I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  Movies in which one of the partners becomes addicted—alcohol, drugs, gambling—have little new to say about marriage. The bottom line is simple enough: this isn’t going to work. Addicts spend all the family’s money and savings, lose their jobs, bring dangers into the household, and become cruel and unloving. Some addiction films ask who’s at fault, and assign blame to a bad character conveniently set up for that purpose. In The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Frank Sinatra (a heroin addict) is wed to a woman (Eleanor Parker) who keeps him tied to her by pretending she’s crippled as a result of his carelessness. When he’s not home, she jumps up out of her wheelchair and trots around the apartment. (Sinatra is in love with Kim Novak, and their love is thwarted by his marriage to Parker.) Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Gambles (1949) falls from happy wife to dyed-blond streetwalker because of her gambling addiction, but her problem is really her sister, who has convinced Stanwyck that she killed their mother because the woman died in childbirth when Stanwyck was born. In both cases, family members set the stage for addictive behavior by allowing the movie plot to locate guilt outside the addict.

  The issues of addiction in movies are often external to marriage dynamics, and little domestic life is observed. (The drama lies in the mesmerizing portrait of the addiction itself.) The Lady Gambles opens up in Las Vegas, where Stanwyck is drawn into gambling while her husband (Robert Preston), a newspaperman, is working on his story about the Boulder Dam. There’s a brief domestic sequence when they try to get away from her problem by moving to Mexico and renting a small place by the ocean. Preston is working on his book (“about the Colorado River”) and they are reunited in love. When he goes off to San Diego to do research (“in the library”), Stanwyck falls in with gamblers again. While trying to fight her temptation, she irons like a madwoman, burning holes in things and then folding them with a frenzied determination. This brief scene is the only time Stanwyck is observed as a typical wife, and her actions are demented, showing clearly that domesticity is not the issue of this movie.

  One film that does portray married life destroyed by addiction is the harrowing Days of Wine and Roses (1962), an unrelentingly tragic tale of a young couple (Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick) who sink into alcoholism. Days of Wine and Roses is a deeply depressing film. Unlike most stories of addiction in marriage, in which one partner is addicted and the other one suffers, this movie is about a couple who are both alcoholics. (Double your misery.) Well directed, with two terrific performances from Lemmon and Remick, it tries to say how problems like this are not easily solved. It ends in sadness. As a portrait of marriage, Days illustrates how two young people who are right for each other can be right for each other for the wrong reasons. Neither can escape the pain of childhood.

  It’s a world of shadows, distrust, and degradation when alcoholism hits both halves of a married couple. Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in the tragic Days of Wine and Roses. (Photo Credit 2.82)

  Scene by scene, the movie shows a marriage literally hitting the skids. Each episode moves the couple forward over time—first as two people who hate each other when they first meet, only to fall rapturously in love; then, married and successful, with a new baby; then suddenly both drinking too much, he on the job, she sitting around alone at home with the baby.

  The film is structured like a binge—it starts happy, goes out of control, and loses detail and coherence (deliberately) as events career forward. The couple grow out of sync. When she is willing to give up drinking, he lures her back. After he’s institutionalized with DTs and wants to stay sober, she entices him. In the end, he is sober, living alone with their daughter in a modest apartment, and steadily employed. He wants her back, but she can’t stay sober. There is no hope for this marriage, and there is no happy ending. Addiction is the marriage “sin” in which, unless it’s a musical, there is no optimism about the ability of the couple to turn things around. It was Hollywood’s ultimate marital warning sign.

  One of the most successful stories about an alcoholic is a woman’s film, Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947)—a striking film because it clearly and absolutely presents marriage as the problem that causes Susan Hayward to become a drinker. It is covertly a feminist film. Hayward is young and beautiful and on her way to a successful career as a singer when she meets and falls in love with a man who sings but isn’t really going anywhere. (The movie is told in flashback form, as Hayward lies in a hospital bed with burned hands. She remembers how she met her husband, etc.) She and Lee Bowman marry, and Hayward gives up her own career to manage his. When he becomes an enormous success (a sort of Bing Crosby),47 there is suddenly no room for her in his life. Since they are wealthy and have servants, and since he hires new people to manage him, she has no purpose, no role to play, nothing to do all day. So she drinks.

  Smash-Up carries a subliminal message for women. It allegedly shows what can happen to a woman (alcoholism, burned hands) if she doesn’t accept her life as it is. It also, however, accomplishes an opposite goal. It asks: What is the point of your life? Are you sitting at home with nothing to do? You could have had a career of your own. Smash-Up is an excellent example of the dual appeal that stories of marriage could exert for women in the audience.

  Bigger Than Life (1956) is a highly effective addiction movie. Its hero (a superb James Mason) is not a war veteran under pressure from his memories of combat, nor is he a jazz drummer tempted by a world of easy drugs and nomadic lifestyle. He’s a high-school teacher. Furthermore, he’s happily married to an intelligent woman (Barbara Rush) and the father of an adoring young son (Christopher Olsen). He’s not rich, and for once a movie home doesn’t give the lie to that by being lavish. The husband (even though he is the elegant James Mason) presents an audience with an ordinary man in an ordinary house in an ordinary town. Mason and Rush have a believable marriage. They’re in tune with each other, loving and supportive, but they’re not waving the flag of idealized perfection. They have a partnership, one honed by years of loving, fighting, sharing, agreeing, and disagreeing. Mason works hard to support his family, and has taken a second job to make ends meet. Rush keeps herself and her house neat and clean, and supports her husband’s career by entertaining his co-workers. The possibility of a general movie audience understanding such a couple is maximum—yet, inevitably, since they are at the movies, they must watch something go wrong. What goes wrong, true to the base of the film, is not something wildly out of whack with a high-school teacher’s world. Mason doesn’t begin hanging around gambling casinos. He doesn’t suddenly invest in Florida oil wells. He doesn’t become enamored of a teenage beauty queen who works at his local coffee shop. No. He develops bad headaches, and his doctor prescribes the miracle drug of the day, cortisone. He’s told to be careful of his dosage and not take too much … but soon he’s gobbling the little pills, and soon enough after that, he’s become “bigger than life.” In his own mind, that is.

  Addiction isn’t always alcohol and drugs. Everyman James Mason is happy and healthy with his family (Christopher Olson and Barbara Rush) … (Photo Credit 2.83)

  … until he starts taking his doctor-prescribed cortisone and begins to believe he’s Bigger Than Life. (Photo Credit 2.84)

  Bigger Than Life is a monster movie in which the monster is a very nice husband. It’s a mad-doctor movie in which the mad doctor administers to himself, and a Frankenstein movie in which the good doctor turns himself into his own crazed creation. Above all, it’s a look-out-for-science movie, but it’s also a marriage movie. As Mason changes, so does the daily life of a married couple, and so, accordingly, does Rush. As Mason grows “bigger than life,” Rush becomes smaller than reality. Initially a woman with her own distinct personality, she fades and becomes fearful. What the movie accomplishes is the demonstration of a couple who lose their original identities, making their marriage go out of balance. The lesson of sharing, taking turns, working together is shattered by an external force—medication—that was not only not their fault, but even prescribed for them by so
ciety’s trustworthy guides, doctors.

  Mason and Rush are destroyed. Mason changes in his behavior toward his wife. He begins to lie to her and treat her as a doormat. Audiences see this happen at first through little things, small disrespectful actions on his part. Sitting in his bath, he barks out an order to her to carry another kettle of hot water for him up from the kitchen. (“Get it yourself!” she yells, and slams the medicine-cabinet door so hard it shatters.) He takes her shopping and buys her a bright orange dress that they can’t afford. He’s rude and boorish to the sales staff. Rush tries to tell Mason she has no place to wear such a dress, so he forces her to wear it to church. Sitting in the pew, she sticks out like a forest fire amid the other, somberly dressed women. In fact, she appears to almost be on fire, a great visual metaphor for her situation. These small things—the kettle of water, the new dress in church—are in keeping with a true-life marital world.

  As Bigger Than Life demonstrates what can go wrong in marriage, it turns into a subtle criticism of 1950s America. Rush is a character who is considered smart by their friends, and she often openly questions her husband. She always says what she really thinks, and the movie also makes clear that before she married, she had a job—and that she could return to it should it ever be necessary. (Mason, true to the times, prefers she not work, and takes a second job himself instead. The pressures of this second job are what drive him to the doctor in the first place.) Mason has made a mistake, and his mistake is destroying his marriage. But Bigger Than Life is about a couple sharing a life, so Rush also makes a mistake. To survive their crisis, she relies on two prevalent attitudes of American 1950s life as touted in movies, television, and magazine ads: she follows the current “rules” on how to be a good wife—that is, obey—and remembers society’s dictum that it’s very important to consider what other people think of you (and thus hide your secrets, deny your problems). The first keeps her from overruling her husband until he has gone too far downhill, and the second holds her prisoner after she begins to understand fully that something really terrible is happening in her home. She ends up standing by her man so long that she nearly goes down herself, taking everything with her. Mason crosses a final line into complete madness, attempting to kill their son.

  Bigger Than Life, like the majority of marriage movies, tells the audience that if they’ll just “face” things, everything will end up all right. The movie ends with the loving family reunited, and Mason superficially healed. He pleasantly agrees to take his cortisone more carefully, and the doctor tells Rush she really must supervise him more closely. Bigger Than Life is an excellent movie, with a great sense of color, wide screen, lighting, decor, and an outstanding performance from Mason, but its ending is neither convincing nor reassuring. Addiction has destroyed the norm, thrown the routine off balance, and made ordinary domesticity unworkable. The purpose of such a marital-problem movie was undoubtedly the usual one for a marriage film: reassurance. Audiences apparently found catharsis in seeing that while their lives were pretty awful sometimes, things could be a whole lot worse.

  MURDER

  When it comes to movie marriages, women are always making the Big Mistake. What melancholy impulse is it that prompts a woman to marry a man who wants to kill her? The movies don’t know, and they don’t care. They just like the idea. It works for them. Movies about marriage often set themselves up like Buster Keaton sitting in his rowboat, infuriated by his idiot girlfriend. He reaches out to strangle her, but stops himself and kisses her instead. In a marriage movie about murder, Keaton would kiss the girl and then strangle her. Audiences liked both versions of the action; one was as satisfying as the other.

  It’s significant that movie women are so easily swayed toward marital mistakes, because the idea was designed to make a direct connection to unhappy women in the audience.48 Men don’t marry as much in movie plots. They take up with gun molls and fall prey to blond murderesses (The Lady from Shanghai, Double Indemnity, et al.), but they know not to marry those babes. (Even the dumbest man knows wedding dresses don’t come with slit skirts and fishnet hose.) However, movies don’t suggest that men can’t also be marital idiots. They, too, can be flattered to the altar, and be easy marks for gold diggers, liars, and connivers. Over and over again, as in Bad for Each Other (1953), Chance at Heaven (1933), China Sky (1945), and more, they give up a lovely little woman who would bake pies for them for something sexier, edgier, and more alluring. But men seldom marry women who are trying to kill them. It’s a plot form that seems out of balance.49 Women just don’t see it coming.

  Although it may seem that very few real people marry in order to murder their mate, it was a popular marriage-story form. (And today, according to the tabloids, it may be becoming more common than we think.) But if one thinks of “murder” as a stand-in for abuse, then the credibility of such a story—as well as its ability to appeal to women in an audience—becomes greater. Furthermore, murder plots focused on a woman uphold a gothic tradition of storytelling in which women are in jeopardy.

  Of course, to be really successful, murder movies needed to have appeal to both men and women. Some films about women who marry unwisely were cleverly pitched toward both. In Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946), Loretta Young’s new husband (Welles himself) turns out to be an ex-Nazi, conveniently hiding in the small academic town in which she lives. In Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936), Sylvia Sidney’s husband turns out to be a spy, even though he’s working alongside her in a small movie theater. In Conspirator (1949), the young and innocent Elizabeth Taylor marries a dashing soldier who is secretly a Communist agent (Robert Taylor). In all cases, the wives are endangered by their cruel and ruthless husbands, who have assumed false identities. Such stories appealed to men, who took them as cracking good spy yarns, chock full of danger and intrigue. A woman was free to think about the melancholy subtext: Young and Sidney and Taylor married men they couldn’t trust. (Men may let you down; they may not be who you thought they were when you married them.) Similarly, in a film inappropriately titled Christmas Holiday (1944), musical stars Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly played a naïve girl and a murderer who marry. Realizing the title and the stars would make the audience think the movie was light holiday entertainment, the ads for once decided to warn them honestly, screaming: “Marriage, Murder, and Mayhem!” Ironically, people still went believing the film would be a musical, and many demanded their money back. Christmas Holiday was a failure; neither men nor women wanted to see Kelly turn ugly on Durbin.50

  In Cause for Alarm! (1951), Loretta Young plays the long-suffering wife of the crippled Barry Sullivan. She works like a dog all day taking care of him, trying to please him, keeping house, cooking, just hoping he’ll be happy. She has accepted her fate. (Her opening narration over the image of their little house with a white picket fence says: “This is where I live. I’m a housewife.”) Her husband’s “ill” in some mysterious way, but mysterious only to her. To an audience it’s perfectly clear: he’s nuts! A psychopath, he writes a letter to the police, telling them she’s trying to kill him. He innocently asks her to mail it for him, and she does. Then he tells her what it contains, and says he plans to kill himself and thus ruin her life. The remaining movie is minute after minute of hysteria and tension, as Young tries to retrieve the letter and save herself.

  Cause for Alarm! is an extreme example of how a married woman found her love returned with hatred. As the ad for Undercurrent (1946) starring Katharine Hepburn as the wife and Robert Taylor as the husband who tries to kill her, put it, “Beneath the surface of an overpowering love may surge an undercurrent of vicious hate! She was deeply in love with him … yet coming between them was a fear, a strange jealousy on his part that she could not explain!” It’s sad but true that some women in an audience might be tied to men who dominate them and keep them cooped up at home in a restricted relationship. They might find solace in movies in which Loretta Young and Katharine Hepburn shared their misery. And the rest of the audience might just enjoy the te
nsion, and not even think of the movie as being about marriage.

  And yet of all the misguided and melancholy reasons that might inspire someone to marry, what can possibly inspire a woman to marry a man whose plan is to kill her? “What did she see in him?” doesn’t cover it. In the opening scene of Julie (1956), a marriage-from-hell movie, Doris Day is driving a convertible along a treacherous coastal road. Her husband, played by Louis Jourdan, rides beside her. They have just left a country club, where, she tells him as the conversation begins, he has humiliated her “in front of all those people.” She makes a definitive statement on their relationship: “Well, if this is what married life is going to be, then we have nothing—absolutely nothing.” And this is before he tries to kill her. Immediately after Day makes her little speech, Jourdan tromps down on the gas pedal, his foot covering hers, and the car takes off on the dangerous winding roads, out of her control. Jourdan just doesn’t care, and Day has to cope. Ultimately, she has to run away from him, and it’s one darned thing after another. Day is even forced to land an airplane on her own (she’s a stewardess) after Jourdan shoots the pilot.