Assessing their prospects, studios turned to an obvious topic: marriage, a subject that could not only help with the war effort but also connect directly to the women in the audience. Marriage could entertain and reassure them—and it could also teach them about their role in the war effort and thus comply with the goals of the Office of War Information. (Classroom films with movie stars!) The marriage movie could go to war. It could help save the country.
The movies made about marriage during World War II maintain the established story units of “the couple” and the familiar list of problems—the in-laws, the kids, the money problems, the infidelity pressures, etc. The difference was that the husband was now in uniform and probably overseas, and the problems were caused directly by a strongly presented external force, the war, which was in and of itself a bigger crisis, more important than a couple’s own little problems. As Ann Sheridan says right out loud to her husband (Jack Carson) in 1942’s Wings for the Eagle, “Whatever you and I feel about each other, there’s a war job to be done.” The national situation (war) outranked the personal problems a married couple might have.
The movie business was obviously already aware that during specific eras, current social issues and situations (a form of pressure) could be translated onto the subject of marriage with great success, but it was the era of World War II that really pinned down—and made full use of—this characteristic of the marriage movie.3 During the war, the moviemaking business learned firsthand at the box office that the public could respond to crisis through familiar story patterns, and that marriage—that everyday old shoe—was just the ticket. Whereas the basic, “pure” marriage movie was isolated, during a national crisis that everyone shared, the usual troubles could be related directly to the crisis itself. The triumvirate of movie marriage issues—the couple, their problems, and the situation in which they lived, their marital context—shifted balance. The couple remained, but their problems, once dominant, took a backseat to their historical situation. This is a key milestone in the development of the history of the marriage movie. In fact, from then on, “situation”—or the background in which the couple struggled or lived—was almost always featured more prominently in marriage stories. Ramping up the “situations” of marriage movies made marriage more topical, more relevant, more modern. It had once been exciting enough just to picture a couple in glamorous clothes living out escapist marriages, but after World War II something more was needed: topicality.
As the war unfolded, there were many questions movies could use as plot lines. Wartime was hard on marriage, so the drama was there, and all of it easily adaptable to the marriage format. What could a married woman who was left behind alone do with herself, and how was she to live her life without her husband (the “lonely wife”)? Should a young couple rush to marriage before the man shipped out? (This “marry in haste” issue applied both to couples who had just met and to couples who knew each other well.) Should a woman left behind go to work outside the home (“Rosie the Riveter”)? Should wives live together economically and share concerns (sisterhood)? Was it wrong for people at home to indulge themselves with black-market goods, keep their big cars, their comfortable lifestyles, in times of war (“Democracy for everyone on a fair basis”)?
Most of these questions could lead directly to interesting plots for big-name female stars. It was easy to envision Loretta Young, Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Irene Dunne, et al. coping with everything imaginable after her man decamped, or dealing with the challenge of sexual frustration, deciding to be unfaithful or not, or struggling to learn how to pay bills, or becoming a black marketer (temporarily, of course), or following her husband to camp. Kid stars like Bonita Granville and Jackie Cooper could run wild with no daddy at home to discipline them. And Betty Grable could show her legs and sing about it.
In its manual for Hollywood, the Office of War Information reminded filmmakers that “the men and women on the production line and the home front are as much a part of the battle front as the soldier in the battle zone.” The “home front” section of the OWI’s goals definitely endorsed the idea of the movies showing women enlisting in the armed services, taking jobs in war factories, and successfully taking the place of their men in the workforce. The American wife, the American woman, and the American girl were all to be sent the same message: you can cope without husbands, sweethearts, or fathers. Everybody had a role to play in gaining victory, and the motion-picture business was asked to participate with positive images. The goals of the government and the goals of the business were beautifully simpatico. So many issues, so many problems—and all of them ripe for Hollywood’s picking.4
First, Hollywood faced the primary issue: how to tell a story about a marriage without the husband at home to participate—a story about marriage with only 50 percent of the couple present. This was easy. A marriage without a man? Women’s pictures had often been tales in which the man—husband, lover, father, or son—was killed off early so the heroine could have a few adventures of her own.
The absence of a husband was a staple of the woman’s film genre. For anything to happen in a woman’s life, screenwriters felt the need to liberate her from the home. Because so many of the great female stars of the 1930s and 1940s were mature women, they needed to be cast as slightly older. Still glamorous and youthful, of course, but nevertheless, “mature.” Thus the story of a woman whose husband is already dead, or who is conveniently killed, or who disappears, or who just gets out of the woman’s way by disappearing offscreen in an acceptable manner, was a Hollywood staple. Marriage did not need to be seen to be believed. What’s more, there were often fanciful versions of how a woman could become married in some magical way. In No Man of Her Own (1949, starring Barbara Stanwyck), the heroine is an unwed mother whose brutal lover has dumped her, giving her a train ticket to nowhere. On the train, she meets another pregnant woman, a war bride on her way to meet her husband’s in-laws for the first time. This happy woman (in a fur coat) lets Stanwyck try on her wedding ring, and bam! There’s a train wreck that kills both the war bride and her husband. Because she’s wearing the ring when she regains consciousness in the hospital, the in-laws think their late son’s widow is Stanwyck. In A Stolen Life, Bette Davis plays twins. The evil one steals the boyfriend of the good one and marries him out from under her, as it were. When the twins go sailing, a huge storm comes up, washing the evil woman overboard while the good one clutches her hand … with its wedding ring, which conveniently slides off onto her own finger. When she wakes up, she’s suddenly the bride of the man she loves.5 This “magic of the rings” bestows marriage on a single woman who needs or wants love. No husband is needed. Audiences were familiar with this strategy, and accepted it.
Practically speaking, the war freed the movies to tell stories about a married couple without bothering to cast a male actor. Hollywood had already often suggested that a married man had about the same function in the home as a hat rack. (Plots often dictated that he just stand there and let people hang things on him.) Audiences had already watched Scarlett and Melanie have a baby in Gone with the Wind. (There is a father—their shared love, Ashley—but where is he when things are happening? It’s Scarlett and Melanie who have the baby.) In The Great Lie, Bette Davis and Mary Astor, too, share a loved one (George Brent), and he had actually been husband to both of them, before he inconveniently flew off to South America and disappeared. The two marriages have overlapped so closely that Astor is pregnant with Brent’s child. (He has disappeared too fast for Davis to keep pace.) Davis brokers a deal with Astor: they’ll go off together into the desert, hide out, and have “their” baby. Who needs men?
Movies about marriage in which no men were prominantly featured had always been successful, most notably The Women (1939), in which there are literally no men, not even a photograph of one, not even a cabdriver. An ad for The Women in the October 1939 Screen Guide says, “135 women with nothing on their minds but men … Out of the boudoir and onto the screen! See women as they do
n’t see themselves! Dowagers and debutantes! Chorines and mannequins! Countesses and cowgirls! … See 135 of them biting, kicking, scratching and kissing in the most hilarious battle over men ever screened!” There is no mention of marriage. Yet The Women, even without any men, is a marriage movie, albeit from only one side of the blanket. The women in it are trying to get married, trying to save their marriages, trying to wreck marriages, trying to figure out marriage, trying to put up with marriage, trying to look good for marriage … and constantly talking about marriage. Marriage is their profession, their blessing and their curse. A hilarious catfight, The Women talks about men and marriage nonstop, and its central story involves a loving wife who loses her husband to divorce, sees him marry a gold digger (played to comic hard-nosed perfection by Joan Crawford), and has to scheme and fight to get him back. It’s all about him, but he’s not important enough to have to be seen. Marriage is easily—and effectively—presented as a woman’s story and a woman’s game.6
The war years, however, needed no clever devices (remove all male actors!) or reasonable excuses (he’s off to Europe on business!) to justify the absence of men. The man’s nonpresence was now vital to the country’s survival. The husband was ennobled by his absence. He wasn’t neglecting the little woman for his job or, worse yet, for another woman or another round of drinks at the country club. He was off saving the world for democracy. This absence was serious, and very real, and although the war inadvertently liberated the women left home alone, the main task of movies was to remind everyone to be faithful and respectful while “the boys” were “over there.”
The first “marriage” issue to gain movie wartime focus was that of the wife left behind on the home front when her husband departs for war—“the lonely wife.” She was defined early in the war by Life magazine. Life’s “Lonely Wife” appeared on the December 21, 1942, cover. She was wearing socks and flat shoes, smoking a cigarette, and slouched down in a patterned chair, looking less than happy with her fate. (She was, Life freely admitted, an actress named Joan Thorsen, hired to appear in one of their famous photo stories.)7 “Lonely Wife” had been inspired by a book entitled So Your Husband’s Gone to War! (a $2.00 purchase authored by Ethel Gorham, an advertising writer for the well-known department store Bonwit Teller). Both the original book and Life’s photo essay were designed as solace and education for the many American women who suddenly found themselves alone after their husbands joined the armed services. Life, like motion pictures, was aimed at a wide audience. Its cover story on the “Lonely Wife” shows her eating alone (“sad business”), sitting home alone, straightening up drawers alone, reading mail from her husband alone—and finally, about to “go mad” with doing everything alone, finding some solutions. She goes back to school at night and makes friends with a female neighbor in the same situation (“These two women understand each other, as both their husbands are in the armed forces”). Finally, she gets a job: she works part-time in a music store (“which involves meeting and talking to people”) and spends the other half of her day in a volunteer civil-defense job. The author, carefully referred to as “Mrs. Gorham,” is Helen Gurley Brown without the sex. “Mrs. Gorham” frankly warns that the day will come when “you want no more with books or lonesome beds, you are done with your volunteer work, and you feel high and dry. What you really want is an unwarlike interest in life, a little bit of the gay, friendly sociability you and your husband once enjoyed together.” Gorham raises a red flag on that. She gives us an entire chapter on how to watch out for the too-helpful male who can lead to entangling alliances. She warns that men you know who are “towers of virtue” are the ones who turn out to be the “garter snappers.” She advises that the company of other women is best. “Intelligent women add as much vigor to an evening as intelligent men,” and “you can talk freely, honestly with them.” She admits that women are of little interest when husbands are around, but, hey … there’s a war on. Finally, Mrs. Gorham says that “in prayer” you can find “strength.” It’s a bit of an afterthought: God was in heaven, but garter snappers could be anywhere.
Life’s article attracted the attention of the Hollywood studios. The concept of the Lonely Wife left behind to suffer bravely would be a perfect fit for movies with female stars, and would certainly attract a female audience. An endless variation of plots could be worked up out of the idea of a married woman suddenly on her own. Additionally, the shrewd bosses of the studios realized there was a big difference between leafing through a magazine to look at a few photos of a staged “wife” and sitting down in the dark of a movie theater to emotionally experience her story. If a Lonely Wife sat down to read about herself in Life, she could put the magazine aside to answer a ringing phone, get up to get a glass of water, or just fall asleep. She could lose interest and page ahead to read other, equally interesting stories. For instance, that December 21, 1942, issue offers photos of comedian Gracie Fields mugging; a serious think piece (“Geopolitics” by Joseph J. Thorndike Jr.); discussions of movies (In Which We Serve and Random Harvest); a photo of Admiral Nimitz dancing with a USO girl in a Hawaiian recreation center; and news that the Battle of Tunisia “has run into trouble.” There is also a report on a troop of soldiers putting on a production of The Women at their camp with an all-male cast. (According to Life, they presented it straight, without burlesque.) Paging through the magazine, a Lonely Wife could also find shopping suggestions. It was just four days until Christmas, and although ads speak loudly about war worries, they speak equally loudly about buying Christmas gifts. Ginger Rogers sells Pan-Cake makeup. Santa Claus sells tires, toasters, Whitman’s candy, and two brands of cigarettes. In an ad for bicycles, Santa tells a little boy, “I’m sorry, son, there’ll be no new bicycle under the tree because of wartime shortages.” His dad has bought him a war bond instead. (The kid is crying.) When the Lonely Wife went into a movie theater, she would not have these distractions. After the lights went down, there was a full immersion in a story in which a woman faced her loneliness. She would be lifted up out of her seat directly into a fictional experience like the one she was herself undergoing—now enacted by someone beautiful, well dressed, and empathetic. She could release what she was feeling—she could weep alone in the dark, in the privacy of her seat, if she so desired. And she could repeat the experience, coming the next night to watch the movie again. Hollywood jumped to embrace the lonely-wife concept, and lonely-wife movies, no matter how sentimental, show viewers even today just what it was like for married women left behind in the days of World War II.
A perfect emblematic example is the movie many believe best sums up the home-front story of World War II: Claudette Colbert in Since You Went Away (1944). Colbert was a popular actress, especially with women, and she was the ideal version of the mature “lonely wife” of World War II. She had been chic and soignée throughout the thirties, and by 1944 she had matured into an even more chic and soignée figure. Colbert, ironically, was French, but she represented the American woman in the way that American women liked to picture themselves. She exuded glamour, but not in a cheap or flashy way. Her characters were witty, intelligent, resourceful, and stoic. Colbert onscreen had American pluck, and the ability to withstand anything.
As Since You Went Away opens, Colbert has just been “left behind” by a successful and loving husband. Her home is beautiful, her children are beautiful, her life is beautiful, and she is beautiful. Her maid (Hattie McDaniel) is a fountain of wisdom and support. The film presents the absolutely perfect home (a seven-room brick colonial) and the absolutely perfect marriage as Hollywood defined it for the masses circa 1944. It’s the American dream of married life. Colbert and her husband (seen only in a photograph beside her bed) have their own song (the treacly “Together,” as in “We strolled the lanes, together,/ laughed at the rains, together,” etc.). Their two daughters (Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple) adore them, and even their bulldog knows his job: he poses in front of the fireplace, nestled close to his master’s old pipes a
nd comfy chair.
Since You Went Away will reboot this perfection. A title announces to viewers as the film begins, “This is the story of an unconquerable fortress … the American Home, 1943.” The story begins early that year in an unnamed Ohio city, just as Colbert and her daughters return home from taking their man to the train station. Colbert assesses her situation as it has been so far. She is a wife. She plans menus and orders food to be delivered. She oversees keeping her house clean and socializes with a well-heeled group of friends. She makes sure her husband, a successful advertising executive, is happy, healthy, and comfortable, and she disciplines their daughters and raises them to be well mannered and to behave properly. Now, however, she is facing a marriage without purpose, because it’s marriage without a husband. What is she supposed to do?
First, there’s uncertainty. Even though Colbert is charming, witty, sophisticated, and not a weakling, she has depended on her husband to make decisions, pay the bills, and understand the larger world outside the home. Their marriage has been traditional, and thus representative. This wife must learn, and in so doing, she will teach the audience what women need to know now that they’ve been left behind. Since You Went Away is a kind of training manual for wartime marriage. Colbert begins by speaking on the sound track, saying what many women might be feeling: “I have no courage, and no vision.”
As the film unfolds, Colbert will learn the following lessons: how to make ends meet by taking in boarders;8 how to resist temptation in the form of a handsome old beau (Joseph Cotten) who still loves her; how to clean her own home and manage when her maid leaves to work in a war plant; how to let go and allow her oldest daughter to work as a nurse/volunteer; how to accept that same daughter falling in love with a young soldier (Robert Walker) and how to comfort her after his death; how never to cheat on the black market; how to break off from trivial, unpatriotic, and superficial friends; and, finally, how to go to work in a war factory and learn how the other half, especially immigrant workers, really live. Her family will plant a victory garden, gather salvage, buy war stamps, and cook nutritious meals without red meat. In the end, Colbert finds strength, courage, and a broader, wider understanding of life. She becomes a role model for her counterparts in the audience. She copes, she manages, and she makes decisions. In other words, she fights the female, married version of World War II. By removing the husband, the story of a woman in wartime can be told on female terms, which are marriage terms. (All the issues Colbert faces are the previously established issues of the marriage film: money, infidelity, kids, etc., just updated for the war years.) Her basic lesson is how to be married without being married, or how to be successful in her situation as a lonely wife.
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