I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  18 There were many about marriage: Wedding Bills (1940), How to Hold Your Husband—Back (1941), I Love My Mother-in-Law, But! (1948), I Love Children, But! (1952), etc.

  19 In later Thin Man movies, Nora becomes more domesticated. She becomes a mother, accompanies Nick on a visit home to his parents, and even dons an apron, but the movies are always Nick’s.

  20 Skippy appeared in many movies, including a star turn with bowler hats in The Awful Truth. Skippy later changed his name to Asta to simplify the problems he had with fans over the issue. On April 10, 2010, he was the clue in a New York Times crossword puzzle: “Skippy’s most famous role.” Answer? “Asta.”

  21 Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House created an ad that depicted its stars, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, standing on a bed, kissing each other, while two cartoon figures watch. “What are they doin’?” asks one, and the other answers, “Playin’ house, you square, the Blandings way.”

  22 The plots of women’s films indicate that women thought a perfect husband was a kind of daddy figure. He was rich, he gave you everything, he solved all your problems—and then he died and got out of your way so you could marry a really hot guy.

  23 When Grant unwraps Tobin’s bandages, she comes out of her surgery in full makeup, with mascara, lipstick, and eyeliner. Grant purrs, “When you first came to me, you were merely pretty, and you’ve become my most beautiful creature.”

  24 This need for power is carried to an extreme in movies in which the woman, knowing she is about to die, fails to mention it to her husband and micromanages what his life will be after she’s gone. In Sentimental Journey (1946), Maureen O’Hara tricks her husband into adopting a child to “carry on her spirit” after she’s dead. (In 1958 the film was remade as The Gift of Love with Lauren Bacall.) In No Sad Songs for Me (1950), Margaret Sullavan uses the last six months of her life to set her husband and daughter up with a new woman, Viveca Lindfors (in the “I am an Ingrid Bergman look-alike” phase of her career). Sullavan’s plan is unnecessary, because her husband has already pretty much selected Lindfors on his own. Sullavan endorses their affair, because Lindfors is a draftsman who will be useful in her husband’s architectural business. In the end, Sullavan and her clueless husband (played by Wendell Corey, an actor born to play clueless) enjoy a hot night of reconciliation, followed by their dream trip to Mexico, where she dies offscreen.

  25 The stories also gently suggest the husband’s need to learn to be sensitive, because these marriage films were really women’s pictures. The idea was modernized in 1981 with a role reversal in Continental Divide (1981). A romance grows up between a naturalist living in the Colorado Rockies so she can observe the activities of eagles (Blair Brown) and a tough-living, hard-driving Chicago newspaperman (John Belushi). When he comes out to the mountains to live with her, he has to learn to cope, city boy that he is.

  26 Since this was the sort of outfit that Colbert usually wore in movies, there’s a subtle message here. Allbritton has shown up in Colbert’s duds! It’s possible to think of her outfit as an anti-marriage suggestion: “This is how you could dress, if only you hadn’t married a chicken farmer.” Hollywood always believed in clothes, which were clearly, by its standards, more important than a happy marriage.

  27 Under Eighteen does have some relief from the Depression and its financial woes. When Marsh, modeling a chinchilla coat, encounters the rich womanizer Warren William, he invites her to a party at his penthouse. All the girls are wearing bathing suits and diving into his swimming pool to recover jewels they can then keep.

  28 Davis goes to work in a department store, a female territory, and the owner naturally falls in love with her and gives her everything. They are super-compatible, and he stands around waiting to marry her in case she should ever be of that mind. She never is.

  29 These three daughters are parented by Beulah Bondi and Henry Travers, a constantly kvetching pair who have nonetheless obviously made a solid marriage with each other and a good home life for their girls over the years. Why can’t the daughters make good marriages?

  Their Problems

  Audiences knew a marriage movie would always be about a couple, but such movies had to search beyond two recurring characters (a husband and a wife) to be interesting. They needed recognizable events, settings, problems, and audience goals. In movie marriages, as in real life, wedding bells ring, brides come down the aisle, cakes are cut, babies are born. Meals are cooked and shirts get ironed. Paychecks are brought home. Jobs are won and lost. Quarrels and disagreements erupt, and misunderstandings lead to walkouts. Couples live in homes with bedrooms and kitchens. People sit around dinner tables, celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. Unlike the events of a horror movie or a western or a musical, the events of a marriage movie were the events of day-to-day life, and these events and settings were so familiar that they were difficult to think of as interesting story material. Even when the generic setting suggested danger, marriage could dull things down: in Son of Frankenstein (1939), the baron and his missus have to juggle servants, mealtime, the needs of their little son, and redecorating the Transylvanian mansion as well as monsters and angry villagers. What happened in marriage that could be made exciting, fun, tear-jerking, explanatory, and meaningful?

  The movies found a set of problems that actually plagued real marriages and that could be used to identify story type, connect to audience experience, and still provide drama. Just as in a horror movie an audience knows not to shower alone or go down to the basement or up to the attic to check out those strange noises … just as in a western they know to get out of the dusty street before the final shootout … they came to know what the problems were going to be in any movie marriage. The difference is that in a movie about marriage, the audience made the rules. The problems were theirs to give, and the movies were receivers, not definers. The audience was living the marriage definition, or had lived it, or was watching someone else live it. This shifted everything. Although there was generic definition onscreen, nobody needed to identify it or label it as such. Hollywood didn’t always avoid the truth; it just reshaped where it was headed. Audiences responded in kind. They knew truth, and they knew fantasy. (That’s often forgotten today.) The audiences of the past knew when they were escaping, and they knew what they were escaping from. They could accept a link between the two. When it came to day-to-day living, and the ins and outs of marriage, audiences were not confused, and the movies played with that knowledge. In Paris, Peoria, or Patagonia, no matter how tarted up with typhoons, revolutions, musical numbers, and lumberjacks, no matter how many distracting decorative touches such as rose gardens and fringed lampshades, the same seven problems were the repeated reasons, excuses, plot points—the whatevers—of conflict in marriage movies. Audiences recognized them, understood them, believed in them. According to the movies, the issues that threaten marital bliss are:

  1. Money. Money kills love. And whereas you probably can buy love with money, you can’t buy money with love.

  2. Infidelity and/or adultery. Someone will get the itch, and it probably won’t take seven years. Benign or deadly, true love or brief dalliance, outside the domestic window the grass is always greener.

  3. In-laws and children—the baggage of marriage—are supposed to be blessings, but, alas, they are humans. Families interfere. The movies clearly teach that the ideal mate would be an orphan.

  4. Incompatibility. Couples rush to the movie altar without noticing fundamental differences: he says “either” and she says “eye-ther.” He eats a potato, and she eats a po-tah-to. Movies suggest that incompatibility—with the attendant issues of competition, control, and communication—can’t be understood until after the words “I do” are spoken.

  5. Class. Americans claim to have no class distinctions, but the movies say otherwise. If the wife wears a dress with too many ruffles, she’s dead at the party up at the big house on the hill. For Hollywood, the ruffle is like the British cockney accent—a dead giveaway that your b
ackground is not up to snuff. Unless you’re Audrey Hepburn, and it’s a single emerald-green satin ruffle starting at the tip of your toes and winding around your skinny-mini body up to your swanlike neck so you can peer over it with your doe eyes, you’d better not show up in ruffles. (Such snobbery is a two-way street: if you can’t dunk a donut at a local diner, you’re not only no fun at all, but drop-dead stupid.) No matter how strong your love, class differences will surface … and bite you in the ass—or in the ruffle.

  6. Addiction. Addiction kills everything—love, the economic balance, the marriage, the family, the career, the reputation. An addicted partner must reform, or die.

  7. Murder. When you marry a murderer, your marriage is in trouble.

  One or more of these seven problems appears in all marriage movies. Each one can be evaluated in terms of realism, with the most realistic being money problems, followed closely by the temptation of infidelity and problems with in-laws and children. These three—money, infidelity, and family issues—exist on the scale toward the side of truth for the audience. Somewhere mid-center lie the complicated issues of compatibility (competition, control, etc.) and various forms of class differences, often redefined by Hollywood as “education” or “money,” so that the difference was specifically social, encompassing manners, fashion, behavior, or a difference in lifestyle goals. Moving toward the “unrealistic” were stories in which marriage was marred by addiction of some sort; and finally there was the truly bizarro issue, murder. Murder was on the crazy side—and yet, who has not said to a loved one, “I’m going to kill you if you … ”? Audiences loved movies in which one mate tried to murder another. One does not need to speculate why.

  Each of the seven issues had flexibility. Each had its own appeal, its own credibility, its own “fun” quota, and its own goals of audience identification. Each could be presented as comic or tragic, positively or negatively. For instance, lack of money could destroy love, but the need for it could unite a couple in their goals. A poor couple might struggle along, fighting their way forward, and despite their hardship learn that true love is the very best currency there is (audience identification strong), or a rich couple, with all their good stuff on display—including the usual mansion, chauffeured car, furs, jewels, and kitchen the size of Phoenix—could learn that losing their money would make them better people and certainly a better couple (audience identification skeptical, but happy with the shopping tour). Similarly, stories of infidelity could be sexy fun, or they could be dramatically tragic. In-laws could be hilarious comedy relief or a bunch of lying spongers. “Class” differences offered audiences the delicious opportunity to experience plots in which someone like them broke free of the restrictions of their backgrounds and became rich … and that could turn out well (giving hope) or turn out badly (sending them home reassured about their own situation). Incompatibility was ever reliable, offering screenwriters the chance to write all sorts of witty male/female bickering in different moods and tones. (Some of the very best writing about marriage in the movies is linked to stories about competition, control, and lack of communication. Since these movies were almost always about resolving the problem of incompatibility, this “problem” was popular.)

  Obviously the most limited of these seven issues were the two that carried the strongest negativity: addiction and murder. These offered great drama and performance opportunities, but they were the least flexible, the hardest to inspire empathy in the audience. Addiction was no fun at all, and filmmakers quickly learned that this was a topic with limited appeal. In general, movies about addiction in marriage did little to cheer audiences up. To make it work, the addict had better be a really great movie star—preferably a singer tackling a serious role—or there was going to be trouble at the box office.1 It did, however, have two strengths: it was believable, and curing it gave audiences hope. And it provided the opportunity for a great box-office hit starring a potential Oscar winner. (Sometimes movies would have a drunk scene in a marriage, but this didn’t make the movie about addiction. In The Male Animal [1942], Henry Fonda, husband of Olivia de Havilland, gets roaringly and hilariously drunk when her old boyfriend, an unlikely Jack Carson, turns up.) As for murder as a marital sin, it blew the rules out the door; but on the other hand, it loosed the hounds of hell onto marriage, thereby visually satisfying many audience members who were never going to avenge their disappointments any other way. And it could be made funny, as in the wonderful Preston Sturges comedy Unfaithfully Yours (1948), in which orchestra conductor Rex Harrison creatively imagines murdering his wife (Linda Darnell) in three different ways, each one reflecting the mood of the music he’s conducting.2

  MONEY

  In the movies, there are two amounts of money available to married couples: too much and too little. Neither works. When it comes to money, there are no solutions, only platitudes. Money, always money: the subliminal message Hollywood sent audiences was: “Just shut up about it. We’re giving you a way to escape that you can afford.”

  Money was not only a marriage issue—it was an American cultural issue. It was the root of all. Movies had from the beginning tapped into the public’s desire to see what they didn’t have, to take visual ownership of luxury if they couldn’t get it any other way. Movies, no matter how serious or deep-dish, usually were a shopping trip. Beauty, love and sex, travel, clothes, cars, jewelry … and, naturally, good furniture. Moviegoers came to shop, and they didn’t go home empty-headed, just empty-handed. They “bought” in a form of mental rental, and they always came back another day to see their goods, those fabulous things they had selected but left up there on the screen when the lights came up and they had to go home.

  Movies acknowledged—but never endorsed—the audience’s greed. In But the Flesh Is Weak (1932), starring C. Aubrey Smith and Robert Montgomery as a father-and-son gold-digging team, the father advises his son, “Love dies. Money lasts.” And in Merrily We Go to Hell (also 1932), a cynical male reporter muses, “When we’re young, we want to marry for love … and when we’re a little bit older, we want to marry for a Rolls-Royce.”3 These coldhearted, even cruel observations are presented with conviction, and yet the final fade-out of both movies finds love and romance triumphant. (Movies are amazingly two-faced, but they get away with it.)

  When a marriage movie presents a couple who are struggling financially, the sympathy is always with the struggle; but when a marriage goes wrong because of too much money, there’s blame to be assigned. Hollywood cheerfully endorsed poverty, one of the most hypocritical aspects of the moviemaking business. Over and over again, not just during the Depression, audiences were told that having no money was not only okay, it was probably better than having too much. If you’re poor, you can make up for it by singing around the piano, popping corn (assuming you had any—not to mention a piano), and really caring for each other. If you had money, you’d have none of this good fun. You’d be going out to lavish dinners, shopping for furs, and tolerating your servants, and who could possibly want any of that? The lesson to be learned was a simple one: do not make money your goal in marriage. The pursuit of money, or even falling into it accidentally (discovering oil or inheriting millions) can unsettle your relationship. Poverty was treated as a form of pseudo-security for the average moviegoer: you have no money, therefore your marriage is safe.

  Money as a topic provided reassurance for moviegoers by telling them over and over again three things:

  1. Marrying for money is always wrong, and will never work out.

  2. Money is a problem for everyone: it makes both rich and poor suffer.

  3. When money comes into your life, it will bring changes you may not like—possibly even danger. You’re probably better off as you are.

  Almost all marriage movies deal in some way with money issues. (Even Blondie had to go on a budget.) One of the most familiar formats is one in which a young couple rise from poverty to wealth—and lose everything that counts along the way. (Their love, and their children, die.
) These rags-to-riches plots are very American, as they address the immigrant experience. In this case, the “journey” is not from a foreign country over to America, but from the “other country” of poverty to the one of wealth. It is about the dream of luxury and success that the mythology of America always promised. Since most citizens didn’t find it, the format reassured them. A rags-to-riches movie has all three of the above-stated goals: warning, suffering, and change.

  The rags-to-riches rise of a couple is beautifully exemplified by a movie that should be better known: The Power and the Glory (1933), starring Spencer Tracy and Colleen Moore, directed by William K. Howard, and written by a young Preston Sturges. The script (a forerunner of Citizen Kane) tells an overlapping, out-of-sequence tale of a man and his wife who journey from the railroad tracks to the top of the financial mountain—and who, in gaining everything, lose everything.

  A story that’s told not just in flashback but out of chronological sequence offers the opportunity for an audience to view all events, even happy ones, with melancholy.4 When we see what a couple become (old and miserable) before we see what they once were (young and optimistic), their story takes on an inescapable sadness. The optimism of love and devotion in marriage is seriously, deliberately undermined. (The Power and the Glory, like so many portraits of misery in marriage, was not a huge success at the box office.) It begins with the lavish and laudatory funeral of the railroad tycoon hero, Spencer Tracy, who has actually committed suicide. The film is “narrated” by Tracy’s faithful lifetime friend Ralph Morgan, who at the same time also has an ongoing conversation with his own wife about Tracy’s character. In a series of transitional scenes, these two give an audience both the male and the female view of Tracy’s marriage. Their words become almost the equivalent of an audience debate, although the actual voice-over narration is always a single voice—Morgan’s. His explanation for what happened to Tracy is simple: “He fell in love, that’s all … he couldn’t help it.”