The new Dana Andrews moves in downstairs from O’Hara. With her help, he sobers up, becomes a famous theatrical puppeteer, rids her of an odious blackmailer, dresses neatly, cuts off his beard, and always addresses her as “my darling.” The two live “without love,” but everyone assumes they’re married. O’Hara begins calling him “Mr. Lambert,” her former husband’s name. In the end, she is reunited with her family and living happily and now comfortably wed to Andrews. The Mews is no longer a slum but thoroughly respectable, a metaphor for her married life.
The Forbidden Street indicates that marriage is a woman’s escape route from her family and from conformity. It is also her only legitimate ticket for sexual experience. The movie endorses “art over commerce” in husbands: they are ever so much more fun if they aren’t bankers, but you do have to take charge of them regarding money. (O’Hara has a convenient small inheritance.) The film’s most interesting aspect is the one that reaches out to female moviegoers who might be disappointed—or even abused—by their husbands. It presents a dream of the other husband: the same one you married only better, the one you originally imagined he would be. To suggest this idea, the same actor plays two different men. O’Hara is given the gift of her original dream man, her exciting lover who swept her away, returned to her after the original model got all broken and died on her. This new one is much better. Gone is the messy beard. Gone is the drunkenness, the laziness, the cruelty. A movie such as The Forbidden Street suggests that marriages are undone by many things in real life, but on the screen they are undone by plot. The Forbidden Street is happy to reverse the concept: it suggests marriages can be restored by plot. It speaks in a secret language of women that the men in the audience can’t hear: we want better men, better husbands.
In selecting a mate, movie coupledom laid out three possible choices: what you wanted, what you got, and what society thought you should have. In other words: Tyrone Power, Eddie Bracken, and Lewis Stone—or Lana Turner, Joan Davis, and Ethel Barrymore. Movies about married couples played across these variations, always juggling desire, reality, and appropriateness. Movies presented perfection in a husband and wife through physical beauty and/or noble actions, made comedy about the foibles and failures of mates, and suggested (even dictated from time to time) what careful behavior might designate the perfect spouse. They played with married couples, using them in many different ways, addressing the idea of what one ought to do on the surface and hinting at what one felt like doing in the subtext. (In Hollywood movies, there is always a subtext.)
Kiss and Make-Up (1935), starring Cary Grant, is an unusual film that confirms the subtext of other films, directly discussing how bad an idea marrying for physical beauty can be. Grant, strangely cast as “Dr. Lamar, the high priest” of cosmetic surgery at the Temple de Beauté in Paris, is a bachelor whose mantra is “Ugliness is a disease, and I’m curing it.” His medical methods are shown via tracking camera: mudpacks, manicures, massages, and workers plucking eyebrows to the tune of “The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” When Dr. Lamar broadcasts about beauty, his listeners are any woman and every woman: a wealthy dame in a boudoir, a maid with a broom, an Eskimo outside her igloo, an African tribeswoman, and an Osa Johnson–like desert explorer sitting in a tent with her camel parked outside. Grant’s character is clear about what advice to give women (“Bandage your ankles,” etc.) as well as his philosophy: “To deprive a woman of love is to deprive her of life itself.” To this highfalutin notion he adds a touch of practicality: “But men are selfish brutes … and they demand beauty … beauty at any price.”
The movie’s plot, such as there is one, is a story of how one wife (Genevieve Tobin) has devoted all her energy to Dr. Lamar’s theories, remaking herself completely to please her husband (Edward Everett Horton),23 who is not pleased: “You’ve lured her with lotions,” Horton complains to Grant, adding that all this advice has added “a couple of dimples to my wife’s knees” and “made them look gaga.” Horton divorces his wife, and Grant, a sucker for his own handiwork, marries her, ending up having to face firsthand what he has done. To maintain her perfection, his new wife can’t go swimming and can’t be touched. She needs hours and hours to get ready to go out, and greases herself up head to toe at bedtime. Thoroughly chastened, Grant gives up his beauty business and opens an experimental science lab, settling down with his very natural, nicely freckled secretary (Helen Mack). A man has learned that marrying for beauty may end up meaning no sex!
The celebrated British movie The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933; directed by Alexander Korda) turns a historical character and his life into a rather ribald and sly discussion of the marriage couple. As history requires, the movie gives us wives being beheaded, but inside that drama is a lot of comedy. In an Academy Award–winning performance, Charles Laughton plays Henry VIII as a man who really just wants to be left alone. Poor Henry: he’s greatly put upon by these wives! He’s a-roisterin’ and only wants to enjoy life, biting lustily into a woman’s back as if she’s little more than a plump chicken leg. He just wants to be half of a functioning couple—but, oh, how these women bedevil him! When he’s busy at work, discussing the future of England with his advisors, his little wifey Jane Seymour bursts in to ask his advice on which headdress she should wear. (“Softly, sweetheart,” he admonishes, “we have affairs of state here!”) Henry sums up his marital adventures with cold appraisals (“My first wife was clever … my second ambitious … ”) and advises Thomas Culpeper (Robert Donat) that if he wants to be happy, “marry a stupid woman.” He tells his courtiers that marriage is “the victory of optimism over experience.” This motif is further carried out by Henry’s servants, slaving away in his kitchens and offering running commentaries on marriage as a dangerous venture (“You never know what you’re getting,” “Marriage is like pastry—you’ve got to be born to it”). The cook sums up Henry’s track record: he “got in the soup” with his first wife, found “stinking fish” with the second, “cooked the goose” of his third (who died after childbirth), and gave “the cold shoulder” to the one he sent packing (Anne of Cleves). One of the female servants tells the cook that a man “needs regular meals,” and the cook replies, “But not the same joint every night.” At the end of the movie, Henry VIII is an old man gnawing on a haunch, bleary-eyed and burpy, while his final “good woman” of a wife nags him (“If I let you out of my sight for one minute, you’re up to some mischief!”). She snatches the food out of his greedy paws, barking, “You know you can’t digest it!” After he pretends to be asleep, she leaves the room. He jumps up, grabs more food, and continues chowing down. Looking directly into the camera, and thus directly at the movie audience, Charles Laughton as the much-married Henry VIII delivers his final evaluation: “Six wives … and the best of them’s the worst.” King he may be, but when it comes to marriage, Henry appears to be a husband who just wants to be left alone with his roast beef.
What a movie man wants in a movie woman can easily be summed up: everything. This fundamental desire (and its attendant unlikelihood) is hilariously represented in the 1953 comedy The Captain’s Paradise, starring Alec Guinness as the captain of a passenger ferry that crosses the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to North Africa. Guinness, it seems, has spent his life in search of Paradise, and has actually found a way to have it. On the Gibraltar side of his journey, he has a perfect little wife, a placid and loving homemaker who keeps his life in order and provides him with a restful and comforting haven. Well played by Celia Johnson, Maud is the dream wife of a certain kind of middle-class man: his mother, only younger and more obedient. Over in North Africa, Guinness has man’s other need: a sexy and glamorous spitfire of a wife who loves to go out dancing all night and who makes him the envy of every other man they encounter. Nita is played by the youthful Yvonne De Carlo (née Peggy Middleton) at the point in her career where movies were discovering that she might be able to do more than wear harem pants.
Guinness sails back and forth: his Paradise a hot life a few ni
ghts a week followed by a reassuring recuperation. Alas, as everyone but Guinness apparently knows, Paradise can only be lost. When he accidentally mixes up some gifts he’s bought for his women, everything crashes to earth. By mistake, De Carlo is given an apron intended for Johnson, and Johnson gets a sexy outfit designed for De Carlo, triggering hidden longings in the two wives, who clearly have their own ideas about Paradise. De Carlo suddenly wants to stay home and cook the captain’s dinner, and Johnson wants him to take her out on the town to rumba the night away. To make the story short, Guinness ends up facing a firing squad—and so much for the idea of the Captain’s Paradise. While it lasted, of course, it met the basic needs of the movie man.
In The Captain’s Paradise, Alec Guinness found the solution to every man’s problem: two different wives. With Yvonne De Carlo, out on the town for a hot rhumba, he was able to have his cake … (Photo Credit 2.44)
… and eat it, too, at a cozy little luncheon at home with his reliable wife, Celia Johnson. (Photo Credit 2.45)
What women want on their side of the married couple is less clearly presented in films. On the surface, women want love and reliability and a chance to kill themselves taking care of a man and a bunch of kids. However, what a woman is supposed to want and what she might want and what she gets are all muddled up, and there’s no one answer. There’s the simple level (a home), the noble level (to care for her man), the romantic level (love), and the venal (a fur coat). It is clear, however, that one of the major purposes of the marriage film as far as women were concerned is the empowerment they were lacking offscreen.24
Empowerment for women sometimes comes in a socially acceptable format: not as what a woman wants but as what she needs—or, more bluntly, what she ought to need to be considered a good woman. She needs a good learning experience. Thus, the marriage story is often presented as an emotional and educational journey for a woman, in which the emotional learning process becomes geographical. After she becomes half of a couple, the bride-is-taken-to-her-new-world-by-her-groom story is a fundamental strategy of the marriage movie, and the “new world” comes in many forms. In Never a Dull Moment (1950), a smart-talking Park Avenue songwriter (Irene Dunne) marries a cowboy (Fred MacMurray) and goes out to Wyoming to learn to be a ranch wife. In Mrs. Mike (1949), bride Evelyn Keyes is taken away from her urban life out to the Canadian wilderness by her Mountie husband (Dick Powell). In I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (1951), Susan Hayward is carted off to a rural mountain retreat where she must learn to cook and sew and support her circuit-riding preacher husband (William Lundigan). In Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), the wealthy Claudette Colbert is taken to the frontier by Henry Fonda, and in The Howards of Virginia (1940), the very, very aristocratic and wealthy Martha Scott is relocated to the cruder, earthier wilderness world of her pioneering husband, Cary Grant. (This common marriage ploy also appears in two Elizabeth Taylor films, Giant [1956] and Elephant Walk [1954].)
The bride-on-a-journey story carries an obvious metaphor. By removing the leading female character from wealth and ease, the subtextual issues are turned into concrete challenges: marauding Indians, bears, wolves, hostile other women, weather, loneliness, et al. Most of these brides can’t cook, can’t sew, can’t do the basic tasks required to survive in their new situation. They must learn. They must change. Furthermore, they must accept their position as wife and understand that their role is to support. These films aren’t meant to suggest this is really what women want; rather, it’s what society agrees is good for them to learn.25
The ability to tell the movie story in a way that could be read from different points of view and still come out in the same place was a phenomenon of the Hollywood product. Men could watch a bride’s journey and see it as exactly what he would expect from a woman he married. She could learn what she needed to be able to do in order to carry out his needs and accept the role assigned to her. A wife, or an unmarried woman, could read the same information as an example of her getting away from the restrictions of her unwed life (and her virginity) and becoming free to cope and to manage things, to take control and learn how much she can do on her own. This ultimate strategy of the marriage film followed the sly-boots tricks of all Hollywood movies, with their crime-doesn’t-pay (but isn’t it fun?) and sin-isn’t-good (but let’s have a look at some) approach.
The bride-on-a-journey movie always shows the first moment the bride sees her horrendous new home: an isolated shack with no amenities. Her face is a study in shock and disappointment, creating a strong alliance with any woman in the audience who’s been let down by her own expectations of dwelling space, not to mention romance and excitement. A neat variation on this moment of revelation occurs in the screen adaptation of Rebecca (1940). Joan Fontaine, the shy little bride, intones, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley” on the soundtrack in a dream that opens the film. Later she is shown really arriving at that mansion. As she anxiously peers out the window, the car rounds the corner to reveal: yikes! There sits Manderley in all its gigantic, overwhelming, aristocratic glory, showing her at once that she doesn’t belong. As she enters its hallowed halls for the first time, the servants have lined up to greet her. They are not hostile Indians or wolves or bears, but they might as well be as far as she’s concerned.
One of the most successful bride-on-a-journey movies was the film that introduced the characters of Ma and Pa Kettle, 1947’s The Egg and I, starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. Based on a best-selling book by Betty MacDonald, The Egg and I was among the year’s top-ten hit films. Everyone loved the story of the sophisticated and witty young woman who learned on her wedding night that her husband had quit his office job and, unbeknownst to her, bought a little chicken farm out in the boonies. Betty MacDonald became a household name, a popular speaker at women’s clubs. Her charming story told how a couple bonded together in hardship, split up over a minor misunderstanding, and reunited when their baby daughter was born. (Offscreen, MacDonald divorced the dope who sprang a chicken farm on her. The movie worked even if the marriage didn’t.)
The Egg and I presents a woman who’s the center of the story. When she first hears about the chickens, she says, “Whatever my husband chooses to do is all right with me.” What she says is one thing—how she looks when she says it is another. They set out in his car, and as they drive farther and farther up into the thickly wooded hills on their way to their new home, the goat they are bringing with them eats her new hat. (Every woman in the audience immediately knows that this hat thing is a terrible omen.) When the “house” is revealed, he’s delighted, she’s stunned. “Hasn’t it got a lot of character?” he booms out. What he sees and what she sees are clearly delineated to the audience as not the same thing. “None of that streamlined stuff,” he exults, as he shows her the pigpen, the chicken coop, and the stove from hell. When he attempts to carry her over the threshold, he can’t get the front door open. He has to set her down and force the door, knocking it off its hinges as she walks in behind him (another awful omen). She breaks a window, he falls through the porch, the roof leaks, and that’s their first night at the old chicken ranch.
Colbert, always a good sport, digs in. After she falls off the roof into the rain barrel and over into the muck of the pigsty, Ma Kettle says out loud what everyone can clearly see about the elegant actress: “You don’t look like a farmer to me.” Ma, happily if messily wed, gives Colbert some marriage advice: do it the guy’s way and it will work. Colbert actually complies. She gardens, she cooks, she sews, she repairs, she builds, she reaps and plants. She wears jeans and overalls and little dirndls. And, of course, she gathers eggs and hatches chicks. Lest we should all wonder why this woman even remotely considers staying out in the wilderness with a guy who pays no attention to her, we are allowed to see them have a romantic evening in which they dress up in their wedding clothes, consume a romantic dinner, dance lovingly together, and he actually does carry her over the threshold.
Living within proximity of Colbert and Mac
Murray is a glamorous and wealthy woman whose own farm is a thriving business (Louise Allbritton). She has money, a station wagon, and connections. When the other women at the square-dance party are in little blouses and skirts, she arrives in a fur stole, a cocktail suit, and a hat with a giant white feather on it.26 Allbritton’s wardrobe (and her interest in MacMurray) ultimately causes Colbert to pack up and leave. (One might wonder why she didn’t flee when she saw the pigpen.) Colbert goes home to Mother, has the baby she forgot to tell her husband about, and finally returns to him, happy to learn he’s bought Allbritton’s farm to give his wife a better life. All ends well.
The film was full of oddball characters, good spirits, and refreshing humor. Seen today, it’s hard to believe it was such a huge box-office draw, but what it says about couples and marriage is significant. First, it reaffirms the institution very strongly, definitely endorsing the idea that a man and his wife must work together to create a home for themselves, no matter what difficulties they face. Second, it says women must learn to accept whatever circumstances their husbands provide; and third, it suggests couples should make friends and turn to the community for help both as a couple and as individuals. It even endorses female friendship, as Ma Kettle and Colbert’s Betty help and support each other. It also warns a woman to watch out for the “other” woman, the one who’s after your husband for the wrong reasons. (With her own ranch, she doesn’t need him the way you do.) The Egg and I instructs women: they’re supposed to want what they’re supposed to have. Back in her mother’s expensive apartment, with its uniformed maid and an obviously luxurious lifestyle, Colbert takes her baby daughter in her arms for the first time and tells her mother that this places everything in the right perspective. “This is what really counts. I’m going back to Bob.”
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