I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  Julie is a marriage nightmare. Jourdan not only decides to murder Day, he announces his intention to her. Furthermore, he admits to killing her first husband so she’d be available. (“He admitted to killing my husband,” she laments. “He admits that he wants to kill me, and nobody can help me do anything!”) The police, useless in her dilemma because she’s legally wed, casually inform her that if they “called in every guy who threatened his wife, we’d need a jail the size of the Pentagon.”

  At least one movie tries to explain why husbands murder their wives. In Conflict, Humphrey Bogart murders Rose Hobart so he can, he hopes, marry her younger and prettier sister, Alexis Smith. (Bogart has tried elsewhere to trade up through murder. In The Two Mrs. Carrolls [1947] he murders his wife so he can marry Barbara Stanwyck and then tries to murder Stanwyck when Alexis Smith appears.) Sydney Greenstreet, playing a psychologist, pontificates at a dinner party celebrating Bogart and Hobart’s fifth wedding anniversary: “A happy marriage is indeed a rare achievement. Marriage is a very tricky business. People have impulses, compulsions, drives, that are set toward escape, an escape from loneliness. They seek that escape in the companionship of someone else, and just when they think they’ve achieved it, they find they’ve put on their own handcuffs.” (Later, Greenstreet helps put some real handcuffs on Bogart.) Greenstreet’s explanation of how men want to escape the trap of marriage isn’t much of an excuse for murder, but at least it’s a try. Mostly, however, film history just asks audiences to accept it. It’s like those years when all the women in film are walking around with strange things on their heads. They call them hats, but what we see are teapots, arrows, wastebaskets, flower gardens, and bowls of Jell-O. We just have to accept it. Similarly, we can only speculate as to what the appeal of the murdering spouse really was to audiences. Perhaps there’s no depth to it at all—people just liked murder mysteries, or just wanted to imagine getting rid of their own obligations in some fanciful manner. It was a safe plot, because the movies almost always put things back to right in the end. Yet the idea that a couple would “strangle each other’s identity” was something movies could make tangible, real, and powerful. Movies didn’t shy away from talking about how marriage could smother someone’s chances in life. In No Marriage Ties (1933), Richard Dix asks point-blank, “Why is it two people take a beautiful emotion like love and do everything they can to kill it? They walk up to an altar and say, ‘I love you … I’ll honor and obey you,’ and then it’s gimme, gimme, gimme. Work for me, you’re mine. Live for me. Think for me. Live for me. Die for me. They strangle each other’s identity.”

  All stewardess Doris Day can do in Julie is hang on to her coffee tray when her crazy husband (Louis Jourdan) pulls a gun on her passengers. Later, she’ll have to land the plane by herself, but for now, the coffee tray is challenge enough. (Photo Credit 2.85)

  The aspect of the murder marriage that develops the traditional woman-in-jeopardy format is akin to the horror film or the detective plot. As stated earlier, this “marriage problem” is the farthest away from the normal life of a traditional couple. (Perhaps it requires a leap into an escapist fantasy that might be appealing only to base instincts.) Such movies have always had great popularity, with their shadowy worlds, murky motives, and spiral staircases. In fact, there are a considerable number of murder-the-wife marriage movies. Many of the great female movie stars faced jeopardy in movie marriages. Ray Milland hires an old friend to strangle Grace Kelly while he’s building his convenient alibi by attending a formal banquet in Dial M for Murder (1954). Hedy Lamarr, exquisite in ribbons and furs, is held captive by bad husband Paul Lukas in Experiment Perilous, but manages to escape with the help of George Brent. In Midnight Lace (1960), Doris Day, yet again, is victimized by telephone calls from a man threatening to murder her—who turns out to be her husband, Rex Harrison. Claudette Colbert adores her handsome husband, Don Ameche, in Sleep, My Love (1948). She doesn’t realize he’s keeping a chippie (Hazel Brooks) on the side or that he’s drugging her with the hot chocolate he lovingly brings her every night. Marriage is a perilous condition for women, because they’re locked into it. And if they have money, and their husband doesn’t have his own, well … it’s a hard-knocks world.

  Rich women—or women who own things—are vulnerable to marrying cads. In fact, it’s usually a rich woman who’s in jeopardy. Very rich men … or very mean men … are sometimes the victim of a desperate mate, but usually it’s the wife.51 There’s something “okay” about a super-rich woman being victimized. The plots usually tell us that, after all, she didn’t do anything to get that money—no worthwhile enterprise or effort or hard work that would justify her having it. She got it from her daddy—maybe from a former husband, maybe from her mother, but mostly she got it from Daddy. This entitles someone to try and take it away from her. An exception to this is the character played by Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear (1952). Crawford is a very wealthy playwright who made it herself. She worked hard for it, and continues to work hard for it. Her faithless spouse and his hard-boiled mistress (Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame) are clearly villainous and have no right to take Crawford’s hard-earned dollars. And besides, we know that in former movie selves, Crawford had to bake pies or work in a factory or take in washing to make a go of it. This poor kid—fifty years old in Sudden Fear—just doesn’t deserve this! Crawford is the center of the film, and the audience’s story identification is through her. (And she triumphs. Palance and Grahame think up an elaborate plot to kill her, but once she finds out, she outplots them and kills them instead. She’s a professional plotter, after all—a playwright.)

  Wealthy wives whose husbands have designs on their riches are not always murdered—that is, strangled, stabbed, poisoned, or pushed off a roof. Sometimes movies show a process that is more subtle, more ominous: the husband drives the wife mad so she will dispatch herself, or at least be suitable for carting off to an asylum. (A movie husband can kill without weapons.) Both Midnight Lace and Sleep, My Love are variations on this theme, but the best-known example is Gaslight, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman (who won the Oscar for her role).52 Boyer impeccably portrays a suave European man of the sort a young and impressionable girl (Bergman) would see as her romantic dream. He is handsome, attentive, deeply caring, and adjusts to her every whim and need—before they’re married. After they wed and he is ensconced in her London home, where he hopes to find hidden jewels, his attentiveness, so charming at first, suddenly turns smarmy—and then menacing. He confuses her about little things: a forgotten social event, a lost piece of jewelry. She begins to doubt herself, and he slowly drives her mad. The spectacle of Bergman, a beautiful, healthy, intelligent woman, crumbling into doubt, confusion, and fear is tragic. The metaphor of how a husband can control his wife, their household, her comings and goings, and her entire definition of herself, is a powerful statement about marriage.

  A portrait of a marriage gone wrong: Jack Palance hides in the shadows so he can move on wife Joan Crawford before she knows he’s there … (Photo Credit 2.86)

  … but Crawford’s already drawn a bead on him. It’s a film noir marriage in Sudden Fear, a cat-and-mouse game of marital murder. (Photo Credit 2.87)

  Movies tell us that when men marry for money, they aren’t content just to live a wealthy life; they want control of the funds, so they plan to murder the wife and inherit. Women, on the other hand, have no master plan. When they marry for money, they’re content just to go shopping. As a character in Paris Model (1953) explains it, wives want “jewels and motor cars and costly raiment.” Men, however, want financial control. It’s sexism buried in plot. Women can be bought off with knickknacks and trinkets, but men, being men, understand high finance. Occasionally, movies present a man who lives off a woman, such as William Holden’s character in Sunset Boulevard (1950). But this is clearly a no-no, and it isn’t connected to marriage. Besides, Holden ends up floating dead in a swimming pool. There’s always the sense that a man who takes money from a woman i
s a gigolo, married or not, whereas a woman who marries for money may be merely a gold digger, or perhaps a very clever little minx. This is not the same level of bad behavior as the man’s. The man who weds for money is weak, while the woman who weds for money is strong. She may be naughty, even evil, and certainly without suitable values, but it is indirectly implied that this is one of the few avenues women have to gain wealth. If a man marries for money, he lacks manly definition and would therefore have to be a secondary character. To elevate his status, he’s made into a mastermind, a murderer who plots. There is a grim lesson in male/female status when one confronts old movies that tell us that men can be murderers because, after all, they’re men and know business and planning, but women, poor souls, can only coax men to buy them stuff. (This suggests that equality means more women murdering husbands on film, as in the 1987 Black Widow, in which Theresa Russell murders several rich husbands until she’s tripped up by another canny female, Debra Winger, or Original Sin [2001], in which Angelina Jolie ultimately spares Antonio Banderas.)

  Why do movie women marry movie men who want to hurt them? In Gaslight, the beautiful Ingrid Bergman pleads with her cruel husband, Charles Boyer, to give her proof she’s not insane, but why would he do that since he’s the one trying to drive her mad? (Photo Credit 2.88)

  Marriage murder plots were often gothic in origin, presenting a beautiful heroine in crinolines and in peril from a dangerous husband. Dragonwyck (1946), starring Gene Tierney, is a variation on a Jane Eyre theme in which Tierney plays a naïve country girl yearning for excitement and luxury. She marries the drug-addicted Vincent Price after he murders his first wife (with an oleander plant, a neat trick) so he can have Tierney as his bride and future mother for healthy sons. (True to tradition, the ads for Dragonwyck ignored marriage—and even murder. “The romantic drama of a woman whose heart challenged her conscience,” blared the posters and the film’s trailer, claiming the film to be an “unusual impassioned drama [of] a woman’s love.”)

  Sometimes women just think the men they married are trying to kill them. Such films reveal much about female psychology as imagined by Hollywood filmmakers, and they give insight into what audiences could or would respond to emotionally. They also suggest under the surface that married women may feel they’re caught in a trap. Two excellent films, both directed by Alfred Hitchcock, superbly illustrate a plan to manipulate an audience’s thinking, create a credible subtext, and weave story elements out of female doubt. Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941) are stories that have a central character who is female, and they not only have the same director but also the same star, Joan Fontaine, whose co-stars are, respectively, Laurence Olivier and Cary Grant. These are both award-winning movies, critical successes as well as top box-office draws. Rebecca won a Best Picture Oscar, beating out stiff competition.53 Fontaine was nominated for Rebecca, but lost to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle—and the next year she won for Suspicion.

  Although Rebecca is the visualization of a best-selling novel by Daphne Du Maurier, and Suspicion is based on Before the Fact (by Anthoney Berkeley writing as Francis Iles) and both films are murder mysteries, it is nevertheless possible to see them as two classic examples of the marriage movie. Marriage is the foundation of the credibility of both stories. In both, the central character is a woman who unexpectedly marries a man who she (and the audience) can easily believe is the ultimate dream man (the young Olivier and the eternal Cary Grant). Both movies make clear to the audience that these two women are without any real assets. The heroine of Rebecca is naïve, inexperienced, unsophisticated, without social status, and poor. She works as a travel companion. For that matter, she doesn’t even have a name: never once, in either novel or film, is the leading character of Rebecca ever called by a specific first name. (The novel was a first-person “memory.”) This character is also something of a ninny by modern standards, although she is supposed to be seen as sweet, fresh, gentle, and easily cowed only because of her lack of experience, a situation that will change. In Suspicion, the character is also without experience or sophistication. She does, however, have some money and some social status, but not a great deal of either. It’s also suggested that she’s without sex appeal or beauty. Her clothes are dowdy, and she wears glasses—the movie equivalent of a wart on the nose.

  In both movies, the audience is shown that, quite unexpectedly and quite rapidly, these two leading ladies without glamour, funds, or wit capture spectacular men. Olivier is even stinking rich, although Grant is not. (He just acts, and lives, as if he were.) The two movies both make it all extremely clear. In case we want to believe that Joan Fontaine in both roles is really, underneath it all, très chic and clever, we’re told by other characters in the movie that we’re just plain wrong. The gauche American woman Fontaine travels with in Rebecca, Florence Bates, says Fontaine is mousy and will never marry, and Fontaine’s own father in Suspicion (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) describes her as “spinsterish.” Both behavior and costuming confirm their opinions. The Fontaine of Rebecca wears little-girl dresses, sweaters, and flat shoes, and she knocks over the flowers in a restaurant and generally stumbles around. The “spinsterish” Fontaine of Suspicion wears severe suits, buttoned‑up blouses, and the aforementioned glasses. She purses her lips and snaps her purse shut whenever Grant looks her over.

  How does Fontaine capture Olivier and Grant? We might be as confused as Bates and Hardwicke, except that Hitchcock, after establishing how society sees her, gives us, the audience, a special private look at Fontaine’s two women. We are allowed to see what society and family can’t see but Grant and Olivier can. Olivier says clearly that he wants Fontaine because she is an unblemished “child.” “What a pity you have to grow up,” he says. She’s not a threat to him. She’s honest, and, as it will turn out, totally unlike what he knew before in his former wife, the dread Rebecca of the title. Grant, it’s established through his point-of-view shot, is a shrewd observer of women. He glances up at a hunt to see Fontaine rear up on her spirited horse, taming him easily and loving the thrill. Grant glimpses the passionate and potentially sexy woman underneath the prude. She can be open and wild, and he later asks her, “How do you feel about me in comparison to your horse?” The audience can see what society doesn’t see, and therefore is given a reason to accept the marriages as credible.

  The most important event in both women’s lives is marriage, a ritual that directly leads each to a confrontation with doubt (a psychological problem) and murder (a physical and legal problem). Both women start living in new houses that represent their states of mind: Rebecca’s heroine lives in a gigantic mansion (the famous Manderley) that is literally too big for her as she wanders around in it, finding all the physical markers of Rebecca—her things, her taste, and her giant monogram, the intimidating “R.” The heroine of Suspicion lives in a new, more modern (but also large) home that is designed with a gigantic spiderweb window, a visual metaphor that speaks directly to her situation. In both movies, other characters tell the women that they were lucky to have these men, because no one believed they ever would, could, or should. And, finally, both women begin to misunderstand their husbands and their motivations. In other words, they begin to doubt that their husbands actually love them—to believe what society has believed: that they’re unworthy of their husbands, so why should their husbands love them? The audience is presented with a female subjectivity, so we agree with what the women are thinking and feeling. We live out their doubts and suspicions, and thus undergo two tales of marriages that start falling apart due to female misunderstanding. The appeal is to insecurity in women, and a sense of the dominant importance of men.

  The fish-out-of-water bride arrives at her new home. Joan Fontaine in Rebecca is accompanied by super-rich hubby Laurence Olivier as she first sees his mansion, Manderley. She faces an army of servants headed by the scary Judith Anderson. (Photo Credit 2.89)

  Rebecca and Suspicion are stories of marriage from a female point of view. In Suspicion, Fontaine “
has,” but feels it’s these material goods that attracted Grant. In Rebecca, she “has not,” and fears she won’t be able to hold Olivier’s love because of that. Fontaine illustrates the wife’s marital role: to accept, to be grateful, but most of all to try to be worthy. She must give all if she “has” and give all if she “hasn’t.” What she gives can be either her physical goods or her physical self, but her job is giving. Rebecca’s Fontaine believes that her husband still loves his ex-wife, the mysterious figure who is never seen onscreen, Rebecca de Winter. The other Fontaine begins to believe her husband is plotting to kill her for her money. The marriages thus are based on misunderstanding, imbalance, blindness, and failure of perception. The female’s point of view is reinforced by the fact that the two men also begin to misunderstand their wives. Olivier in Rebecca, as Maxim de Winter, doesn’t recognize his wife’s pain or insecurity at all. He doesn’t seem to notice how lost and out of place she is, or that the really scary Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) is bullying her; he just thinks her faltering insecurity is “charming.” In Suspicion, a movie with an ending that many people find unacceptable, Cary Grant is presumably going to kill, not his wife, but himself—because he thinks she will be too ashamed of him when she finds out he stole some money. (Suspicion does such a good job of aligning audiences with Joan Fontaine’s suspecting her husband is going to kill her that they’re furious when he doesn’t, and reject the film’s final scenes.)

  Beneath their murder stories, these movies are about marriage, and women responded to them as women’s films during their original releases. Stories about women who feel unsure in their marriages found female acceptance, and with potential murder thrown in, the men could enjoy them too. (That both wives are willing to die for their husbands apparently seemed very entertaining to men as well as to women.)