I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  The Egg and I is an example of how a movie marriage could work the double standard for an audience. On the surface, the husband is a nice guy. We aren’t supposed to hate him, but we are allowed to think of him as wrong, especially because we are allowed to see the subtle reaction to everything he does from Claudette Colbert, who could imply like no other actress could imply. It is possible to watch this movie and have pure fun, a happy experience (especially since it’s going to turn out all right), or watch it in a horrified state as it speaks out loud of problems women might know and feel (“He never asks me what I want to do,” “I’m killing myself with work,” “We have nothing,” etc.).

  The Egg and I tells the story of a marriage: bride Claudette Colbert carried over the threshold by groom Fred MacMurray … (Photo Credit 2.46)

  … bride Colbert coping with groom MacMurray’s pigs …

  … and bride Colbert getting it across just how she feels about it.

  Ambivalence—show both escape and an underlying truth—is built into the marriage movie’s pattern of affirm, destroy, and reaffirm. The Egg and I, a bride-on-a-journey film, shows everyone how hard it is to make marriage work; but in the tradition of the format, it suggests that if a woman keeps at it and follows the rules, it will endure. Once again, a movie suggests to viewers that marriage is all most couples will ever have: it will be children, a home, and each other. Make the best of it and, as MacMurray says in The Egg and I, “believe in each other.”

  On the other hand, a great many small, forgotten movies clearly spell out marital disappointment. Under Eighteen (1932) presents a disastrous marriage as a lesson to be learned for a young girl who is “under eighteen.” (Presumably, there is time for her to learn.) The very pretty and almost totally unknown Marian Marsh plays the girl, who watches her older sister (Anita Page) enter into marriage through a glorious ceremony with orchids, bridesmaids, and starry-eyed optimism. “There are lots of reasons for marriage,” says their mother. “Convenience … money … infatuation … but the only ones that last are those based on love.” The teenager believes it.

  Within no time, however, the father of the family (who was going to help the young couple financially) is dead and the Depression is on. Marsh and her mom are living in a slum (“I’m sick of everything,” she says) and she’s refusing to marry the boy she loves (Regis Toomey) because he’s only a trucker and hasn’t got enough money. As if to reinforce her determination, Marsh is confronted daily with the sight of sister Page and her worthless husband, who are sponging off Mom and Sis. Hubby has no real job—he’s a part-time pool hustler. There’s a kid, they argue night and day, and their marriage is an ugly picture.

  There’s an opposite lesson for Marsh, who works as a seamstress in a fashion house. The models aren’t married, and they have spending money, fur coats, and flowers from their “boyfriends.” (“They like to make believe they’re happy,” the store matron warns Marsh.) Her unhappy sister tells Marsh that “marriage is a great game for guys—using girls like us, the saps that we are,” but Sis needs no warnings. “If I hand myself to a man for life,” she says, “it’s cash on delivery … Marriage is the bunk, at least it is for poor people.”27

  Ambivalence was built into stories about the choices women make in marriage. What sort of couple would they become part of? Who was a good “better half”? Three women could choose three different husbands (and thus three different lifestyles) and suffer the consequences of each. (The answer to what women wanted, on Hollywood terms, was clearly: everything—or whatever worked at the box office.) Movies that offered choices most commonly presented three unmarried young women, alone in life but trying to make their way forward. Marriage was one of three end goals: one would want money (and thus was doomed to die); one would want a career (and end up lonely and miserable); and one would want to find true love and get married (the cop-out role model, often played by the least stellar of the group). There could be variations on this format: the money grubber could end up in the gutter, and the career woman might die (prostitution and alcoholism hovered over both), but the idea was that the three choices available for women were love and marriage, money, and career. Films such as Three Blind Mice; Sally, Irene and Mary; and Our Modern Maidens were about what young women should want, but showed what they secretly did want. There was a subversive subtext.

  The “three choices” format was still going strong in the 1950s as the studio system began to wheeze its way out: Three Coins in the Fountain (1953), for example, and The Best of Everything (1959). The story of three working girls was perked up with wide-screen location shooting in Rome for Three Coins and in New York City for The Best of Everything. Romance—but really marriage—was pursued in Three Coins by three females who each represented a different age group. Dorothy McGuire played a fully mature secretary to an (as always) acerbic Clifton Webb; Jean Peters was a nubile, ready-for-life young woman who nearly goes wrong with an Italian, Rossano Brazzi (because we all know Europeans want sex, unlike us Americans); and Maggie McNamara played a late-teenage virgin who wins the heart of rich Lothario, Louis Jourdan.

  In The Best of Everything, based on a best seller by Rona Jaffe, Suzy Parker, Hope Lange, and Diane Baker were updated into modern Manhattan career girls. A glossy presentation with high fashion, glamorous settings, and more than enough plot, The Best of Everything suggests that marriage is still the proper goal for such young women, but that in the meantime, it’s not careers they need—it’s sex. At least, sex is the bottom line for each of their story lines: one has an affair with a stage producer; one gets pregnant while unwed; and one is offered what is politely termed “an arrangement” instead of a traditional wedding. The Best of Everything provides an imaginary depiction of the book-publishing world as a hotbed of sexual intrigue in which an occasional book gets published. Its best fun is found in the small but meaty role played by Joan Crawford, already in her legendary era. All by herself she’s a cautionary tale. She’s a frankly older but highly successful career woman who has clung to a longtime affair with a married man. The part isn’t much, but Crawford sets it on fire, fueling it with repressed rage to depict her trapped status as the “other woman” who finally realizes she’s wasted her life. (Variety said a good subtitle for The Best of Everything might be “Except for Men—Who Are Beasts.”)

  When marriage is the subject of the “threesome” picture, all three women get married, and each of the resulting couples represents a level of marital success or failure. A perfect example of this format is The Sisters (1938), starring Bette Davis, Anita Louise, and Jane Bryan. These actresses play daughters of a turn-of-the-century pharmacist in Silver Bow, Montana. All three have as their goal becoming part of a married couple, but their sense of what they want from a partner is very different. Davis begins the film engaged to a solidly reliable man, but she romps off in the dark of night with Errol Flynn after the two of them spot each other during a do-si-do at a local dance. Flynn is in town for only one night, but when he and Davis lock eyeballs, that’s it. He marries her before the train pulls out, and takes her to his life as a sportswriter in San Francisco. Davis didn’t want a dull and secure marriage; she wanted love, and a very exciting version of it, too. The second daughter, Louise, is coolly calculating. She wants to get out of Silver Bow and have “things.” She opts to marry the older, widowed (and very wealthy) father of a disapproving school friend, and she makes this choice because he (Alan Hale) promises to give her everything and expect nothing in return. (She has told him frankly she doesn’t love him and never will.) The third daughter, Bryan, is a cheerful, tomboyish type with no particular goal other than the safe marriage Davis rejected. Young and inexperienced, she happily scoops up Davis’s abandoned fiancé. The two of them have a friendly relationship which she interprets as love. They wed, settle down to a comfortable life in Silver Bow, and babies arrive around the calendar.

  Ironically, all their marriages are disastrous. Flynn turns out to be an alcoholic who can’t accept the day-to-d
ay grind of marriage. He loves Davis, but feels guilty when she loses their baby because of their impoverished circumstances—and then even worse when he gets fired from his job, can’t finish his novel, and keeps on drinking. When Davis finally gets a job (at which she excels, heading toward a career),28 Flynn is devastated and hops a freighter out of town. Davis is left behind to suffer through the San Francisco earthquake all by herself—so the lesson for women is that if you want to keep out of earthquakes, marry the boy back home. Make a safe coupling.

  The Sisters doesn’t have a lot of plot time for the other sisters. Louise, whose story was more fully developed in the best-selling novel of 1937, falls in love with a young nobleman on a trip to Europe. When Hale has a convenient heart attack and she becomes a widow, she marries outside her class. This marriage doesn’t work, either. (She is on her third one when she arrives home in Silver Bow toward the end of the film.) Bryan has to face the fact that her husband is not only ignoring her and his kids, but is also having an affair. (Davis and Louise arrive home to fix this. They threaten the other men who have dallied with the very same local hussy: unless they run her out of town, the sisters will tattle to their wives.)

  Although all three marriages are failures, the plot focus endorses the Davis/Flynn arrangement. These two, after all, are stars, and thus entitled, but they also are in love, and thus really entitled. Although it makes no sense, an unshaven, still-alcoholic Flynn returns to Silver Bow to once again claim Davis during a do-si-do. One might say their love has come full circle, and one would be right. It has gone around in a circle and is apparently headed the same way again. The film endorses Davis and Flynn because they represent the choice of love. Louise married for money, and Bryan didn’t know what love really was—she just wanted to be married.29 The film says that the sisters knew what they wanted, but they were wrong about it. Only Davis has the right goal: love. She will suffer, but it’s worth it because she loves her husband and he loves her. They are an appropriate romantic couple, even if their marriage stinks. Although Louise has money and travel and “things,” and Bryan has comfort, safety, and children, Davis has what they don’t have—she has love. The Sisters thus becomes a romantic melodrama about married couples, designed to both reassure women in the audience with failed marriages and still provide them with a visual endorsement of their misery.

  Star pairings, definitions of what men and women wanted from each other, how “union” could be defined and/or seen, the standards for perfection in a wife or husband, reflections of audience behavior, suggestions about what to look for in a mate: all these things were the purpose of the presentation of “the couple” in the marriage film. The couple was the first element in a marriage movie. Their problems were the second.

  1 Another outside-the-four-walls-of-conventionality marriage is one that appears in Apache, a 1954 western starring Burt Lancaster as a wild Native American who is domesticated by a willing squaw played by Jean Peters.

  2 Movies, of course, weren’t always careful with biographical truth: they created romances wherever they felt they were needed. But the idea of Anna becoming the Queen of Siam would have stretched all credibility.

  3 This concept doesn’t really apply to couples who were cast together only after they actually had gotten married, and the casting was designed to cash in on their publicity. Such couples include Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, and others. Bogart and Bacall first fell in love in front of audiences in 1944’s To Have and Have Not, when they were not yet wed. They continued to be a fabulous team even after they were Mr. and Mrs., however. Their chemistry never died in films such as The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947). They were still excellent in 1948’s Key Largo. Married offscreen, they’re unmarried in the plot; yet they have a comfort in each other’s presence, and a mutual timing, a real-life married rhythm. Like Bogart and Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton notoriously fell in love while making a film—Cleopatra, in 1963—but they generated little heat on film. The movies they made together after their marriage (The VIPs [1963], The Sandpiper [1965], etc.) show no real sexual spark between them. Perhaps images really can reveal onscreen marital compatibility. Bogart and Bacall spent the rest of their lives together; Taylor and Burton did not.

  4 These offscreen ceremonies that took place in the heads of moviegoers sometimes went beyond reason. Fans wanted to believe in star “marriage” so badly that they wrote in, begging them to actually get married right now. Sometimes fans even began to believe the couple were married—it happened to Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, and later, as the result of an advertising campaign for Polaroid, to James Garner and Mariette Hartley.

  5 The two actors could be men, as in the “buddy” movies of Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable (Test Pilot, Boom Town, San Francisco), Paul Newman and Robert Redford (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting) or Michael Caine and Sean Connery (The Man Who Would Be King). Women buddies were less common, although the beautiful Thelma Todd made seventeen comedy shorts paired with Zasu Pitts and twenty-one with Patsy Kelly in the early 1930s. Marie Dressler and Polly Moran made features such as Prosperity (1932). One cannot forget, also, the spectacular twosome of Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Talk about buddies!

  6 Similarly, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, the singing version of Astaire and Rogers, made eight movies together and were married in only two, Sweethearts (1938) and Bitter Sweet (1940). In I Married an Angel (1942) the marriage takes place inside Eddy’s dream, and in Maytime (1937), Eddy is shot before they can enjoy their life together. Eddy and MacDonald were wedded through song in the way Astaire and Rogers were through dance.

  7 As is almost always true in movie history, there’s an exception in which Ginger pursues Fred: Carefree, with Astaire oddly cast as a psychiatrist who, of course, dances.

  8 People often say that Astaire and Rogers are mismatched because she’s very down-to-earth and American, and he’s more sophisticated and European. Rogers was from Texas, and Astaire was from Nebraska. His onscreen personality is as jaunty, flip, and brash as hers.

  9 In Julia Misbehaves they’re a divorced couple who act as if they’re still married—and inevitably reunite at the end.

  10 It’s interesting to note that when I first began asking people to name marriage movies they remembered, only one person mentioned Hepburn and Tracy—and she couldn’t think of a single film they were in. (Later, she thought of Pat and Mike (1952), in which they aren’t married.) As I talked to people about marriage in the movies, I realized that Hepburn and Tracy were famously thought of as not married. That was their triumph: as a high-profile, cohabiting unmarried couple.

  11 It’s one of those fortuitous moments in film history when, as with Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, a couple fated to be together come together, right in front of our eyes. It’s magic.

  12 The film makes an interesting comparison to Without Love (see this page), which is Adam’s Rib without the sex, but also without a nasty undertone of competitive rivalry and distrust. Without Love shows Hepburn and Tracy working together successfully, in great harmony and without competition—until, of course, they fall in love and things fall apart. In Adam’s Rib, in which they are allegedly happily wed and have plenty of love and sex, another story runs underneath the screen.

  13 It was said of Astaire and Rogers that she gave him sex appeal and he gave her class. Hepburn and Tracy reverse the idea: he gives her sex appeal and she gives him class.

  14 As soon as a movie like The Thin Man became an enormous hit, Hollywood not only went on making more Thin Man movies but also created imitations. There was the successful “Joel and Garda Sloane” series about two rare-book dealers who solve crimes—three movies, each with a different set of stars to play the married couple: Fast Company (1938) with Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice; Fast and Loose (1939) with Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell; and Fast and Furious (also 1939) with Franc
hot Tone and Ann Sothern. Gracie Allen (without George Burns) paired with William Post in Mr. and Mrs. North (1941), a movie version of a popular radio series with married sleuths. Loretta Young and Brian Aherne played a mystery writer and his wife caught up in murder in A Night to Remember (1943), and Joan Blondell and Melvyn Douglas played married private eyes in There’s Always a Woman (1938). An odd two-film series (also about a mystery writer and his wife who solve real crimes) paired Allyn Joslyn and Evelyn Keyes: Dangerous Blondes in 1943 and Strange Affair in 1944. The two films presented the characters as completely different couples: Jane and Barry Craig in the first, Bill and Jacqueline Harrison in the second.

  15 Their son, Alexander (originally known as “Baby Dumpling”), would be born in 1934, and their daughter, Cookie (all of America participated in the contest to name her), in 1941.

  16 Singleton and Lake were in the right place at the right time. Lake was born into show business, the son of circus acrobats. He played in his first film in the silent era, and also starred in Harold Teen (1928), another movie about a comic-strip character—a sort of underage Dagwood Bumstead. Lake can famously be seen in the Cary Grant/Constance Bennett success Topper (1937) and several other movies of the era. He worked steadily as a freelance actor, and in 1942 wed Patricia Van Cleeve, Marion Davies’s young niece, who was rumored to actually be her daughter with William Randolph Hearst. Singleton originally had appeared on Broadway and in movies under her birth name, Dorothy McNulty, until she married Dr. Lawrence Singleton in 1937 and changed her name to Penny Singleton. As McNulty, she appeared in, among other films, After the Thin Man (1936), in which she sang and danced.

  17 It was also an updating of the old “make fun of marriage” situation from the silent era, a newer version of Mabel and Fatty. The public also seemed able to believe in marriages that were clearly cartoonish—and that clearly did not try to bend a big-name-star’s persona down into the plot. “Star pairings” required a star’s level of plot, fashion, and furniture.