4 In fact, it is a remake of one of silent star Norma Talmadge’s greatest hits, made in 1924 and also called Secrets. Both versions are well directed by Frank Borzage.
5 American viewers learned to “read” design: a small town had one kind of street, a western settlement had another, and a big city yet another. Sets on back lots were labeled this way: “Western street,” “New York City block,” “small-town residential street,” etc.
6 Another movie that states ideas coldly about marriage is James Whale’s One More River (1934), starring Colin Clive and Diana Wynyard, based on John Galsworthy’s last novel. Clive says marriage is nothing but a mixture of “mutual interest and desire,” and that the desire will fade but the mutual interest can become stronger. He turns marriage into a long-term business deal (and uses this as his excuse to beat his wife when she falls in love).
7 Made for Each Other, a late 1930s product, shows how sound marriage movies, while still remaining glamorous with stars and wardrobes, nevertheless stepped down and away from the 1920s marital spectacle in an attempt to be more realistic and thus closer to the audience’s experience. These movies differ from the glamorous screwball comedies and sophisticated “divorce” movies of the era.
8 Although Lombard actually made a movie in 1921, it was 1924 when she began her career in earnest.
9 Stewart’s first film was The Murder Man in 1935. He played a fledgling reporter and was billed ninth.
10 Made for Each Other was released on February 10, 1939, Mr. Smith on October 16, 1939.
11 In No Man of Her Own, Lombard played a mousy librarian (!) wed to Clark Gable, an unreliable heel. In Swing High, Swing Low, a musical, she suffered while her husband (Fred MacMurray) became an alcoholic. And in Virtue, a pre-Code movie, she weds taxi driver Pat O’Brien without his realizing she’s been a prostitute. No punches are pulled about this occupation. She’s not called a “dance-hall girl,” a “model,” or a “nightclub hostess”; as she herself later admits to O’Brien, “I picked men up on the streets.” As the movie opens, Lombard is being run out of town, and since the “town” is New York City, that’s quite impressive. (One of the cops advises her, “Buy yourself a hot-water bottle.”) Lombard had also played a nun, a nurse, and a schoolteacher on her way to stardom.
12 The romantic comedy was a movie staple in the 1930s. It was meat-and-potatoes filmmaking, a form that Hollywood could practically do in its sleep. The system had the writers, it had the stars, and it had the chops. For a period of time, it was one of the easiest types of movie they could make, whereas today it’s apparently the most difficult challenge for moviemakers. Alas, they keep on trying. Romantic comedies today are called “romcoms.” This is perhaps the explanation of why they are no good: we can’t even bring ourselves to say the two words. We have no faith in either category, much less the unification of the two. The “romcom” is just about what its name suggests: something truncated, cut down, and therefore diminished. “Romcom” implies a little bit of love but not too much, and a little bit of comedy, but not too much (“not too much” being all they can give).
13 In Two for the Road, the couple are unquestionably remaining together. The ambiguity lies in whether they will continue to do so.
14 Later, we’ll hear that after years of marriage he’s finally become too old to “climb the mountains” to find the attractive girls on the other side.
15 As Warren William, a divorce lawyer, says to a man in Smarty (1934): “In marriage, when you leave before the final curtain, you get no privileges.” Originally titled Hit Me Again, Smarty was a dubious marriage comedy about spousal abuse. The pressbook suggested theater owners should sponsor newspaper contests in which local moviegoers could write up their own experiences of abuse—“but make ’em funny.”
16 She was anything but: known for her high IQ and ability to learn lines quickly.
17 Ray had previously appeared uncredited in two 1951 movies; and billed as Aldo DaRe, he also had small roles in My True Story (1951) and Saturday’s Hero (1951). He was nevertheless treated as an unknown for Marrying Kind. He later achieved a stardom of sorts in Pat and Mike, war films, and tough little noir movies. Sadly, just as he emerged, the studio star system was beginning to collapse, and he also developed personal problems, so he never became a big name. As a cult figure, however, he’s greatly respected for his unique qualities as an “ordinary American guy.”
18 The Crowd, while not told in flashback and not a “divorce” movie, represents the late silent era’s move toward the emerging sound format for marriage movies.
19 The Marrying Kind is essentially Made for Each Other told in flashbacks.
20 Movies often overtly articulate the need to fight for a good marriage. In B.F.’s Daughter (1948), for instance, an unhappy wife (Barbara Stanwyck) is lectured by her best friend (Margaret Lindsay) on the subject: “Marriage is an investment. It’s easy to quit, but it’s better to fight … Lots of marriages aren’t the way they say in books … but still … they’re worth fighting for.” She was talking directly to the audience.
21 She arrives home in the wee hours after a night of partying, and there’s a wet, soggy snow all over the ground. Standing outside in her blazingly red evening gown (with matching wrap), she pounds on the door to be let in, but Johnson has passed out drunk on the stairs inside. Forlorn and believing herself to be deliberately rejected, Taylor staggers off in the slush in her little red (also matching) high heels, contracting pneumonia the way one always does when one gets wet in the movies. (Movie rain and snow are lethal, and that’s a fact.) Taylor dies, looking radiantly healthy, in a French hospital bed, while Johnson sobs at her side and they pledge their love for one another all over again.
22 Among the good moneymakers: Dodsworth (1936), Swing High, Swing Low (1937), The Women (1939), Woman of the Year (1942), Claudia (1943), Random Harvest (1942), Mr. Skeffington (1944), Without Love (1945), Life with Father (1947), Cass Timberlane (1947), When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948), Clash by Night (1952), Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), The Long, Long Trailer (1953), Ten North Frederick (1958), Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), Strangers When We Meet (1960), Midnight Lace (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), The Thrill of It All (1963), What a Way to Go! (1960), and Send Me No Flowers (1964).
23 Numbers matter here. Hollywood made and/or released between five hundred and seven hundred features per year in the glory days of the studio system. We’re talking relative numbers in comparison to other, more popular story forms: westerns, musicals, romantic comedies, etc.
24 Men apparently are drawn to marrying women who are going to die soon (Dark Victory [1939], Embraceable You [1948], and Invitation [1952]), sometimes for financial gain, but mostly out of the goodness of their hearts, and only occasionally for love.
25 “Without love” movies also include Next Time I Marry (1938), with Lucille Ball, and I Married a Doctor (1936) and Rachel and the Stranger (1948), both with Loretta Young. In Honeymoon for Three (1941), Ann Sheridan merely pretends to be her boss’s (George Brent) wife so he can conduct his dalliances without consequence. (Sheridan will arrive at just the crucial moment to save him from the altar.) In Pillow to Post (1945), Ida Lupino is a traveling saleswoman who needs accommodations during wartime. Since there’s a housing shortage, people will only rent to servicemen and their wives, so she has to find a guy (William Prince) to pretend to be her husband. In Guest Wife (1945), Dick Foran lends his wife (Claudette Colbert) to his best friend (Don Ameche) because Ameche’s boss requires his employees to be married. The oddball “without love” format is still with us: consider Sandra Bullock’s box-office smash The Proposal (2009), in which a tough boss (Bullock) hires one of her employees (Ryan Reynolds) to marry her so she can get her visa renewed.
26 Tracy appeared on the lists of top ten box-office draws every year from 1938 to 1942, reappearing in 1944, 1945, 1946, 1948, 1950, and 1951. Hepburn never appeared on such lists at all during the golden age of Hollywood; her first appearance was
in 1969.
The Couple
Playing the Czarina Alexandra in Rasputin and the Empress (1932), Ethel Barrymore lovingly pats the hand of her mate, Czar Nicholas, and says, “I know you love me, Nicky, and that’s all any empress could want.” Nicholas and Alexandra are married, so hand patting and comforting words are appropriate. Whether it’s rubies or rhinestones, palaces or apartments, married couples in the movies share a bottom line: they are the two main characters who validate the wedded state: a husband and a wife. The presentation of a believable couple was crucial to the marriage movie. Even if they’re a czar and a czarina, they are expected to behave a certain way. Thus, after Alexandra and “Nicky” attend a spectacular religious ceremony blessing their son, replete with choral music, candles, incense, cavernous cathedral, and enraptured courtiers, Alexandra will enter their private quarters, sigh deeply, pull off her elaborate and heavy tiara, plop down on an embroidered sofa, and instruct Nicholas to sit beside her. She will pat his hand and reassure him, because she’s more than a czarina: she’s half of a couple, a movie wife. What’s the difference between a czar and czarina returning from a state event and Blondie and Dagwood coming home after a dinner party at the boss’s house? Nothing. They’re married. Both have had to get dressed up to fulfill an obligation, and it is a duty directly related to the fact that they’re married. A wife has had to accompany the husband in the duties of his job. That’s her duty. A couple share their obligations, which weary them—but never mind, it’s all any empress could want. She and the czar are married. Husbands and wives who behave in expected ways are the first required element in making a marriage movie.
The basic, most familiar idea that a married couple presents—at least initially, before the plot troubles arrive—is that of a comfortable union, one in which two people can work together smoothly because they know each other’s rhythms. Significantly, the married couple is in contrast to the romantic couple. They dance to different tunes. The American romantic couple are locked in combat, battling each other until the inevitable occurs and they fall in love. (American movies traditionally tell audiences that if you meet an individual you absolutely cannot stand—someone you truly hope never to see again as long as you live—you’ve just met your life’s partner.) The married couple, on the other hand, are low-key, probably bored, and if they have anything much to say to each other, it’ll be offhand and irrelevant. In some variations, they’ll be supremely simpatico, but that’s not going to last. And in other variations, they are totally at odds, but that’s not going to last, either. Marriage is an untenable plot position. What is true is that the movies present courtship as a battlefield and marriage as a field of dead bodies after the war is won.
Onscreen, “attracted” and “in love” are to be read as tension—something moving and dangerous. “Married” is to be read as something settled, preferably in a chair covered in chintz—that is, until the marriage has to become unglued and start moving somewhere. Married couples cannot easily maintain a status quo. The surface reason is easy: there has to be something happening in the plot. Underneath the surface is the implication that the couple are representing the battle of the sexes, and the way they behave toward each other will connect directly to any audience’s sense of what a couple is supposed to be, actually is, and might ideally be turned into. “Couples” taught romance, marital behavior, and cultural standards. They were teachers in the classroom of marriage.
Romantic hostility—married or unmarried—was smart screenwriting. It created two things: a plot problem to be resolved and an antagonism that could represent sexual chemistry. It was a way to bring tangible energy to a romance that was being viewed in a flat, two-dimensional format. Audiences could hear, see, and understand the energetic war between a couple, and understand that what was going on between them was more than an argument. Arguing made an abstract concept (sexual attraction) concrete. The challenge to generate a tangible love between two people who were wed (and also for those just falling in love) was solved with two main devices: screenwriting and casting. Screenwriting constituted dialogue between two members of a romantic couple as clever banter; the married couple’s variation was bickering. Casting was used carefully to select two stars who seemed to be sympathetically wed.
Bickering was an American Olympic sport for married people in the movies. How to write these arguments without losing audience sympathy for one or both characters was a challenge. Bickering is one thing in a romantic comedy. It provides a frisson, the censor’s prudent presentation of sexual attraction. It can be made charming, witty, and alive with sexual possibilities. Bickering in marriage has no charm, no sex, no fun to it, because it has no place to go. It can’t be translated into anything new, into anything the couple hasn’t already experienced. When a couple are trying to get into love and marriage, bickering works. When they are already in it, bickering is a trap. Writers had to find a way to make it work.
In Joseph Mankiewicz’s classic film about three marriages with problems, A Letter to Three Wives (1949), the excellent screenplay uses different types and levels of bickering that provide variety, further define the characters, and keep the audience from hating the situations. There are three distinctly different couples, with different economic situations, different backgrounds, and different levels of love and camaraderie, but they have one thing in common: they bicker. Jeanne Crain and Jeffrey Lynn are lowest on the bicker scale, playing two young people who married during World War II without having met each other’s families. Back home, out of uniform and badly dressed, Crain feels uncomfortable among Lynn’s fashionable friends. She and Lynn bicker gently, creating a low rumble beneath their song of love. Low, but definite—especially when his chic former love arrives back in town. Their bickering is inept, insincere; it has no verbal bite. They are amateurs who love each other so much they can’t figure out how to really insult each other.
Married couples always have to bicker: Jeffrey Lynn and Jeanne Crain over cocktails … (Photo Credit 2.18)
… Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas by the piano …
… and Kirk Douglas and Ann Sothern in their cozy living room—all facing the issue of A Letter to Three Wives. Someone ran off with one of their husbands. Who’s the loser?
Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas—an inspired pairing—are wealthy. She used to live in a railroad shack, and he’s the self-made owner of a big department store. Now that she’s bagged him and is safely ensconced in his mansion, he feels used and she feels neglected. They bicker cruelly in a manner that suits their essentially lower-class ability to fight for survival, no holds barred. They’re mean and desperate, throwing daggers at each other. Bickering—and its resolution—becomes the definition of both their love and their anger.
Kirk Douglas and Ann Sothern are a sophisticated, well-educated couple, parents of twins. He’s a professor and she’s a successful writer of radio soap operas, but her career is interfering with their home life. They bicker at a very high level, dueling quipsters armed with words to kill. Their fight has an edge to it, and it’s out on the surface, but it’s the verbiage of people who use words effectively to make their living. It’s not as much emotion as it is one-upmanship.
“Bicker” was a language all Americans spoke. Any movie married people who did not bicker had limited screen time as a couple. One of them was going to die very, very soon, or be shoved aside while the other invented something useful … or a catastrophe was going to hit them both hard, like World War II, a spaceship, or another woman. The nonbickering couple was going to lose its status of bliss. Either that or they were, in the first place, a secondary unit of character actors, such as Judge Hardy and his wife. (And the Hardys actually bicker a bit: just a little bit, but a bit.)
The marriage movie is an arena of conflict. The compatibility of most couples is temporary. Couples who remain compatible are usually those who work together successfully, or ones in which the wife takes a secondary position in support of the man. Happily wed couples who do not
have a problem with each other usually turn up in movies not focused on marriage, and they turn up in unlikely places. Tarzan’s jungle, for instance.1 Tarzan and Jane are happily, harmoniously living together, and they are a picture of domestic bliss whether swinging through the forest on vines, romping with Boy and some cuddly lion cubs, or swimming naked in their pool. They don’t argue or bicker, because each knows his own territory, each respects the other’s skills, and they don’t get in each other’s way. Tarzan is king of the jungle; Jane is queen of their tree hut. Tarzan knows the laws of survival in a world of beasts; Jane knows the laws of survival in the world of humans. They pool their experience and add up to a perfect union. Tarzan and Jane have a perfect marriage—but, of course, they’re not really married, are they? And certainly the Tarzan series is not a group of marriage movies.
The happy jungle family: Tarzan, Jane, and Boy (Johnny Sheffield, Johnny Weissmuller, and Maureen O’Sullivan), their table set for lunch … (Photo Credit 2.21)
… and the Tarzans at home: Mr. and Mrs., Junior, and the inestimable Cheetah, family retainer (Photo Credit 2.22)
In thinking about the couple as one of the three primary components of the marriage movie, the simple definition of a married couple is that they are husband and wife. For the movies, though, they also need to be something more metaphoric or emblematic. They needed to suggest union, and they need to represent an embodiment—possibly perfect—of their concepts: the Perfect Wife, the Perfect Husband. And they might also be instructional, representing what one should correctly want in a mate. If they could be more than just the sum of their parts, they could transcend their story and give it purpose as well as entertainment value. They also would not necessarily have to be only a husband and wife. Movies could suggest “coupling” to audiences in ways that implied union/marriage without the two characters being the simple definition of Mr. and Mrs. Two people in sync could be a couple and thus a marriage of sorts. Audiences could read “marriage” into unions whenever they saw or felt something they recognized as real.
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