Perhaps the most lifelike movie example of a real married couple’s relationship is … surprise! Laurel and Hardy. They bicker, they disagree, they snipe, they challenge, and they yell, but if any outside threat arrives in their world, they instantly pull together. In their hearts they each know they’ve found the perfect other. The subtext of Laurel and Hardy is that of “married couple,” not homoerotic lovers. They are in sync, and they share common attitudes. They can come together in unified action to achieve a goal without any debate. They communicate with each other directly, specifically, in that manner all married couples have: “Let’s get out of here, I’m bored to death” is a little raised eyebrow. “Let’s go home and watch TV” is a nod toward the doorway, “Let’s pretend we think this roast beef isn’t shoe leather,” the subtle placement of the knife on the dinner plate. In the case of Laurel and Hardy, the communication is simple: a nonverbal stare means “Let’s destroy.” And destroy they do, in a quiet ballet of mutual focus and rhythm. They can wreck the hall and go home happy. A little dance they amble into in Way Out West (1937) shows how perfectly wed they are. Arriving in town, dirty and dusty, their burro loaded with junk, Laurel and Hardy walk up to the porch of a saloon/hotel. A group of laid-back cowboys are casually singing and playing their instruments, giving off a tuneful and rhythmic little number, all about “take your partner and hold her … Commence a-dancin’. Commence a-prancin’ … ” It’s catchy, and it catches Laurel and Hardy. They give it their attention, standing for a moment, listening. They then launch into an impromptu dance routine that’s a true gem. At first, they move slowly, just bending their knees a bit, each tappin’ a foot, Hardy tipping his hat forward at a jaunty angle. Then they begin to groove a bit more, daintily stepping, flapping their jackets, all in perfect unison and perfect time to the music. Then, confident of each other, they “commence a-prancin’.” They get down, escalating the intricacy of their steps, finally grasping hands and really letting go. They know each other’s moves, and barely make eye contact. In complete sync, Laurel and Hardy execute a little dance improv that shows a perfectly unified couple.
Laurel and Hardy are a married couple, without the marriage. The popular male comedy duos found in movies, in fact, are definitely an example of pseudo-married couples. Like Laurel and Hardy, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope are always grousing at each other but can exchange a look and turn themselves instantly into a perfectly coordinated team to escape and destroy. They are the opposite of Abbott and Costello, who clearly do not like each other and who are never unified. Much of Costello’s comedy takes place when he’s alone or with someone other than Abbott, and their famous routines such as “Who’s on First?” are grounded in frustration and anger that are never released into affection or unity. It’s a form of atomic bickering. “Who’s on First?” is hilarious—a classic—but it’s also about a failure to communicate, showing a different kind of marital template. Abbott and Costello represent a bad marriage in which neither will let go of the other no matter how disgruntled they are. Yet they are still wed—unlike Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who are a couple on the brink of divorce. And, of course, famously they finally did get divorced. The couple they represent is lopsided: Lewis madly loves Martin, but Martin is cool, indifferent to Lewis’s ardor. As the years go by in their work together, it’s clear Lewis becomes more and more manic in order to attract love and attention, while Martin gets more and more detached. In the end, Lewis turns to others (the audience) and goes crazy, while Martin suddenly realizes he’s being upstaged and looks really angry. Their partnership is the comic visualization of divorce.
The picture of married bliss: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy … (Photo Credit 2.23)
… coping with a fashion malfunction … (Photo Credit 2.24)
… happy around the house, relaxing with the dogs … (Photo Credit 2.25)
… and smiling en famille (from Their First Mistake) … all portraits that could grace any marriage movie
It may seem odd to discuss these nonromantic, asexual male comedy teams as married couples, but all filmed couples were constructs. Two male comedians playing in a story in which they live together, work together, face problems together, quarrel and make up are as much a married construct as anything else. In fact, male comedians aren’t the only nonsexual couples to show audiences marital compatibility without sex. Anna and the King of Siam (1946) and its musical variation, The King and I (1956), both depict a man and woman who grow together over time in a productive and mutually beneficial relationship. She educates his children toward the future, and he helps her learn patience and tolerance. Anna (an English schoolteacher) and the King were real people. There could be no suggestion of sex in such a movie “marriage”: first of all, the material was biographical; and secondly, he was a king.2 A marriage of purpose and mutual respect between a man and a woman—who never fall in love and never have sex—is also illustrated by the teacher/pupil relationship of Bette Davis and John Dall in The Corn Is Green (1945) and by the wartime survival story Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957). In Corn, Davis guides Dall to the successful passing of an exam that will get him out of the coal mines, and in Heaven Knows, Robert Mitchum (as a U.S. Marine) and Deborah Kerr (as a nun) become stranded together on a Japanese-held island during World War II. These movies demonstrate a man and a woman in a committed relationship without sex, but the relationships are marital in the sense that they reflect an ultimately harmonious and respectful pairing.
A movie had to build a couple for the audience, and two actors had to be cast to create an illusion or enact a story. This inevitably meant the star system. If marriage movies were stories about couples, and couples were played by actors, then actors in movies meant stars. (Stardom, and the making and selling of movie stars, was the bread and butter of the movie business.) It was axiomatic that marriage movies would involve movie stars—a couple of them, a man and a woman—who would play married. Movie stars married to each other! On the other hand, did they have to be married, or could they just form a union of sorts that could seem like marriage?
Reflecting what Thomas Schatz calls “the genius of the system,” Hollywood studios created a form of pseudo-marriage that the public embraced wholeheartedly: star pairings. It was simple and doable: cast and recast a leading actor and a leading actress to create a sense that this couple belonged together and were “married” as performers.3 Wed them onscreen—in plot or not in plot, but certainly in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer (preferably richer), and, with any luck at all, for better and better and more and more money at the box office. “Together Again!,” “Your Favorite Couple Is Back!,” “Always Loving, Always Laughing, Always Together!” were advertising tag lines associated with movie-star pairings, a subliminal link to the concept of a man and a woman who were not husband and wife but show-business mates.
Moviemakers could understand this kind of star marriage—it was fake. And moviegoers liked it. What the public joined together, let no movie mogul put asunder. The audience performed the ceremony in their heads, and Hollywood validated what they imagined. Successful pairings between movie stars were about acting chemistry, roles, and plots, but they were also about intangibles: size, coloring, vocal timbre, star personae, fashion, dialogue, and an inexplicable something that was behind the acceptance of what was onscreen. This quality—whatever it was—represented a kind of onscreen marriage that carried over offscreen for audiences. The business kept a successful pair together, as if they were married, by casting them again and again and again. And here was the real genius of the system: they dubbed these star pairings “love teams.”4 “Love teams”: it sounded ever so much more fun than “married couple.” Hollywood found box-office success (as well as its own comfort zone) with these star pairings.5 It was their best, most enduring form of making a marriage couple in the movies, and it confirms how important “the couple” was, not only in marriage films but in all films.
“Love teams” shed light on what the public bought as an authe
ntic “married” rhythm between two people. What was it audiences saw or felt between two actors that made them believe they were a couple? What did the audience think married couples looked like or sounded like—or what did they want to dream they looked like and sounded like? What read “married” to an audience?
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers appeared together in ten movies, and in only two of them were they married (The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, the last of their original RKO pairings in 1939, and The Barkleys of Broadway, their decade-later reunion and final film as a dance couple).6 Moviegoers had no need to see them play an actual married couple because they wed one another so beautifully through dance. Astaire and Rogers were the living metaphor of a perfect union, and they didn’t have to play married to show it. Their swooning, yearning, swaying-like-two-chic-cobras romantic numbers spoke to audiences about desire, but also about a spectacularly balanced, perfectly beautiful physicality. Theirs was a marriage set to music, and their dance-floor coupling was real and romantic. (Fred and Ginger seldom kiss in their films. There’s no need for it. Their sex life takes place when they have on their dancing shoes.)
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers seldom played married, but when they did, as in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, a real-life couple … (Photo Credit 2.27)
… or in The Barkleys of Broadway, an imaginary one, it was still dancing that defined the relationship. (Photo Credit 2.28)
When they’re not dancing, Fred and Ginger have an adversarial relationship. He’s eager and in pursuit; she’s disdainful, and holds out.7 This strain between their characters’ personalities pays off because it has a purpose: to resolve a potential imbalance. Fred has to earn Ginger in the plot because Ginger will have to earn Fred on the dance floor.
The movies in which Astaire and Rogers play a married couple are two of their least enjoyable: the tension of the pursuit is lost. The biopic (The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle) was made under pressure from their offscreen advisor, Irene Castle, who was still alive and demanded input as to how she and her husband would be presented. The onscreen Castles are harmonious but all business. Their marriage, which occurs early in the plot, is dedicated to their success, the dances they invent, and Mrs. Castle’s fashion influence. The resulting film is the only RKO Astaire/Rogers film that’s never in any way magical.8 (In Barkleys, in which they play a successful Broadway team, the original pattern of Astaire’s pursuit is maintained, because the couple quarrel and separate early in the story. The quarreling is heavy-handed and charmless.)
Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon had an entirely different “married” chemistry. They gave off an aura of a calm, dedicated love that could stand the test of time. They were perfectly cast as a married couple in all but one of their eight films together, Julia Misbehaves (1948). (In That Forsyte Woman [1949], after spending most of the movie apart, they finally end up married.)9 Garson and Pidgeon were at the height of their popularity as a love team during the years of World War II. The audience not only wanted to believe in marriage in those years; they needed to believe in it. Onscreen, Garson and Pidgeon answered that need, presenting a reassuringly mature relationship, a steadfast love for the duration, that was nevertheless just a tad spicy, a little saucy. They made marriage fun, but also comfortable and—most of all in a time of uncertainty—reliable. In their most famous movie, Mrs. Miniver (1942), they were youthful and stunning to look at, but still believable as a middle-aged couple with a son old enough to serve in the war. In the famous scene in which they are in their bomb shelter with their younger children and the Germans attack by air, they work in perfect harmony to comfort their children. They easily enact the silent telecommunication that grows between two people who’ve been married for a long time. Reflecting years of mutual agreement and habit, he reaches for the boy and she embraces the little girl. They don’t look at each other but focus on their children while they withstand the assault.
Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon were one of America’s favorite married couples onscreen, with Garson, the bigger star, always looking up to Pidgeon, because that’s what wives were supposed to do. They were perfect as a brave British duo facing the challenges of World War II in Mrs. Miniver … (Photo Credit 2.29)
… or as a childless couple in Blossoms in the Dust …
… or as the real-life Nobel Prize winners Marie and Pierre Curie in Madame Curie.
Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn, another famous love team, were carefully cast as a couple, but seldom a married couple. They were the embodiment of the romantic tradition of the swashbuckling film. They both have a touch of British class, look good in color as well as black-and-white, and wear period costumes well. Flynn is an outlaw type … but a gentleman. De Havilland’s a dignified lady … but with spirit. (One of de Havilland’s great accomplishments as an actress was her ability to bring the standard leading-lady role of such films to life.) He’s on one side, she’s on the other, and they must cross a chasm between tradition and rebellion to come together—a significant form of change and growth. As they do, his charm keeps her sweetness from becoming too cloying, and her intelligence gives his derring-do some gravitas. In the plots of their films, de Havilland and Flynn move toward each other from fixed positions, yet there’s a unity of purpose required from them in their movies, and that unity seemed to audiences to be a marriage of sorts.
How perfectly “wed” they seemed to be is verified by They Died with Their Boots On (1941), the one film in which they were actually married for a significant portion of plot time. In their portrait of Mr. and Mrs. George Armstrong Custer, de Havilland and Flynn enact one of the most touchingly honest married scenes in the movies. As Mrs. Custer, de Havilland packs her husband’s things in preparation for the Battle of the Little Bighorn, putting together what he will need in the field. Thinking she cannot see, he deliberately breaks his watch chain, and notes that, alas, now he will have to leave this cherished war memento behind. De Havilland has seen, and she knows what it means—he will leave it behind to become her most cherished memento of their married life together. (Also surreptitiously, he’s placed in his jacket pocket a miniature portrait of her.) De Havilland, portraying a daughter of the military, knows her role: do not weep, do not show fear. They speak jocularly to one another of their future years, in which they will grow fat and happy together, but they both know it’s a future they’ll never have. He lies to her, and she accepts his lie. It’s the agreement of a lifetime in a successful military marriage: each must play his or her role properly and not let down the other side. As the sound of bugles is heard from outside, Flynn embraces her, but not casually. He makes it important, final, a real goodbye, for that is what it will be. His last words are, “Walking through life with you, ma’am, has been a very gracious thing.” After he leaves, she leans against the wall and the camera pulls back from her. She slumps, and falls to the floor in a faint. Outside, he mounts, yells “Forward, ho!” to his men, and the cavalry moves out to the traditional sound of fifes and drums. He’s off to the Little Bighorn, because even a married man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. A married woman, of course, has gotta do what she’s gotta do. She remains behind. (Audiences of the era were reported to weep at this scene. They believed in it. The “marriage” of de Havilland and Flynn was star pairing that conveyed conjugal truth.)
Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn portrayed General and Mrs. George Armstrong Custer in They Died with Their Boots On, and enacted a credible marital farewell scene. (Photo Credit 2.32)
Even when a happily-ever-after marriage was not necessarily the endgame of a star pairing, the concept of “union” lay underneath. One of the greatest pairs in movie history was the young Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Rooney and Garland brought to each other a gift no one else could give: an astonishing talent that could do anything, and the shared misery and joy of being a show-business tot. They were troupers, faux teens who were older than old, show-biz pro to show-biz pro, talent to talent. They interacted like a frie
ndly Godzilla and Mothra (even though both were tiny: he stood 5′5″ to her 4′11″). Because of their youth, marriage was not the goal of their onscreen pairing, but their professionalism gave off the aura of a real-life merger in which the participants honored each other and would troop onward together no matter what.
Today the most written-about movie team is probably Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.10 The two made nine movies together, and from the first one onward they were also a couple offscreen. In their most successful movies (Woman of the Year [1942], Adam’s Rib [1949]), they were the epitome of modern man and woman, striving to cram their independent, tough-minded natures into a fair-sided male/female union. Some of their films (Desk Set, Pat and Mike) presented them as a cantankerous unwed couple who sparred instead of wooed, but in a way the audience clearly understood meant they were a simply perfect match. Without each other, it was implied, there was only the lonely life, because each was a unique individual.
Hepburn and Tracy are married in six of their nine movies. In Woman of the Year, The Sea of Grass (1947) State of the Union (1948), Without Love (1945), and Adam’s Rib—five of those six—the marriages are troubled. In the sixth and perfectly harmonious one, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), their relationship is neither honest nor particularly credible. If Tracy and Hepburn weren’t playing the roles, the couple would seem even phonier than they already do. Since audiences know that Tracy and Hepburn remained together for years in real life, they can accept the onscreen union; otherwise, the couple would be a ramped‑up Judge and Mrs. Hardy in a very ritzy-looking house, with an Andy Hardy–ish perfect daughter who shows up with a social issue that had just become Hollywood-chic.
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