The marriage movie is different from the family story, however. Movies about family, or a dominant parent—I Remember Mama, Life with Father—are about life from the point of view of one of the children. The dynamics are shifted away from the couple and onto the larger unit, and the stories define the concept of marriage only tangentially. In I Remember Mama (1948), the marriage is definitely a secondary substory. Life with Father (1947) is about how Mother (Irene Dunne) can cleverly manipulate Father (William Powell) in all directions for the benefit of individual goals inside the family unit. The joke is that she’s the boss; he only imagines he is. The true marriage movie involving in-laws and children is a story about how marriage is directly affected by external characters who impact the central relationship in various ways.
The most popular in-law problem in marriage stories lies in the shenanigans of domineering mothers-in-law. It’s an old joke, but a reliable one.22 The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values. No Room for the Groom is a nightmare disguised as a comedy. Tony Curtis plays a sweet army private who marries a cute Piper Laurie. Curtis loves her unconditionally, and the only other thing he cares about is his family’s vineyard and the old house that stands on it. His fondest hope is that when he leaves the service, he can activate the family vineyard and live peacefully on the land for the rest of his life—with his little bride, of course. So it is perfectly natural that to save money for their future, he urges Laurie to move into the house and stay there while he is away. In she comes, followed by her mother … followed by her uncles and her cousins and her aunts. All freeloaders. And if that weren’t enough—and it is—Curtis and Laurie have their wedding night interrupted by his coming down with a case of chicken pox. Before he ships out, they have only a day and a half to marry, so they go to Las Vegas to locate a swift justice of the peace. They choose a man whose shingle says “Marriage Without Delay.” Laurie has said they should choose the cheapest, but Curtis says the fastest would be better—he’s in a hurry. (“You know how it is,” Curtis says to the judge, who responds, “I did.”) The pox strikes right after “I do!,” and Curtis is taken immediately to a hospital. Laurie returns home, he’s shipped out, and by the time the war is over, her entire family has taken over his home. There are sixteen of them, but none matter except for Mama, played by Spring Byington in a cheerful Madame de Farge kind of style, if Madame de Farge had been a master of French farce—and someone’s mother-in-law.
When Curtis is discharged and arrives home, Mama tells the family they have one week to break up the marriage so she can sell Curtis’s land to Laurie’s former boss, Herman Strouple, the Cement King (Don DeFore). All they have to do is never allow the couple to sleep together—since they never have.23 This is a peculiarly American kind of weird comedy—an entire family of sixteen people doing everything they can to achieve coitus interruptus. It’s up one stair-case and down another, indoors and out, tears and shouts and, above all, vigilance. The couple never get a minute alone; Mama herself insists that her daughter needs to sleep with her because she’s not well (“my heart!”)—although she smokes and keeps her bookie on the phone most of her spare time. What is stunning about this movie is that the complications add up to only one thing: interfering in-laws who have their own designs on what the couple can do for them. There’s a sadness underneath the surface, and an ugly honesty about greed and family relationships that literally eats the comedy and spits it out.
Movies with interfering in-laws suggest that if they don’t watch out, couples can easily be influenced against each other by family members. Collectively, such stories seem to be simple warnings to married people not to live with relatives or let relatives live with them. Better yet, move away—far, far away.
If other relatives, especially mothers-in-law, were movie punch lines, children in movies became little more than plot developers. Children were sacred cows, and thus a challenge in the movies. In a serious film about marital stress, an audience still wanted respect for parenting. In comedies, naughty children were good for rueful laughs of recognition, and in a world populated only by children, such as the Our Gang comedies, anything could happen. But in a marriage movie, the world of the adult in the audience, some caution had to be exercised. A little dickens of a kid might be funny (Jane Withers in Shirley Temple movies), but a truly evil child was offensive.24 Movies usually opted to present undisciplined youngsters who interfered in their parents’ lives in comedies or musicals, such as And So They Were Married (1936) with Mary Astor, Three Smart Girls (1936) with Deanna Durbin, Listen, Darling (1938) with Judy Garland, or Three Daring Daughters (1948) with Jane Powell. Three versions (one British, two American) were made of The Parent Trap, in which twin girls seek to break up their father’s plans for remarriage, steering him instead to remarry their mother. The child as marriage counselor was a useful plot that could go either way: reunite a couple or wreck one.25
Mothers-in-law always know how to poke their noses in: Spring Byington hovers over her daughter (Piper Laurie) and brand new son-in-law (Tony Curtis) to no good end in Douglas Sirk’s comedy, No Room for the Groom. (Photo Credit 2.65)
Children were often used with a kind of fiendish humor as excuses for keeping married couples from having sex. It was a perverse retaliation for all the romantic comedies in which the censors kept an unmarried couple apart. In Family Honeymoon (1948), the popular romantic team of Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray (seven films together) are wed at the film’s beginning. Colbert has been a widow for nearly five years, and she has three small children (Gigi Perreau, Jimmy Hunt, and Peter Miles). (“The bride-to-be is what you might call a crowd,” says Colbert’s rival, Rita Johnson, who hasn’t given up yet.) MacMurray’s a bachelor professor, and has no parenting experience. (The children refer to him as “that man.”) As the wedding ceremony gets under way, Colbert’s sister (Lillian Bronson), who’s going to babysit the kids during the honeymoon, falls down the stairs and breaks her leg. Result? A family honeymoon. It’s a clever twist on the romantic comedy, but a dreary portrait of three dreadfully behaved children who provide a series of complications (aided by Johnson) that ultimately drive the honeymooners apart. Of course, they reconcile in the last reel, but the sight of the ghastly children interfering between an obviously loving couple is hardly entertaining, even though Colbert and MacMurray handle everything with their typical grace and style.
Movies do admit that children really can cause marriage trouble. They die out from under you; but even when they don’t, they cause disasters. If you are widowed, they’ll break up any new romance. If you become wealthy, they’ll turn into lazy louts who scorn you for your work ethic. If you educate them or take them to Europe, they’ll develop a set of personal habits that are nothing but trouble, and will essentially remain ignorant despite your efforts. Once in a while you’ll see a little dream tot in the movies, but it’s usually Shirley Temple, and in that case all the married adults have failed her. It’s just a difficult thing having children on film—or as Carol Burnett said in her parody of Mildred Pierce, after she learns that her daughter is a murderer: “Kids. They sure keep ya hoppin’!”
Why would movies present the child/parent relationship in such negative terms? Obviously for the same reasons they always had to present the ordinary in negative terms: to create a dramatic arc, to get something—anything—to happen in the plot. (In this regard, Hollywood was not so different from theater and literature; it just turned out more product, and its product was consumed by a mass audience.) The marriage film also presented frustrations in marriage that were caused by children to connect to any similar disappointments that audiences might have.
Movies found their best use for children in marriage movies as facilitators of the entire list of seven basic marital problems. You needed money to feed and clothe children and pay their doctor bill
s. Mothers and daddies who committed adultery, neglecting their little ones, could be lured back into the fold full of remorse when they focused on the kids, etc. Thus many marriage movies featured small children, or perhaps teenaged children.26
Hollywood understood that bad children changed the equation in marriages. It was hard to do much with good children—except kill them off in some sentimental bid for sympathy. Mean ones were more interesting, with all their evil little tricks that could end in opportunities for redemption. But introducing children into the marriage plot inevitably locked the parents down, tied them to the homestead. Movies found the best way to use children effectively was to keep them under the radar, indirectly linking the success of the marriage to the parenting issue. Children could be kept offscreen as much as possible27 and still have a full impact on marriage. Penny Serenade (1941), starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, is a perfect example of how a story that appears to be about romance, compatibility, money problems, and even earthquakes was really all about children.
It’s the story of an impending separation and divorce, typically told through flashbacks inspired by a record album entitled The Story of a Happy Marriage. It opens with a portrait of Grant and Dunne in a silver frame, followed by the credits. Dunne is leaving Grant. The couple’s best friend (Applejack, played by Edgar Buchanan) reminds her solemnly, “You and Roger have been married a long time.” She responds by saying, “We don’t need each other anymore. When that happens … there’s nothing left.”28
The audience is set up for the usual form of marriage story (love, failed love, and rejuvenated love) featuring two of Hollywood’s best, most compatible co-stars. Penny Serenade turns out to be something different: a carefully modulated tale about parenting, in which having a child or not having a child is the key to success in marriage. When the couple meet and fall in love, an important issue is whether or not Grant, a carefree spirit, can grow up and settle down. Can he be a husband, and thus a parent, if he remains a child? This issue is solved when he accepts a fine new job as a foreign correspondent. They wed and go to Japan, where they live beyond their means (lots of good Japanese furniture), and she worries about it, but all is bliss when she becomes pregnant. This up is followed by a down: she loses the baby in an earthquake. This is followed by another up when he gets a job back in America, and they start their own little newspaper … followed by the down of financial failure … followed by the up of adopting a baby girl … followed by a down when the state threatens to take the child away because Grant’s work isn’t steady … followed by an up when they get her back … a down when she dies. The film has begun just after this last devastating down; a coda will provide an eternal up when the kindly adoption agent (Beulah Bondi) who found their first baby finds them a little son. Penny Serenade makes clear that success in marriage is linked to children, producing them, raising them, keeping them alive. The happiness of the couple rockets up and down according to the childometer.
Penny Serenade was a big box-office hit, and received five Oscar nominations. Grant is wonderful in his atypical, unfamiliar role. He has all the careless charm to make the unreliable part of his character attractive, but when the time comes for him to plead with authorities to let them keep their daughter despite his having no income, he is magnificent. Cary Grant begging, promising he’ll do anything, is a scene that can tear anyone’s heart out.
Although the movie presents Grant’s unreliability about money as the main surface issue of the marriage, what an audience sees onscreen is a link to their own roles as parents. Without a child, this marriage cannot endure. With one, poverty is bearable. What the filmmakers understood was that here was an honest look at what really keeps a great many marriages together: children. Penny Serenade doesn’t present itself that way, though: it’s got recordings of “My Blue Heaven,” “Happy Birthday,” and “Together”; it’s got Grant and Dunne; it’s got Japan and an earthquake and a great cast of character actors. But it links itself to viewers by saying that the purpose of marriage is children. A family will hold you together and get you through the tough times. And that was a message that paid off at the box office.
The baby makes the marriage, says Penny Serenade, with Cary Grant, who’s happy because his wife, Irene Dunne, is happy. Baby makes three. (Photo Credit 2.66)
Bad parenting was never endorsed. The need to be an unselfish parent was often stressed. Since divorce was socially unacceptable, sympathy for the children of divorce was often a movie plot point. In such cases, however, the movie is not about marriage but about the effect of divorce on a child—two different issues. The focus becomes less what goes wrong in marriage and more how children suffer from what was perceived at the time to be the selfishness of their parents. Such a movie is the 1934 Wednesday’s Child, starring Frankie Thomas as an eleven-year-old whose parents (Karen Morley and Edward Arnold) get a divorce. Morley portrays a bored housewife who falls in love with a man who brings her excitement and wealth, while Arnold portrays the typical businessman who pays no attention to what’s going on at home until it’s too late. Thomas is tormented by his friends, who know of his mother’s affairs, and is ultimately shipped off to military boarding school when his dad needs time with a new woman. In the end, both Morley and Arnold overhear a tragic conversation between their son and another child of divorce. While both realize how selfish they’ve been, Morley goes back to her new husband (wearing fur), but Arnold gives up his new woman, accepting what the film is clearly endorsing: the burden of parenthood, which, it’s made clear, is his job. There’s a “someone’s gotta do it” quality to the story. Wednesday’s Child focuses on the child’s view of how children suffer from a failed marriage, but under the surface it’s a warning of how they can prevent remarriage and make parents rue a divorce.
Children and in-laws were workhorses in marriage movies. They were recognizable and reliable, but seldom did anything unpredictable. They usually appear in the least interesting of the marriage stories, perhaps because they are the inevitable results of almost all marriages.
CLASS DIFFERENCES
Class is not supposed to be an American thing … and yet we can’t leave it alone. The marriage film was its natural habitat. A marriage meant stepping out of your place (your own family) and hooking up elsewhere, the perfect metaphor for class. Movies could define the concept in many different but clearly understood ways. It might be actual “class”—that is, a commoner marrying a nobleman—or it might be “class” as defined by economics, rich or poor. It might also be an educational gap, a social background, an age difference, nationality and ethnicity, or even a political background or ranking. Used in a marriage movie, it had a single, dominant, and very clear message to send viewers: you’ll be happier if you stay where you are. Marry your own kind and stick with what you understand. The “class” idea, however it was defined, was presented to affirm an essentially American idea: class stinks, and it should not exist. The movies endorsed our national superiority: we are better because we are a classless society.
And yet—“and yet” being one of the most important aspects of mass moviemaking’s ambivalence—and yet you might want to give it a try, because you, the individual in your seat, are special and might against all odds make it work. You can marry up, or down, because you are you. The class story of the marriage film represents the very strongest example of how movies simultaneously affirmed and denied things for moviegoers, and how their wish-fulfillment system worked. On the positive side, the marriage story presented one half of the couple as challenged by a fundamental difference, or lack, or need. The result was the presentation of an urge, the desire to achieve, to grow, to move, to change—a basic American motivation. Up that ladder! Across that ocean! The story of a marriage was an excellent way to fulfill the goal of discussing class without discussing class, and to tell an audience that they were upwardly mobile. You could cross those tracks. On the other hand, those tracks were very, very visible, and laid down with a heavy hand. Characters were very
definitely either from the right side or the wrong side, and the fact that such sides existed was a plot staple in all kinds of movies. As Ann Sothern laments about the family of her beau in Panama Hattie: “They’re from the other side of the tracks, and I don’t wanna have to get over crossin’ ’em.”
Marriage movies always reminded audiences that marrying uptown brought trouble. The downtowners were the better guys. As stated earlier regarding “money” marriages, movies tend to say that the rich have bad values (that’s how they got rich) and the poor are noble (that’s their lot in life). Naughty rich, noble poor—it’s practically our national anthem. One example of this mentality is The Valley of Decision (1945), in which Greer Garson is a poor Irish housemaid who loves—and is loved by—the noble son of the house, Gregory Peck. But Greer is noble herself, and knows it wouldn’t be fittin’ for the two of them to marry, so she goes away and he takes a mean-spirited bride in the form of Jessica Tandy. Greer suffers, Greg suffers, and there are labor troubles everywhere; but in the end, the family’s matriarch (Gladys Cooper) dies and leaves all her money to Greer, automatically upgrading her to first class. The Valley of Decision doesn’t say much about marriage, but it says a lot about class.
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