That Forsyte Woman (1949) is a veritable cornucopia of class-conflicted marriage issues. Based on a novel by Nobel Prize–winning author John Galsworthy, who will marry whom, and why, across what class lines, and whether it will work or not, is the foundation of the story. The lavish MGM production was Merchant Ivory before there was Merchant Ivory, full of period clothes and furniture, “significant” attitudes toward women’s roles, and plenty of la-di-da acting of a high-minded nature. In fact, the MGM stock company of Greer Garson, Janet Leigh, Robert Young, Walter Pidgeon, and others handle themselves well as they steer their bustles and waistcoats around Victorian couches and tables. They are joined by Errol Flynn, more familiar to audiences for his dashing roles in Warner Bros. westerns and swashbucklers. Flynn is cast against type as the cold, money-obsessed Soames Forsyte (and he gives an excellent performance). At the core of the love affairs and the misunderstandings, the ruminations on the mores and social restrictions of the Victorian era, and the suggestion that artists are the only people who know how to live, lies a marriage movie with a full list of marital problems: adultery, money, class, competition, family, and in-laws. There is even talk of murder, a threatened suicide, and an ultimate death as a horse-and-carriage drive over a hapless would-be lover in a thick London fog. The biggest conflict, however, is class.
That Forsyte Woman shows the audience something outside their daily world—lavish sets, period costumes and attitudes—but grounded in what they understood: marital trouble that grows out of marrying outside your tribe. Old Jolyon Forsyte (Harry Davenport) ostracized his son, Young Jolyon (Walter Pidgeon), an artist, because he ran off with the nursery governess less than a year after his wife died. A chip off the old block, Pidgeon’s now-grown daughter (Janet Leigh) seeks Old Jolyon’s permission to marry an architect (Robert Young), another unreliable artist type outside her class. Old Jolyon has previously, against all family wishes, contradicted his own instincts by approving the marriage of his nephew Soames (Flynn) to the genteel but poverty-stricken Irene (Greer Garson). Garson has to take in music students to pay for her lodgings, but not, apparently, for her wardrobe, which is spectacular. She doesn’t really want to marry Soames; but, being a man who gets what he wants (“value for his money”), Soames keeps after her until she relents. There is a Greek chorus of three elderly aunts, one unwed (and thus a failure in society) and two who represent society’s attitude toward the proper roles of marriage. (Naturally, they hate Garson.)
The Way We Were (1973) is another example. It’s a believable story about an unlikely marriage that cannot last, even though it’s based on true love between two people (Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand) from different backgrounds. In this case, the “class” clash is fundamentally politics, the left versus the right, or at least Democrat versus Republican.29 It’s the American version of the British class system. When interviewed about what drew him to play this role, Redford found lofty purpose: “The questionable nature of free speech was a provocative notion and I attached to that.” Nevertheless, it’s fundamentally a marriage story about class.
The Way We Were tracks ruthlessly forward, delineating all the social issues of America from the mid-1930s into the late 1950s. To do so, it uses the marriage between two perfectly mismatched types: a frizzy-haired leftist (Streisand) and a handsome WASP (Redford).30 As the film opens, they are college students. Redford is a football hero, part of the in social crowd, and Streisand is a scholarship student working several jobs to pay her tuition. She wants his Fitzgeraldean perfection and status, and he wants her feisty ability to question and break out of conformity. Since an audience brings in the credible knowledge that people often marry someone who is their ideal other self, or their high-school/college dream catch, this film taps perfectly into the viewers’ sense of the world. It was a big, big hit, and one of Hollywood’s best-remembered marriage movies, although by grounding itself in trendy political issues, it avoids ordinary day-to-day marital problems. Its bottom line is, however, marry your own kind.
Having an American marry someone British can stimulate the class issue and still maintain a pro-Yankee twist. The idea of Europeans seeking out the wealth of vulgar Americans wasn’t owned exclusively by Henry James. In Our Betters (1933)—which carries the hilarious credit of “Technical Advisor—Elsa Maxwell”31 —what happens to such Americans is swiftly laid out at the very beginning of the movie. HARDWARE HEIRESS TO WED PEER, screams a headline, followed by a well-dressed couple exiting a church under crossed swords, surrounded by top hats and pealing bells. The bride (Constance Bennett) tells her groom, “I’m going to make you a good wife, darling.” She feels very humble and proud to be part of his long family heritage, and he sniffs and says she can afford to be proud, catching himself just in time to add swiftly, “You’re the best looking of the whole crew.” After they kiss, the movie cuts ruthlessly to a scene in which she walks in on him with the woman he really loves but couldn’t afford to marry. The movie then cuts to two more headlines: IS AMERICAN LADY GRAYSTON RUTHLESS AS LONDON’S SOCIAL DICTATOR? and BRITAIN’S FADS AND FASHION NOW FOLLOW THE COMMAND OF LORD GRAYSTON’S DARING WIFE.
Our Betters goes on to demonstrate the agreed-upon rules of upper-class marriage between money and title. (Violet Kemble-Cooper as an aging aristocrat with a gigolo in tow says: “Marriage is so middle-class. It takes away all the romance of love.”) It’s a cruel and trivial world, superficially brittle, witty in a Wildean manner, but with real pain and disappointment underneath. Bennett has accepted her fate: “Think of the people you know who’ve married for love,” she tells a friend. “After five years, do they care for one another any more than those who’ve married for money?” She says you can’t remember how love feels when it’s over. However, it’s made clear to the viewing audience that this is not the proper way to think or behave, and that Bennett is suffering from the wrong done her. She’s got American pluck, though, and has sucked it up: “I’ve made myself the fashion … I’ve got power, I’ve got influence … I’ve bought it.” The true marriage/class lesson emerges when Bennett’s little sister decides to wed a penniless marquis instead of the decent and honest young American man who voices what the audience is supposed to endorse: that the world Bennett is living in makes no sense, and neither does her approach to marriage. Our Betters plays out in the usual ambivalent tradition: marriage is a bore and we all know it, but marriage is the only thing that matters, and it must be done for love.
A charming comedy, The Mating Season (1951), illustrates a successful example of how to reconcile the class issue. A handsome young couple, John Lund and Gene Tierney, meet cute and immediately marry.32 He’s an up-and-coming businessman, and she’s the daughter of a sophisticated woman who’s managed to bring her up in wealth through a series of strategic marriages and divorces. Lund and Tierney don’t know each other very well, and one thing Tierney doesn’t know is that Lund’s mom is a hash-house waitress, brilliantly played, as always, by Thelma Ritter. (Tierney’s own mom is the waspish—but very well dressed—Miriam Hopkins.) As the inconsequential plot plays out (all about Lund’s rise to success, his boss’s lumbago, and country-club snobbery), an out-of-work Ritter becomes Tierney’s maid without Tierney knowing she’s really her mother-in-law. When Hopkins comes to town to join everyone in the newlyweds’ small apartment, a perfect battlefield across class lines is laid out. Lund’s mother represents democracy in the flesh, and Tierney’s mom is a real upper-crust bitch. The clever twist to provide balance is that Tierney is democratic—it’s Lund who’s a snob. The half-and-half situation signals to the audience that all will end well, because both Tierney and Lund have a touch of democracy somewhere—Tierney in her soul, and Lund in his blood. Everyone could be comfortable with the story, which took no real sides, especially when, in the end, Ritter marries Lund’s boss and solves the problem. The marriage is used as a lesson in democracy, with love as a leveling force.
The novels of Sinclair Lewis were very popular sources for American movies. His t
ales of small-town life, fraught with unhappy, uncommunicative marriages, had great appeal for both moviemakers and audiences. Dodsworth, Arrowsmith, Main Street, Babbitt—all were made into movies.33 One of Lewis’s strengths as a writer was his ability to describe a specific milieu accurately, both physically and psychologically, so Hollywood art directors and writers found adaptation of his work easy to do. Lewis also had the ability to satirize his world, to point up its limitations and absurdities, as well as to create characters that were both sympathetic and immediately recognizable as American types.
By 1945, when he published Cass Timberlane, Lewis was regarded as an aging enfant terrible and was being devalued as a literary figure. For Hollywood, however, his status as a reliable commodity had been established, so it embraced Cass Timberlane, even though the book was not appreciated by critics, who thought of it as a middlebrow offering. Perhaps it was inevitable—and somehow perfect—that the middlebrow studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer turned it into a hit movie for the middle class. The book had sold well as a hardcover, was serialized in Cosmopolitan, and was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. That was all MGM had to know—the studio purchased the movie rights as a vehicle for the oddball romantic teaming of Spencer Tracy (as Cass) and Lana Turner as the young woman he weds.
The novel Cass Timberlane is Main Street revisited, set in an imaginary Minnesota town called Grand Republic. It tells the story of the respected and reliable judge Cass Timberlane, who sits comfortably on the bench and equally comfortably (perhaps even smugly) amid the town’s established social elite. He is not so much with this crowd as he is of them by birth, profession, and schooling. The judge has survived a painful divorce from a socially ambitious wife who left him for a more glamorous existence, a Carol Kennicott who got away. (This marriage, summarized in an excellent section of the book, is Main Street boiled down and revisited from a more modern point of view.) The novel is the story of how the judge is shaken out of his comfort level when he meets a slightly Bohemian young girl, Jinny Marshland. Their romance is that of an established professional man in his forties with an attractive young girl in her early twenties.
How the movies defined class in marriage is well delineated by the changes made to the novel in order to turn it into an MGM movie. The first and most significant step lies in redefining Cass and Jinny by the onscreen personae of the superstars Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner. This, in fact, means they are seriously rewritten. Tracy had come to represent goodness, honesty, and reliability in men, and Turner a warmhearted sexuality in women. The original Cass and Jinny don’t have a chance. Gone is Cass’s smugness, his vacillation, his blindness to the faults of his world. In their place stands Spencer Tracy, who, by way of his screen personality, presents the viewer with a man of instant decency, dependability, and excellent judgment. Tracy Timberlane will not make a wrong judgment—his side will be the right side. The film version opens with Tracy on the bench in front of a couple seeking a divorce—he is telling them that marriage is sacred, and he doesn’t grant the decree. Jinny, turned into Lana Turner, inevitably becomes a sex symbol, a young woman who is confident around men. The heroine of the novel is coy and flirtatious, but she holds out on Cass, often teasing him to incite his jealousy. Turner doesn’t bother—why would Lana Turner have to do that? The novel’s Jinny is from a happy and respectable family, but Lana’s Jinny is from the wrong side of the tracks, to make her more appealing and democratic for the audience, and to sharpen the issue of class. In the novel, the relationship between Cass and Jinny is tense, tedious, and desperate. They are wrong for each other and the reader knows it. In the movie, the love story is warmer, kinder, more relaxed and happy. The reason Tracy and Turner’s marriage nearly fails has nothing to do with them or how they feel—it has only to do with the issue of whether Tracy’s lifelong friends will allow Turner into their circle. She’s from the wrong side of the tracks—a class issue.
When you marry outside your tribe, your age group, or your own social level, you’re going to find it hard going. “Judge” Spencer Tracy learns his lesson in Cass Timberlane. He should have stayed behind his desk in his safe, upper-class world … (Photo Credit 2.67)
… but instead he strayed over the tracks and found a ballplaying tomboy in the person of Lana Turner. (Photo Credit 2.68)
Another major difference between the book and the film lies in the balance of power between Cass and Jinny. In the book, Jinny walks out on Cass, and thus she is the controlling force in their relationship. He sits home and waits, unable to do anything to alter the situation until an illness makes her weak and helpless. In the movie, Cass walks out on Jinny because of an imagined adultery. A male in the person of Tracy, who sits on the bench as judge and who works for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, is going to be the one who calls the shots in a mass-market motion picture. Lana Turner is abandoned, left alone and frightened, except for some money Tracy gives her. It’s a clear statement that women are dependent on men in marriage, a distinct departure from the emasculation theme of the novel, but no doubt one designed to have more mass-market box-office appeal. It’s also reflective of the typical marriage-movie view of infidelity: women who do it are wrong, but they need love and are driven to sin by a man’s coldness or indifference. In the end, they will still be losers, because society will vote against them. (Men do it because—well, they’re men, and they’ll usually end up all right.)
The novel ends ambiguously. Cass submits to Jinny for the sake of their marriage. “Cass gave up his vested right to be tragic, gave up pride and triumph and all the luxury of submerged resentment, and smiled at her with the simplicity of a baby.” (In Main Street, Carol Kennicott gave in to her husband’s wishes and returned to him on his terms. Cass is forced to accept Jinny’s.) In the movie, there is no ambiguity to the resolutions. Cass takes Jinny back and is lucky to have her: after all, she’s Lana Turner. And she didn’t really sleep with Zachary Scott. It was Cass’s snotty “classy” friends who caused all the trouble, by just thinking she did. The ending is happy. Their marriage prevails.
Reading the novel and viewing the film made from it reveal a shifting tone. The movie is moral, familial, romantic, made more agreeable for a mass audience. It endorses both Lana Turner’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks warmth and Tracy’s libertarian urge to wed her. Its world is folksy and, except for Cass’s social set, full of honest conviviality. Its approach to its audience can only be described as friendly—as opposed to Lewis’s often cynical relationship with readers. The movie script changes things in ways that soften the characters and make them more middle-of-the-road, less controversial or questionable. For instance, Cass Timberlane is a divorcé in the novel. In the movie he’s a widower, whose wife died early in their first year of marriage, leaving him practically a virgin and thus acceptable as both a court judge and a mate for Turner. The book’s Cass is a semi-prude. Tracy has a charming Lincolnesque sense of humor, and he’s stoic, gentle in the face of loneliness. (Tracy follows the MGM template for all movie judges: Judge Hardy, Andy’s dad.)
One of the great lessons of the “class” marriage movie is for mothers in the audience: don’t send your sons to New York to bring home a straying sibling. It’s like war—you can end up losing all your boys. In Vivacious Lady (1938), James Stewart, a mild-mannered professor, is sent by his parents to retrieve his brother (James Ellison), who has become a nightclub habitué. Getting him onto the 4 a.m. train is all that’s required of Stewart as “nursemaid.” Unfortunately, making the rounds of nightclubs, Stewart casts his small-town eyes on Ginger Rogers, all shimmery and sparkly and slim, singing “You’ll Be Reminded of Me” in a white-hot spotlight. (Stewart tells her later that seeing her for the first time was just like the time his dad ran him over when he was a kid.) Within minutes, Stewart and Rogers are eating corn on the cob, riding a double-decker bus, and walking the wet streets of Manhattan at dawn. Before one full day has passed, they’re married and riding the train home together—and ominously listening to an older couple quarrelin
g: “I know what I’m married to” and “I’ll pin your ears back” and “You can’t fool me.”
When Stewart and Rogers arrive home in the boondocks, a form of class conflict emerges. Rogers learns Stewart’s father is the president of the local university, and begins to worry a bit. “What’s a professor’s wife have to do?” she asks, but that’s not her most immediate problem. Stewart is actually engaged to “a thoroughbred” and hasn’t had the guts to tell anyone, including his parents, about his marriage. (“Darling,” says Rogers, “would I be too much of a bore if I suggested you break off your engagement to that girl?”) As the events unfold, mixing in-law issues with class issues, a basic story of background differences emerges: nightclub girl, small-town professor—two different worlds, and she’s not welcome in his. The movie also presents a parallel portrait of marriage, that of Stewart’s parents. His father (Charles Coburn) is the primary locus of success, position, snobbery, and the movie’s definition of “class.” He dominates everyone—his staff, his university, his son, and his wife (Beulah Bondi). He is the force that must be overcome in order for the marriage between Stewart and Rogers to survive. As “class,” he is the problem, and the American definition of the wrong thing to be. Bondi, on the other hand, represents something subversive. On the surface, she is obedient, suitably middle-aged, and proper, the perfect wife for a successful university president in 1940; she has survived a lifetime of oppressive marriage by pretending to have heart trouble, her possible death being the only leverage she has in her union with Coburn. (“I’ve spent the best years of my life in bed with heart trouble,” she confesses to Rogers. Again, a mother uses “my heart!” as a secret weapon of marriage war.) Her public behavior is always proper, but secretly she smokes. Her maid, Hattie McDaniel, says, “If I had a husband that wouldn’t let me smoke, I’d get a new husband.” (Rogers, ever the wise girl, points out that it “depends on what you enjoy the most.”)
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