I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  One Foot in Heaven, a successful movie, is a grim picture, which suits its theme of sacrifice for religious standards. As the portrait of a marriage, it’s a frightening time capsule in which a once-sparkling young woman, full of life and love and hope (her name), leaves her comfortable home and her adoring parents to enter not just a life of poverty, sacrifice, and crushingly hard work—that would be bad enough—but also one in which she has no say in her fate, no real respect, and no equality in her marriage. Competition is not just inappropriate for her, it would be a sin; but the denial of her right to compete at least on an everyday marital level crushes her spirit.

  Married couple Fredric March and Martha Scott look at the planned church that will fulfill March’s career as a clergyman, a goal that he has worked for and she has made enormous sacrifices to help him achieve. With Grant Mitchell and Gene Lockhart in One Foot in Heaven. (Photo Credit 2.74)

  Sometimes incompatibility could be very simple: the couple just want different things in life. Blue Skies (1946), an easygoing musical, has at its base a plot in which Bing Crosby woos Joan Caulfield away from Fred Astaire and marries her. As their union unfolds, she wants stability, and he wants change. He constantly opens and closes a series of restaurants with different motifs, and never really makes any of them work. Caulfield can’t take the uncertainty. The idea that the woman needed security and the man wanted change is woven into many marital plots that have already been mentioned: Chicken Every Sunday, Penny Serenade, and others.

  Competition in marriage movies is often about control. It’s not just “Who’s in charge?” or “Do not compete,” but who really has the upper hand. In Father Takes a Wife, the female point of view is: “Men are like children. Always let them think they’re getting their own way. Never let them suspect you’re really getting yours.” The male attitude is equally smug: “Don’t let her get the upper hand. I trained Leslie from the very beginning.” Movie women who are ignored by their husbands always begin covert operations to gain control in order to get the attention they need. My Life with Caroline (1941) is a dreary portrait of a silly marriage (and a dreary film except for the ever-reliable Ronald Colman). It’s the story of a neglected wife (Anna Lee) who carries out elaborate schemes to make her husband believe she’s in love with someone else. She believes she controls him, but he’s just humoring her. He controls her by letting her imagine she’s in control. (The movie presents an insufferably male point of view, but cleverly designed to appeal to women, as the husband asks himself questions wives want their husbands to ask: “Do I really understand? Do I really know all her hopes and dreams, or am I just selfish?”)

  In You Belong to Me (1941) the neglected-wife issue is cleverly reversed for a variation on who’s in control. Henry Fonda plays a super-wealthy man with nothing to do all day. He marries Barbara Stanwyck (a successful doctor) in a whirlwind courtship, and then has to sit home all day while she’s out seeing her patients, some of whom are men. He becomes wildly jealous. Fonda behaves badly, interfering in Stanwyck’s work, embarrassing her, and trying to get her to give up her career through a series of schemes to gain mastery of her work life. Their problem is solved only when he finds something useful to do with himself (and his money): build her a hospital. He buys himself a partial control that’s useful.

  Columbia Pictures’ 1933 Ann Carver’s Profession clearly demonstrates a Depression-era issue: disparity between men’s and women’s opportunities to find work, and the resulting tension if it’s the woman who gains financial control in the marriage. Although the fundamental Depression problem—men were out of work and women had to take in boarders, take up laundry or sewing, or become domestic workers—is glamorized into “Ann Carver’s Profession” (she’s a headline-getting trial lawyer), the issue touched a familiar chord with viewers.

  Ann Carver’s Profession stars Fay Wray and Gene Raymond. The script was written by Robert Riskin, based on a story called “Rules for Wives.” The dialogue is sharp, witty, and the story moves swiftly. Step by step, Ann Carver’s Profession lays out for an audience what goes wrong when there’s an imbalance in a couple’s earning power.

  The movie defines its “Should the female work or not work?” issue quickly. The opening image is of a newspaper headline: GIRLS VOTE FOOTBALL PLAYER MOST POPULAR IN COLLEGE. The opening line of dialogue is: “I want to make it clear right now—the woman I marry has got to know how to make flapjacks. Not those comical things … good old-fashioned flapjacks!” This dubious philosophy is spoken by the actor who plays the football hero—Gene Raymond, confidently posed in front of his pals, impeccably dressed in a form-fitting tuxedo. Ann Carver’s Profession has staked its claim for the male point of view, and within seconds it adds its female attitude. Ann Carver (Wray) works in a diner as waitress and cook (“I’m just that poor Ann Carver who has to work for a living”). She tells Raymond (after a steamy kiss) that “I’ve got a profession, why not use it?” She’s just finished law school, putting herself through, and he’s gotten his Bachelor of Architecture and they are getting married. “Okay,” he tells her, although he adds that she won’t have to work because he’s going to make a “million dollars.”

  The movie spends under five minutes setting up this potential conflict, which is actually all we learn of their courtship. They immediately marry, and the film turns into a fight for the upper hand—with a vengeance. They move to the city, he takes a job, and she keeps house. It’s immediately established with the same economical swiftness of the opening that he’s getting nowhere, and she’s bored silly. When he does agree to let her work, their happy marriage begins to malfunction. As Wray climbs the ladder of success, Raymond falls lower and lower, and loses more and more confidence. (“Bill, Bill,” she says, “you’re not getting jealous of my success, are you?”) He has to appear at dinner parties that advance her career. While she’s off on business trips, he starts drinking and hanging out in nightclubs. She’s too busy to pay any attention to him, which is made clear when she pours him a cup of coffee and has forgotten he doesn’t take sugar. They argue over decisions, and she points out that since she’s the one who pays the bills, she’s entitled to be the decision maker. After he gets nowhere as an architect, he takes a job as a nightclub singer (Raymond was more a singer than an actor), which puts him in the limelight and earns him more money. However, this embarrasses Wray in front of her friends. (“A crooner! … The thought of it makes me sick!”) Inexplicably, Wray and Raymond reconcile in the end. The restoration of compatibility between them is a fade-out in a little cottage with him once again an architect (in control) and her once again at home (not in control).

  Ann Carver’s Profession addresses the question of the woman’s right to earn, as well as her ability not only to do so but to do so at a higher level than her husband. This issue arises often in marriage movies from the silent era into the 1950s. The wife thinks that working outside the home will be an excellent solution to money woes, but the husband always disagrees. (“No wife of mine should have to work!”) The fact that she apparently needs to do so is undermined by the traditional view of a married man and a woman as breadwinner and homemaker.42

  Ann Carver’s Profession is lawyer. Her husband’s profession is failed-architect-turned-nightclub-singer. Fay Wray and Gene Raymond have to sort the inequities out to make their marriage work. (Photo Credit 2.75)

  One of the most bizarre variations on the who’s-in-control? marriage movie is 1934’s Journal of a Crime, starring Ruth Chatterton, Adolphe Menjou, and Claire Dodd. At its base, it’s the old story of infidelity: playwright Menjou’s hot affair with his glamorous star, Dodd, which wife Chatterton discovers. Chatterton deals with her pain and humiliation by shooting and killing Dodd; presumably that’s the end of the affair. Yet it’s only the beginning of the plot. The murder becomes the motivation for a struggle between husband and wife over her punishment. Menjou, the clever writer, has no trouble deducing the fact that his wife is the murderer. (The police, however, are much dimmer a
nd blame a bank thief who just happened to be escaping through the theater at the same moment.) Menjou confronts his wife as she’s calmly powdering her nose, sitting in her boudoir in front of her lavish makeup table. “What kind of woman are you?” he demands, and then answers his own question. “You’re a murderess.” Making no attempt to deny it, she quietly replies, “I’m your wife.” She powders on, then calmly presides at their previously planned dinner party, charmingly chatting up guests and ringing her little bell to summon her butler.

  Menjou and Chatterton begin an elaborate cat-and-mouse waiting game. “You’ll die of it,” he tells her, warning that she will lose in the end. She feels she’s already won: “I wanted to keep you. I’ve kept you.” Months pass. He waits. She doesn’t crack. It’s only when the bank thief is executed for her crime that she’s overwhelmed. She passes out, even though she visited him in prison and received his blessing. (“The joke’s on them,” he says, admitting he had killed others.) Finally, Menjou wins the competition when she decides she must turn herself in. After all his hatred of her, his ugly remarks, his writing in his diary how he wanted to be rid of her, he does the inexplicable marriage thing and decides to accompany her to the police. “Whatever happens, I’ll be with you,” he remarks, advancing the plot to the place many marriage films go—that is, to remind audiences that no one really understands marriage. Conveniently for Menjou (and perhaps for Chatterton), she’s run over on the way to confess and suffers amnesia. She’s returned to the status of “newborn child” with no memory of the murder. The movie ends with them blissfully happy. He’s spoonfeeding her lunch out on a terrace, and she knows nothing. In other words, he has regained control.43

  Lack of communication between a married couple is another dimension of incompatibility in marriage movies. James Mason, playing a guardian angel for Lucille Ball in Forever, Darling (1956), looks right into the camera—and thus directly at the audience—and lays it on the line. “There are some people who go through all their lives without ever knowing the companionship of another soul. You’ve seen them. Married people.” Mason goes on to add that such couples are “going through all the gestures and the acts of love, but each is living his life alone, each on an island apart from the other.” Not listening, not paying attention, not communicating—audiences not only recognized this form of incompatibility, they did more than respond to it: they loved it.

  Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, famously and successfully wed in real life, played married couples in three movies that illustrate lack of marital communication in three different ways. They starred as a suburban couple in the 1958 comedy Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys; as an example of the John O’Hara universe of misguided Americans in From the Terrace (1960); and as an aged couple bewildered by how their lives turned out in Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990). When it came to portraying couples who never directly connected, the Newmans were the Olympic gold champions. For two people who were apparently happy together, they played marital isolation with astonishing credibility. Their ability to be side by side in the frame, each radiating outward to the audience, projecting an individual character, and still maintaining an inside-the-frame breakdown of communication, defies description. They could play married, both happy and unhappy, like no other acting couple have ever played married. They’re the Lunts of the American marriage movie.

  In Rally ’Round the Flag, the couple simply doesn’t listen. They represent a modern (for 1958) suburban couple. He goes to work in the city early every morning, and she busies herself all day with various committees and causes. When he comes home tired, she’s got plans—they must go to a meeting for one of her projects. There’s no time to talk. Based on an amusing book by Max Shulman, the dreary movie illustrates an allegedly funny premise: two married people who are leading separate lives, with the husband desperately trying to get his wife alone only so they can have sex. What a joke! The movie reached audiences who were actually beginning to live similar married lives, separated by the train and the car and the distance between a work life and a home life, with wives who had so many appliances that they didn’t need to stay home all day to cook and clean.

  From the Terrace is not a comedy but a serious film based on an O’Hara novel about a disastrous marriage between an ambitious young lawyer and a well-to-do society belle. The movie shows how the concept of marriage is defined for individuals by both society (with its rules of class and proper behavior) and family. Newman is the product of a marriage destroyed by his mother’s infidelity. His father (Leon Ames) is bitter, and his mother (Myrna Loy) is an alcoholic. Newman has no model for a successful marriage. Woodward is the product of a wealthy, socially structured marriage in which everything is correct on the surface and nothing else matters. For Newman, winning a girl like Woodward is about climbing the ladder of success; and for the spoiled Woodward, it’s about getting what she wants and defying convention. They’re off to a bad start.

  As their story unfolds, the couple never communicate their true feelings to each other. Woodward is sly and manipulative, and there’s a hint that she’s a nymphomaniac. She’s married Newman for sex, but he doesn’t realize it. (She has, true to her upper-crust background, also checked out some basics first. “Are you going to be somebody?” she asks him, because that is of great importance. He assures her that he is, because it’s equally important to him.) Woodward’s background has taught her what is expected from a husband (he must succeed) and from a wife (she must entertain, look good, and keep any affairs secret). Since Newman is the product of a marriage in which the wife’s affairs destroyed everything, they clearly are not communicating anything about their expectations, backgrounds, or needs. They are, and always were, hopelessly incompatible. He has made the marriage he felt society expected of him if he wanted to be successful and upwardly mobile. She has made the marriage her status of rich princess made possible. She gets what she wants.

  As Newman claws his way upward, becoming more and more successful, Woodward becomes more and more bored. (They have no children.) Ultimately, she slips into having affairs and drinking, while he’s increasingly out of town on business for extended time periods. Newman finally finds true love with a straightforward young woman whose own parents are devoted to each other, and he walks out on his job and his wife. From the Terrace is a male weepie: we’re asked to place our sympathies with Newman, and understand his point of view. He is honorable, just working his butt off while Woodward becomes an adulteress and therefore a bad person. Earlier in the film, we are asked to see his mother’s adultery sympathetically, so there’s a fundamental confusion, although the rules of incompatibility in the marriage movie are intact. Communication should be kept open; wives must stand by their men; husbands must not neglect their wives; and children ought to be born.

  For obvious reasons, very few films exist about middle-aged or older married couples. Where’s the interest, where’s the glamour? Where’s the optimism or hope for the future? Excellent films do exist on the subject, however, and one is a pure marriage movie in which Newman and Woodward make it work. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge exists to tell moviegoers that the marriage of their parents—especially if they were those tragic dogsbodies, Midwesterners—were fogbound. The film depicts a steady relationship that has no real communication between its couple.

  Mr. and Mrs. Bridge presents a mid-century American couple in Kansas, taking them from their prewar lives, through World War II, and over onto the brink of the social changes that followed the war. The initial thing of note is the title of the film: Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. In it, the couple are united, although onscreen they seem to exist in separate universes even while living in the same house. Significantly, the film is based on, not one, but two books written by Evan O’Connell, the first entitled Mr. Bridge and the second, Mrs. Bridge. O’Connell originally presented them as living the same events from totally different emotional perspectives and responses. United inside a movie frame, the disconnect between them is inevitably more visible and unmistakable, yet someho
w less troubling. In film, action is character, and seeing Mr. Bridge buy a painting Mrs. Bridge had admired on their trip to Paris so he can surprise her with it at a sidewalk café, softens him, humanizes her, and romanticizes their relationship in ways that allow audiences to see them as better suited for each other than the original author may have intended.

  A mid-century Midwestern married couple: Mr. Bridge (Paul Newman) with his newspaper … (Photo Credit 2.76)

  … Mrs. Bridge (Joanne Woodward) with her music and her embroidery …

  … and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, out in public, where they appear to have each other the way married couples are supposed to have each other.

  Newman, a real-life midwesterner, understood the man he was playing. Mr. Bridge is rigid and controlling, but not unsympathetic. He’s a prude, but not sexless. He can listen and he can change and he can care, as when he has to bail his black maid out of jail. (Earlier in the movie, he walks into his house and takes a glass of lemonade right out of her hand, just after she’s poured it for herself. On another occasion, he walks right by her without looking as she sits at the kitchen table, throwing his order for a drink at her with no acknowledgment of her physical presence.) For the most part, however, he is insensitive because there seems to be (to him) no need for sensitivity. He is the master of his domain. He has no time for his wife’s suicidal friend (Blythe Danner) and has ignored his faithful secretary of twenty years, not even remembering the twentieth anniversary of her coming to work for him. He has his little lustful secrets—seeing his nubile young daughter sunbathing outside his bedroom window prompts him to jump his wife’s bones in midday when she walks into the room. Most of all, he has his acts of kindness and his small observances of his wife’s pains and disappointments. When their son is the only boy in the Eagle Scout ceremony not to turn and kiss his mother when prompted, Mr. Bridge notices, feels it, and offers loving kisses and embraces to his wife later. Equally, when her problems are small and petty, he makes her sit in his lap so he can pet her, as if she were a child. He is, in short, presented to the audience, not as a bad man, but as the man you don’t want to be—and the man you no longer have to be, because we’re all freer, smarter, hipper, and wiser. He’s not a villain, just a repressed and unfashionable man who never directly communicates—even though he’s Paul Newman.