The Yearling (1946) is based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s celebrated novel about a young boy and his pet deer, but central to the story is the marriage of his backwoods parents, played by Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. Beautifully shot on location in Florida, The Yearling shows poor people to be wise, even noble, and the marriage to be steady as a rock despite disagreements. The Sundowners (1960) is the story of a family of sheepherders in Australia, with Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum as a couple whose goals are different. She would like to settle down, have a home; he loves the nomadic life of herding. Their passion for each other, and their commitment to their marriage, is again seen as having a nobility and truth to it that might not be found in richer, steadier homes. Perhaps the best film about a couple struggling to make a living in an outback arena is The Southerner (1945), directed by Jean Renoir, starring Zachary Scott and Betty Field. Scott and Field face hardships every step of the way to make their farmland support their family, and the film has an honesty and a sensitivity that is especially real in the marriage of Scott and Field, who are presented working side by side, accepting their fate, and fighting hard for their kinfolk and children. All these movies have marriage as a secondary issue, but the presentation of couples who are not distracted by trivia and who really must work together for survival and who as a result find little pleasure except in each other, are films that cannot be ignored when considering issues of “money” in marriage movies.
INFIDELITY
In 2010, state legislators in New Hampshire attempted to repeal the state’s two-hundred-year-old adultery laws. The original punishment included standing on the gallows for an hour with a noose around the neck. Over time, the penalty had been softened to paying a $1,200 fine. What was personal and physical had become financial. Adultery had become a misdemeanor with a fine and no jail time, and was rarely, if ever, enforced by criminal laws. New Hampshire State Representative Timothy Horrigan (a Democrat) stated firmly, “We shouldn’t be regulating people’s sex lives and their love lives.”
This could be bad news for Hollywood, which has been regulating them for quite a while and charging money for the privilege. The Production Code that was adopted by the motion-picture industry on June 13, 1934, and put into action at that time was specifically vague—or vaguely specific—about infidelity in the way only the canny movie business could be. One of its three general principles stated that “no picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it … Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin.” Under the category of “Sex,” along with instructions about “scenes of passion” and “seduction or rape,” the Code stated: “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing. Adultery, sometimes necessary plot material, must not be explicitly treated, or justified, or presented attractively.” After paying lip service to good taste, morality, etc., etc., the Code concluded with a section entitled “Reasons Underlying the General Principles.” This section had a few significant reminders, such as: “Note: Sympathy with a person who sins is not the same as sympathy with the sin or crime of which he is guilty … The presentation of evil is often essential for art or fiction or drama. This in itself is not wrong … Sin and evil enter into the story of human beings and hence in themselves are valid material … such subjects are occasionally necessary for the plot … ,” etc. In other words, “sin and evil” would be open to interpretation if “done in good taste” because the movies just might be reluctantly forced into presenting them for the purpose of plot. It would be, of course, only in everyone’s best interest.
Infidelity—and its legal judgment, adultery—was from the very beginning of movies a favorite topic for a story about marriage. Infidelity involved love, however misguided, but its physical action was sex, always the real glamour of Hollywood’s “love” scam. The myriad variations that could be found (good man sleeps with bad woman, good woman takes on bad man, two good people justified, two good people not justified, two bad people, and so on) were solid box-office business.
The infidelity movie was potentially the really fun version of the marriage film. It brought viewers excitement—a little dash of naughtiness at the local movie theater. Everybody could get dressed up in tuxedos and furs, flirt around all bare-shouldered in the moonlight, misunderstand each other, stomp off with a rival to a luxury spa or a ski lodge or a foreign city to swill champagne on a hotel terrace, and then make it all right again with kisses and hugs.11 The marriage story about infidelity could easily embrace the exotic, and provide sensuous settings, clothing, and design. As the years went by, the subject always remained on the screen, sometimes as comic bedroom romp (Up in Mabel’s Room, 1944), sometimes as an emotional disaster (Strangers When We Meet, 1960), sometimes as a sly and witty suggestion (Captain’s Paradise, 1953), and sometimes as a cautionary tale (Unfaithful, 2002).
The popularity of the infidelity movie was established in the silent era with movies like The Cheat. The goals were always contradictory but clear. Movies rode a fine line between censoring (as required) and liberating (as desired). Infidelity provided an opportunity for filmmakers to use visual imagination, because it had to be implied, not specifically shown. Some of the movies’ most beautiful and memorable scenes involve infidelity. The discordant goals of caution, love, exotic escape, disaster, and sexual excitement could also be modulated to reflect changing morality over the decades.
Infidelity was everywhere onscreen, which is really fascinating, since, because of censorship, technically it couldn’t be anywhere at all (unless someone was going to die and pay for it). It is absolutely appropriate that one of the most honest and touching movies ever made about adultery is a movie in which it is denied: Brief Encounter (1945). How ironic is that?12 The point of the movie is to depict the emotions that might generate adultery, not enact it. The concerns of the film are the loneliness of marriage, the dullness of its daily comforts. Brief Encounter, starring Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, is all the more devastating—and honest—as a result, and it doesn’t matter whether they actually have sex or not. The two leading characters are not looking for adventure or cheap excitement. They are not fooled or hoodwinked by each other. They meet accidentally, are drawn together, and are as confused by their feelings as they are excited by them. They are excellent audience surrogates.
Brief Encounter presents a story that could happen to any two people. Johnson is a housewife, and a good one. She is cheerful, humorous, and loyal to her husband and family. Her husband is a good provider, and is always kind to her and appreciative of her efforts. They reside in a cozy little cottage with a fireplace and plenty of rose-patterned chintz chairs and good hot cups of tea. They have settled into comfortably ignoring each other most of the time. The audience never sees Howard’s home or his wife. It’s implied that he’s less happily situated, but he’s not a philanderer. Neither of these two people is actively looking for an affair, and yet one day in the railroad station, between trains, they have a brief encounter.
The story that unspools tells of an unfulfilled love between two middle-aged married people, based on a famous one-act play by Noël Coward. Expanded into a full-length motion picture, it has filled in the gaps without losing the original sadness. A voice-over (Johnson) has been added that helps repress any censorship issues and that also creates a deep sympathy for the wife. “There will come a time in the future when I can look back … and it will all be in perspective,” she says. As she knits, her husband works his crossword puzzle. They listen to Rachmaninoff. Her voice-over says, “We’re a happily married couple … This is my home … I’m an ordinary woman.” An audience can hear the very large “but” hanging in the silence. “I have fallen in love.”
A great deal of explanation and justification lies in the sound track of the film. Johnson admits to being “like a romantic schoolgirl” and that she “
imagined [Howard] holding me in his arms” and “all kinds of glamorous circumstances … It was one of those absurd fantasies just like one has when one is a girl—being wooed and married by the ideal of one’s dreams.” Johnson says she pictures herself and Howard when they were both young—at a box in the opera, in Venice on a gondola, traveling to “all the places I’ve always wanted to go.” (So where does she actually go? To the movies.)
The unfulfilled desires of Johnson and Howard represent the dreams that will never come true for the audience, and the realization (and final acceptance) of that fact is the genius of the movie. When both characters realize how hopeless things are, he takes a job in Johannesburg (that’s far enough), and tells her, “Let’s prepare ourselves.” After they say goodbye, she runs out toward the tracks just as the express is roaring through, but “I was not brave enough” to be an Anna Karenina. When she returns home, her husband gently tells her, “Wherever you’ve been … a long way … thank you for coming back to me.”
A Brief Encounter between two lonely married people (Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard) leads to a return to their spouses, who will never know what happened. (Photo Credit 2.52)
Brief Encounter was, and is, a beloved and highly respected film, an international hit. Its tender and low-key tale (British manners cover all trauma) touched a chord in adults. It is a story about longing, yearning, and knowing it’s too late to really be able to do anything about it that could possibly work. It may be the finest adultery movie ever made.
Brief Encounter is as British as it gets, but there’s a Hollywood movie about middle-aged married people who are lonely and yearning for something more in their lives, who also learn they must keep a grip on reality. Its rhythms, attitudes, and events are purely American, and a useful contrast to the British version. The Facts of Life (1960) stars Lucille Ball and Bob Hope. It, too, is an “almost adultery” story about settled people who accidentally, against all expectations and intentions, end up falling in love with each other. Since Ball and Hope are primarily known for comedy, an audience might expect to find nothing much but a silly slapstick affair. While it is true that the story does ultimately disintegrate into physical comedy, the movie opens up honestly and moves forward with a touchingly sad portrait of marital isolation and disappointment. A precredit sequence shows the arrival of an airplane, happily anticipated by an ordinary-looking Bob Hope. A lovely Lucille Ball disembarks, and he embraces her—“Hello, dear”—and goes to get her luggage. As far as any audience can see, they are a happily married couple, because that’s what they look like and that’s what they act like. (They don’t know any other way to behave.) And that, as it turns out, will be what the movie is all about. No matter what illicit love they desire, they really only know how to be married people.
As she sits waiting for Hope to return, Ball’s voice-over reveals the truth. “Am I really doing this? Me? Kitty Weaver? Pasadena housewife? Secretary of the PTA, den mother of the Cub Scouts? Have I really come to Monterey to spend the weekend with my best friend’s husband?” On comes the jaunty credit sequence, but the answer to the question “Am I really an adulteress?” will be the usual “Yes, but not really.” As the flashback story of “how she got that way” unfolds, an audience sees a portrait of marriage that is indigenous to the coming decade of the 1960s. The film is set in the typical world of highly successful couples who interact through the country club, community events, weekly card games, and various parties they give and attend in order to keep a social life going. Hope is married to Ruth Hussey, who runs his house with military efficiency and wryly tolerates him. She’s a kind of super-detached version of Myrna Loy, without the humor. Ball is married to hard-driving, hard-drinking salesman Don DeFore, who’s more interested in playing the horses than he is in spending time with her. At home, Hope is surrounded by his wife, their kids, and his maid. Ball’s problem is the opposite. She is almost always pictured playing solitaire or sitting around all dressed up with no place to go. Neither is happy with his marital situation. Hope is never alone, and Ball is deeply lonely.
When the movie begins, it’s made clear that Ball and Hope don’t particularly like each other. They’re in the American tradition of a romantic couple who are at first antagonistic. Since they are part of the same social set, they must pretend to get along. When a group from their country club decides to vacation together in Acapulco, plot events will end up throwing them together. (There’s a sick child, food poisoning, etc.) Their “courtship” is not unlike what unfolds in Brief Encounter, but it’s very American—all about jokes, high-school memories, and sing-alongs.
The movement from dislike and disapproval on both sides to appreciation and enjoyment is accomplished effectively through only one scene—the two of them fishing off the back of a boat. This scene is superbly acted by two old pros—it’s one of the best courtship scenes in any marriage film. (Ball and Hope had appeared together earlier in Sorrowful Jones [1949], Fancy Pants [1950], and on TV, and they work together like a well-oiled machine.) They’re frankly not young, but as they play their lines, acting out a blossoming friendship, they suddenly seem like kids falling in love for the first time. As they talk of high school, they become more relaxed, looser, and happier. They burst out laughing, and tension disappears. There’s none of Hope’s false smarminess, and none of Ball’s cartoonish antics. They look and act like what they are: two no-longer-young people who are lonely and a bit sad, and who begin to find another human who’s interested in what they have to say, who will pay attention to them, who’ll appreciate their special qualities.
Married (but not to each other), Lucille Ball and Bob Hope are happy when they first begin to eyeball each other in The Facts of Life … (Photo Credit 2.53)
… but when their actual moment for infidelity arrives, they become rain-soaked and apprehensive. (Photo Credit 2.54)
As Ball and Hope try to find time together back at home, the film begins to fall apart. It’s made clear that they never find a time or a place—or the determination—to actually commit adultery. The movie loses its honesty, except in one excellent and highly revealing scene. Having finally decided they will go away together for an assignation, no matter what, they become trapped in an open convertible during a drenching downpour. Trying to cope with directions, the rain, and their nerves, they begin to quarrel. Up to this point, there’s been nothing but concern and tenderness between them. Suddenly, they are at it, and when it comes to quarreling, these two people are pros. Married for years—just not to each other—they leap right in with all the experience of a lifetime. They don’t need incentive. They don’t need facts. They don’t need evidence. They can just take the high road and quarrel. They know the drill. They are not so much quarreling over the situation they’re stuck in as quarreling with their own spouses on behalf of married people everywhere. It’s authentic. After this, the film goes into wacky comedy (they fall out the back door of the house they’re trying to have an assignation in), ultimately resolving itself with a no-harm-done coda.
The appeal for any audience of The Facts of Life is the sight of two frankly middle-aged people yearning for young love, and almost finding it, but recovering their sanity before any real disaster occurs. Infidelity movies are best loved by audiences when they are reassuring and only about a flirtation, nothing that could actually hurt anyone. Audiences liked infidelity stories that came close, but didn’t deliver.
A wonderful way for the movies to flirt with adultery was a story in which a beloved mate has been lost at sea, only to turn up alive later on. (This plot is used by Hollywood in drama, comedy, and musical versions, and is a take on the Enoch Arden theme, from the Alfred Lord Tennyson poem that also inspired movies in the silent era.) The way the theme worked is illustrated by two movies released in 1940: My Favorite Wife, starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, and Too Many Husbands, with Jean Arthur, Melvyn Douglas, and Fred MacMurray. (It’s significant that two films with the same basic plot could come out in the same year and no one
really noticed or even cared. There were so many movies out there—and all the audience wanted was some fun. Audiences were willing to have the same old elements repeated in new ways.) My Favorite Wife, by far the superior effort, had Dunne as the disappearing mate, while Too Many Husbands had MacMurray. Grant was the husband in Wife, while Jean Arthur was the wife in Husbands.
Too Many Husbands, based on a play (Home and Beauty) by Somerset Maugham, lays it on the line: while MacMurray was presumed dead, Arthur married his best friend and business partner, Melvyn Douglas. And a year has passed. There’s no ambiguity about sex. She’s slept with both of them, albeit legally and, as it were, innocently. And it’s the men who have to deal with her “infidelity.” In My Favorite Wife, Dunne arrives home just as Grant marries Gail Patrick, which allows for a blocked-wedding-night farce that keeps things okay by censorship standards. (Grant hasn’t yet bedded Patrick.) Since Grant and Dunne have children, which Arthur and MacMurray do not, the sanctity of motherhood is respected. Why should Dunne, a mommy, have to return home and confront infidelity? Dunne’s focus is on winning back the father of her children, and Grant’s is on learning that his children need their mother, not Gail Patrick. “Love” is also parenthood. It’s chaste. At the same time, however, there’s a saucy undertone to My Favorite Wife, which, having established its basic decency, is free to hint at things in a way that Too Many Husbands won’t go near: Dunne was marooned on an island with another guy—and he looks just like Randolph Scott! (In fact, he is Randolph Scott.)
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