nothing.” (Nothing is what she’s got.) Holm tells her daughter, newly engaged, that she hopes she’ll be “as happy as your father and I have always been.” The reunited couple embrace, and it’s The End.
The plot sounds silly and the movie trivial, yet it’s not so easy to dismiss Chicken Every Sunday. It was a successful book, a successful play, and a highly successful movie (a top box-office draw of 1949–50). Its ability to gloss over a lifetime of struggle for a woman married to an unreliable man was reassuring to audiences, both men and women, because it was a movie that lightened these issues, making taking in boarders sound like a zany romp. It justified irresponsibility, endorsing it as charming, loving, and the source of deep friendships. Above all, it suggested love would make everything turn out all right. Love would burn the mortgage. The success of Chicken Every Sunday shows how a marriage movie couched as a divorce movie could reassure everyone that a bad deal wasn’t all that bad … if it could be turned into a romantic comedy selling love.
The little-known Bette Davis vehicle Payment on Demand (also known as The Story of a Divorce) begins in an alleged marital heaven: a beautiful home with a circular driveway, a uniformed maid to answer the door, a lavish interior loaded with antiques, and the lady of the house (La Davis herself) floating down a grand staircase in a long dress and plenty of jewels, a fur draped casually over her arm. Davis plays the wife of a highly successful man, one who has given her everything, including children. She is proud and happy. However, when hubby (Barry Sullivan) arrives home that day, he flatly tells her, to her great surprise, “I want a divorce.” He refers to their situation as “the whole meaningless mess” and warns her that “all your platitudes aren’t going to make it right.” She replies in a traditional Davis manner: she slaps him.
The “divorce” conversation that opens Payment on Demand is a clear depiction of how two people can see their marriage in completely different ways. The movie endorses the argument. Davis feels that she and her husband have everything tha
t matters. She states firmly that she has always believed they have “a good marriage.” Her husband, however, says that their marriage is lost, what they had is gone, and they are bored with each other. From this point onward, the movie shows the audience two levels of story: the advancing tale of the divorce, as the couple move closer and closer to the end of their union, and the flashback story of how their marriage collapsed. The moving forward/moving backward format is headed toward a moment of final confrontation, in which an audience is led to believe that there is no way this couple can ever reunite (although, in the end, they do).
The marriage portrayed in Payment on Demand shows two people with two different levels of ambition and two different definitions of success. Their goals are not—and never really were—in sync. Davis wants money and success, and to get away from the farm life she was born into. Sullivan would prefer to live in the country, and he doesn’t want to play the social game in the city. Like so many movie husbands, however, he is easily manipulated and follows the directions Davis lays out for him. Unbeknownst to Sullivan, she cheats his business partner, eliminating him from their lives. Later, the wife (Jane Cowl) of his city boss tells Davis: “You are a ruthless climber, aren’t you? You’ll climb, maneuver, do whatever’s necessary … step over anyone to help him, won’t you?” That, in fact, is the story of their marriage. Davis drives, Sullivan rides along.
After Sullivan asks for a divorce, Davis refuses to believe her marriage is over. She tells her daughters that their father “will get over it.” Trying to keep busy, she joins her divorced female friends at lunch. (They say, “Welcome to the sisterhood.”) When she finally grasps that things are finished (he has fallen in love with another woman), Davis turns ugly. The film’s most honest (and horrifying) moments come during the property-settlement scenes with their lawyers. (This stark honesty probably reflects the grim knowledge clearly gleaned from personal experience in the highly divorced film business.) “Marriage does not provide security,” states Davis, demanding a trust fund for both daughters. She rejects 50 percent of everything as her share, asking for 100 percent. She’s vicious and demanding, but he says it’s worth it to get rid of her and exit his miserable marriage. He just wants to walk away, and learns that to do so he will have to give her everything.15 (Earlier he’s said, “You hate people who aren’t strong and successful, don’t you?” and she has yelled back, “Without me you’d be nothing!”)
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