I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  15 Brent, in leaving, remains a good sport: “All the best,” he says.

  16 This Asian style of dress was popular in the late 1950s among young American women.

  17 This couple also fights over whether to eat their salads because of the cholera epidemic. Their quarrel is a tour de force by Norton and Watts, who make it a power struggle over tomatoes—a brilliant metaphor for married disagreement. Ordinary edible objects become the weapons of destruction. Both eat defiantly. “You’ll dare to kill yourself? I dare to kill myself even better!”

  18 This “Asian doll” motif is present in other films of the era: Japanese War Bride (1952), Sayonara (1957), and others.

  19 A television movie was made in 1985 with Jacqueline Bisset, Christopher Reeve, and Paul Scofield, and in 1997 a film called Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (in case we thought it was someone else’s), starring Sophie Marceau, was released. The latter was the first English version to be actually filmed in Russia. There are also other Karenina films, such as Love (1927), a silent with Garbo and John Gilbert.

  20 Earlier in the movie, trapped in a seedy hotel room with a would-be lover, Jones has wept and also asked directly: “Is it a crime to want things to be beautiful?” It’s a strong theme of the film.

  21 For instance, giving in-laws any type of control in the lives of a young couple was always a mistake. In This Time for Keeps (1942), newlyweds Ann Rutherford and Robert Sterling find their marriage going to pieces because Sterling has to work for Rutherford’s father (Guy Kibbee). Old Dad won’t let his son-in-law do anything on his own, and the young wife is caught between them.

  22 Mothers-in-law were most commonly used in comedies, but not always. For instance, 1933’s The Silver Cord presented Laura Hope Crews as a narcissistic mother who dominates the lives of all her sons. When one of them (Joel McCrea) marries a strong-minded career woman (Irene Dunne), the clash is very serious.

  23 These mothers-in-law are still around today: see Jane Fonda in Monster-in-Law (2005) and Doris Roberts in TV’s Everybody Loves Raymond series. A 2010 survey by the iVillage Web site showed Americans would prefer to do a great many awful things rather than visit their mothers-in-law: stay home and clean (51 percent); visit the gynecologist (36 percent); figure income tax (28 percent); or have a root canal (28 percent). In-law problems apparently never lose their movie appeal. In 2003, Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy (in Just Married) spend their European honeymoon coping with in-laws (and her former boyfriend).

  24 Evil children had to wait for the horror movies of the late 1970s and onward to take hold, which is why so many people fondly remember Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed (1956, not really a marriage movie). She was an oasis of really hideous behavior in the world of movie children.

  25 Douglas Sirk made another low-budget “comedy” besides No Room for the Groom that illustrates the point. In Week-End with Father (1951), widowed Patricia Neal and Van Heflin fall in love and decide to wed; but before they do, they feel they must reconcile their children to their union. The kids do everything they can to break them up. Technically not a marriage movie but a stunted courtship story, Week-End with Father is really depressing. There are also serious dramas about children trying to destroy a parent’s new marriage, like The Secret Heart (1946) and A Woman Obsessed (1959).

  26 One excellent movie presented a portrait of how grown‑up children could fail their parents. Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), directed by Leo McCarey and starring Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi as an elderly couple, is not technically a marriage movie, but it is one of the saddest, most touching films ever made—a heartbreaking combination of humor, pathos, and brutal honesty about what to do when parents become too old to care for themselves. The two old people have to be separated “temporarily” while a solution is found. Bondi will live in New York City with their oldest son, and Moore will live three hundred miles away with a daughter. Moore comments that parents living with their kids has never worked out before, and he wonders why it should work out now. He’s right, of course: the movie finds no happy ending. Ultimately, the old couple face the fact that after decades of marriage, they’ll never be together again. They share a day in the city in which a group of strangers they bump into are all nicer to them than their own kids have been. Alone at the train station, they say their final goodbye (“In case I don’t see you again … it’s been lovely, the whole fifty years”). It’s an unusual story, and a very honest one.

  27 Child actors were often unreliable. For one thing, they grew bigger right in front of your eyes. And they had to go to school on set, cutting down the hours they could work. The business often had problems with them, and many adult actors really fought working with children. (Everyone remembers W. C. Fields’s famous warning not to “work with dogs or children.”)

  28 Each “memory” (or flashback scene) is triggered by Dunne’s playing one of their recordings, the first one being “You Were Meant for Me.” The records are a perfect motif, as the couple first meet-cute in a record store. She’s a saleslady, so Grant stays all day and buys a giant pile of records. (Only later will she discover that he has no phonograph on which to play them.)

  29 Another example of politics as class dooming a marriage is The Searching Wind (1946), based on a Lillian Hellman play that basically condemns the American diplomatic corps that let Hitler rise to power in Europe. The story features Robert Young as a U.S. ambassador who weds a woman from his own class (Ann Richards), but whose true love is a leftish American newspaperwoman (Sylvia Sidney). The political issues—which are also “class” in terms of wealth versus work—are framed most clearly by the love story itself.

  30 Movies were good at verifying what audiences learned the hard way: love is blind. Picking the wrong person is a cottage industry in movies.

  31 Elsa Maxwell was a self-appointed social advisor to party-throwers and movie stars, a hefty old broad whose claim to class was a hoot. If they’d made a movie about her, Marie Dressler would have been perfect casting. (Maxwell, of course, would have insisted on playing herself.)

  32 Tierney is sitting in a convertible that hangs halfway out over a cliff. Every time she moves, the car rocks, threatening to plunge her to her death. Lund drives up and rescues her, pulling her out just as the car crashes over. Holding her in his arms, he buries his nose in her hair and asks, “Where’d you get this hair … off a lilac bush?”

  33 Main Street was retitled I Married a Doctor (1936). Babbitt was filmed twice, once in 1924 as a silent film and again in 1934 with Guy Kibbee in the title role. The character was reshaped to fit Kibbee’s blowhard persona, and the film is not completely true to the spirit of the novel.

  34 Hollywood made a lot of movies, and there are exceptions to every plot form. When rich John Boles married Barbara Stanwyck’s Stella Dallas in the 1937 film, he learned class barriers could not easily be crossed. He later gets a socially appropriate wife (a good person), and Stella has to suffer, giving up their child to her more socially correct replacement. Stella’s goal is always the welfare of her daughter, so she makes the sacrifice. Thus Stella is proved to be both low class and high class. She lacks social grace and good clothes, but she has humanity and grace in her soul. (Stella Dallas is more of a motherhood movie than a marriage movie.)

  35 The Bride Wore Boots uses several screen minutes to tell us what The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) tells us in a matter of seconds. Brought to life by the good doctor, Elsa Lanchester takes one look at her intended and lets out a blood-curdling shriek.

  36 It is curious that the musical format, an allegedly lighthearted entertainment mode, became the locus of so much marital trouble. Perhaps moviemakers thought the song-and-dance would take the sting out of the bad news.

  37 Musicals also afforded plots that were ready-made because many real-life show-biz couples existed: Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth (Shine On, Harvest Moon, 1944), Vernon and Irene Castle, Flo Ziegfeld and both Billie Burke and Anna Held (The Great Ziegfeld, 1936), and others.

  38 I
n reality, Rogers is pretty awful as Bernhardt.

  39 It goes without saying that the perfect male/female dialogue about competition should be musical. In Annie Get Your Gun, both Broadway musical and film adaptation (1950), the unmarried (until the end) sharpshooters Annie Oakley and Frank Butler square off with “Anything you can do, I can do better … I can do anything better than you,” a musical variation of their shootouts with rifle and pistols, the final one of which she will fake losing.

  40 Or “the helpful man behind the great woman.” In the latter category of films (a smaller one) are such titles as Blossoms in the Dust (1941) and Madame Curie (1943), both of which star the popular “love team” of Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. Garson was always the bigger star of the two, but her association with Pidgeon was such that it didn’t seem inappropriate that she was stepping into the limelight without him. (In the case of the Curies, of course, Pierre Curie was also a Nobel Prize–winner, and hardly a lesser light. His early death by accident simply removes him from competition in the plot, as it did in life.)

  41 One Foot in Heaven, adapted from Hartzell Spence’s book, had an illustrious technical advisor: Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The film also had input from the Advisory Committee of Clergymen organized by the Christian Herald.

  42 There’s an interesting dichotomy between black women and white women on film regarding this issue. For instance, in The Bride Walks Out, groom Gene Raymond insists he and his wife (Barbara Stanwyck) live in the small apartment he can afford on his salary, but they have money problems she could solve by working. “I’m tired of playing nursemaid to three rooms and a canary,” she tells her maid, Hattie McDaniel. McDaniel’s reply describes a husband with a different attitude: “I can’t see why white men don’t want their wives to work … My husband retired the day we signed the marriage certificate.” Stanwyck had a career and gave it up to please her man. McDaniel started working the day she got married, with no end in sight, to please hers.

  43 As Menjou has learned, having a mate who doesn’t know much isn’t always a problem. Tarzan’s mate, Jane, points out: “I love saying things to a man who doesn’t understand.”

  44 The film was a commercial failure. This type of plain reality regarding marriage was not reassuring to audiences, even though it was made after the Sexual Revolution.

  45 It also carries the double standard of the day: a man has a better chance of survival than a woman in the aging process.

  46 Perhaps the most celebrated movie about addiction is The Lost Weekend (1945), for which Ray Milland received the Oscar for his portrayal of an alcoholic writer. His character isn’t married, but the movie nevertheless illustrates how alcoholism (or any addiction) destroys all kinds of relationships. Milland has a patient and supportive brother, who finally gives up on him, and a lovely young girlfriend (Jane Wyman in one of her first serious roles) who does everything she can to help. In the end, however, Milland is on his own, a self-destructive personality who can’t really make relationships with other people work.

  47 Crosby’s first wife, Dixie Lee, was a onetime star who became an alcoholic after she gave up her career.

  48 Even the most glamorous female stars fall prey to bad men in movies. In Gilda (1946), Rita Hayworth piteously observes: “You wouldn’t think one woman could marry two insane men in one lifetime, now would you?”

  49 Two films in which husbands are murdered by their wives are The Strange Woman (1946), in which Hedy Lamarr offs Gene Lockhart (and anyone else who gets in her way), and My Cousin Rachel (1952), although it is never exactly clear whether Olivia de Havilland is really a murderess. That’s Richard Burton’s problem. He suspects her … but will never know for sure, since she dies before he can figure it out.

  50 Another form of man-victimizes-woman marriage movie, which apparently didn’t have as much appeal, was the story of bigamy. It’s possible to posit bigamy as a form of disguised murder—that is, a tale in which a woman is shattered (if the crime is discovered) by her man. There are very few bigamy movies—it’s a strangely unbelievable idea that a man could get away with it, even though they do—but at least two examples exist. There’s a tragic one, The Bigamist (1953), starring Edmund O’Brien, and a comic one, The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (1959), with Clifton Webb.

  51 Sometimes she’s shrewish (The Suspect, 1944), unattractive (The Two Mrs. Carrolls), or stingy (Greed, 1924). A woman murders her mate because he’s abusive or because she wants a better husband (The Strange Woman), but the most common motivation for either males or females to murder their spouse is that other major marriage problem: money.

  52 Gaslight (1944) was based on a successful Broadway play, Angel Street. The play was filmed earlier in Great Britain in 1940, starring Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard also under the title Gaslight. When it was first released for television in the United States, it was retitled Angel Street to avoid confusion with the later American version. It now plays on Turner Classic Movies under its original title.

  53 The other nominees were All This and Heaven Too, Foreign Correspondent, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Dictator, Kitty Foyle, The Letter, The Long Voyage Home, Our Town, and The Philadelphia Story.

  54 Scenes was originally created as a six-part miniseries for Swedish television; it was released in America in 1974 in a three-hour theatrical version. Bergman’s original television version ran five hours.

  Their Situations

  Viewing the marriage movie throughout the decades, I began to see the evolution of this mysterious entity that was never identified by its own name. I observed its birth in the silent era, with its bipolar goals of amusement and caution, and with its escapist additions of spectacle and erotic pleasure. In the sound era, I located the “pure” versions that faked an “honest” story line while still maintaining reassurance and escape, and I realized that the three main components of any marriage story were the couple, their problems, and their situations. At first, it seemed that “situations” would be simple to grasp. After two people married, preferably before the movie started or certainly in its earliest minutes, and well before they encountered their inevitable problems, they took up a life that would become their “situation.” That is, they would live in a city or a small town, on a farm or in a mansion. They would have kids or not have kids, face troubled times or live peacefully. Their “situation” would be the setting, which would showcase the background selected for variety, familiarity, shock, comfort, or whatever. But the real situation the couple would be in was fundamentally marriage itself, so this other “situation,” or context, wasn’t really all that important. It was, after all, marriage. The problem or problems would be what made the movie tick. “Situations” would be the least of the three main elements.

  As it turned out, however, one of the most difficult problems in tracing and defining the marriage film was that a large shift in marriage movies took place. During and after World War II, when a movie married couple faced a large, historical situation outside their control, such as the war (and later the Sexual Revolution), their problems were subjugated to the situation. The couple endured and the old problems still exerted themselves, but the situation the couple were living in and trying to resolve their problems in took over the definition of the film. “Situation” became a trump card in the movie-marriage deck. Nowhere was this more obvious than during the war itself, the “situation” that began the trend and solidified it for the future.

  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and America entered World War II overnight. During 1942, eleven million men left home to go to war. The result was a confluence of changes in the world, the home front, the audience, and the film business. It was a time of sudden and intense patriotism. People who worked in movies, like everyone else in the country, were citizens who cared about what was happening. A significant number of big-name leading men enlisted in the armed services: Tyrone Power, Jimmy Stewart, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Robert Montgomery, Wayne Morris,1 Clark Gable, and others. (The youngsters
in the pipeline to replace the Powers and the Stewarts and the Gables had themselves also decamped: William Holden, Glenn Ford, Dan Dailey, et al.) This meant an immediate lack of leading men and a need to find new ones who would not be drafted.

  The newly formed Office of War Information asked Hollywood to help Americans understand their new circumstances—understand and support the effort to win. As Hollywood assessed the government guidelines (articulated in the OWI’s Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry), the businessmen who ran the studios moved to cooperate fully. First of all, they would have to address the need for new male stars. They would also have to make better use of the men left behind: the exempted older stars with families, the teenagers too young to serve, and the foreign-accented émigrés arriving from Europe. The studios still had a strong set of established stars available: the fabulous lineup of females from the 1930s, the older, solidly established actresses in their prime (Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, etc.). There was also emerging a sexy young set of up-and-coming beauties (Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Dorothy Lamour), and unlimited access to new female faces that could be developed. There were plenty of women to star in movies, and there were also plenty of women in the audiences to watch them. When the men marched off, these women had time on their hands and, once they started working in war plants, more money in their own pockets than they had ever had. With no men to date, and with husbands overseas, women were restricted in their social lives. (As the popular song put it, “Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week.”) It was not thought appropriate for women to go to bars or nightclubs or dances alone, so where could they go to amuse themselves? They could, of course, go to the movies, a socially acceptable activity. Women had always gone to movies, alone and in groups, but now they went more often, and they went more than once to the same film. Hollywood’s job was to figure out what movies the home-front female audience wanted to see. What would lure them to the box office?2