I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  In Marriage Is a Private Affair (1944), things don’t go as smoothly. The movie opens up on a big, glamorous wedding in which Lana Turner is walking down the aisle, saying to herself on the soundtrack: “What on earth am I doing here? How did I get into this, anyway?” She’s marrying John Hodiak, a man she knew only three days when he proposed. (“But I don’t know you. You don’t know me.”) He counters with the argument of the war years: “We have so little time.” (Turner’s mother, herself wed three times and on the way to her fourth, warns: “The guy’s from Boston.”) Everyone else, however, tells Turner that it’s love that matters, and she says she knows she loves him. Mom accepts the situation: “Well, the first marriage should be romantic.” By the time the wedding is planned and under way, and Turner and Hodiak are saying their vows, they have known each other only two weeks.

  Marriage Is a Private Affair was designed for two things: to show Lana Turner in a spectacular wardrobe, and to recognize that young couples were marrying on short acquaintance. However glamorized by Turner’s presence, it tells a story of a hasty marriage under wartime pressure. A baby is born, troubles arise, and everything goes wrong. The movie says there’s a wartime law that prevents a woman from divorcing a soldier who is overseas without his consent. Since her mom is hardly a source of wisdom, Turner consults her father about what to do. He’s a man she didn’t recognize at her wedding because he was her mother’s first husband from way back when, but he’s rich, and therefore, by MGM terms, very wise. He tells her, “Just because everyone gets married, it doesn’t mean that it’s an institution … It’s your own private affair.” This puzzling observation settles Turner down, and she and Hodiak reunite. What the film accomplished for audiences was reassurance. This time that reassurance comes attached to star power, a fantastic wardrobe, and lavish set decoration, some humor and sexiness, but no real information. It’s the reassurance that can be obtained when a familiar story—two people run into trouble after marrying—is grafted onto a topical film of an era: situation triumphs over individual problems for the couple.

  What was happening in marriage during World War II made excellent plot material. When Lana Turner marries John Hodiak in haste, her mother-in-law (Virginia Brissac) steps in to help with the problems, forgetting that Marriage Is a Private Affair. (Photo Credit 2.98)

  There’s a tendency today to assume that everything Hollywood presented about the home front and marriage during wartime was positive. This is not the case. Everyone in the audience was living through the war, and however much they might have wanted to escape or forget, they weren’t fools. Hollywood had to mix some reality into the stories they were telling. That had always been their filmmaking policy—take off from a ground base of realism where possible or required. They kept that policy alive even during the darkest days of the war. For instance, Allotment Wives (1945) presented a crime peculiar to wartime: women ruthlessly married men who were shipping out in order to gain control of their paychecks, known as “allotments.” (During the war, the Office of Dependency Benefits provided allotment checks and family allowances to women whose men were serving in the armed forces.) The film concerns the ODB discovering a high level of fraudulent claims made by women who were marrying multiple times to different men and then claiming their checks. The woman who runs this racket is the very well-dressed Kay Francis, who operates a high-class beauty salon as her front. A low-budget movie from Monogram, Allotment Wives disintegrates rapidly into a story of gangsters, racketeering, mother love, and suitable punishment for Francis, who is gunned down close to her hair dryer, but the movie pulled no punches. There was ugly fraud being committed on the home front, women were involved in it, and marriage was their ruse.

  A good example of a movie that presents an American family, the topic of marriage, and the problems of women on the home front in a negative—although ultimately redeemable—way is the little-known The Very Thought of You, made in 1944 and starring Dennis Morgan, Eleanor Parker, Dane Clark, and Faye Emerson. The film contains a roster of World War II marriage-movie concepts: a lonely wife, the should-we-marry-or-not? question, the hasty wedding, the unfaithful wife, the war-plant female worker, the baby born while Dad’s overseas, the husband injured in war. It throws in everything, but it’s also a rare example of how movies, designed though they were to uplift Americans, could also get down pretty mean and low … and honest.

  The movie features four levels of marital connection. First, there’s the central story about a young soldier and a girl (Morgan and Parker) who happily fall in love and wed inside a brief time frame. Second, there’s the failure of a marriage between Parker’s parents, Henry Travers and Beulah Bondi. Mom is resentful, bossy, and scornful of her husband because he was just “a WPA worker who then became a clerk.” He’s never amounted to much by Mom’s standards, and she openly says, “I wanted my daughters to marry well. That’s all. I wanted them to profit from my mistake.” The third marriage is one hanging in the balance, the cautionary tale for viewers. Parker’s older sister (Andrea King) is married to a sailor who has been overseas so long that she’s forgotten “what Freddie looked like.” King is embarrassing everyone by being openly unfaithful, never writing to Freddie, and constantly bad-mouthing the concept of the wartime marriage. (Censorship of the day puts a decent spin on her activities, but when Freddie comes home and Molly has to confess, she says she was especially bad with one wealthy older man: “I let him kiss me.” Audiences knew what that meant.) The fourth marriage is not a marriage but a reflection of the romantic comedies of the prewar era—the “funny” relationship between Clark and Emerson, which is played for laughs, sexiness, and a soldier’s “wolfish” nature. (At the end of the film, they unite and will marry.)

  Parker’s “typical American family” isn’t very inspirational. There’s her 4-F brother (a goldbricker), her disobedient teenage sister, the aforementioned adulterous sister, her weak dad, her brother’s repressed wife … and, finally, Mom. Most people think the moms of war movies were all swell creatures, keeping those V-mails going overseas and those apple pies coming out of the oven. This mom is mean. (Later, she’ll go googly over her grandson, but early scenes show her for what she is.) The audience is frankly shown a dysfunctional family. They quarrel, resent one another, and don’t support one another’s emotional needs. Before she brings Morgan home for dinner, Parker pleads, “Please, everyone, be nice to him.” But they aren’t. Uncomfortable silences reign at the table, and since no one has heard about Morgan previously, King wonders if “our own little Jannie has been having herself a fling.” The brother grouses, “A fine sister, picking up soldiers in the street.” King points out that her brother is “a filthy, draft-dodging heel.” After Morgan leaves, Parker runs upstairs, yelling, “I hate what you’ve done,” to her family, and Dad comments that they treated their guest about the same way they would treat “a Jap.”

  Parker and Morgan are unquestionably in love, and no conflict arises between them. Parker’s character represents three important issues for women in war: she works in a parachute factory, becomes a lonely wife, and gives birth without her husband at her side. Everything ends well, after both Morgan and Clark are wounded and shipped home, but along the way, things are shown and said about the American family and women left behind that are shockingly unsentimental and certainly not patriotic. There is no endorsement for these remarks—or for bad behavior—but the misery and anger are not hidden from the audience.

  It’s startling to hear these remarks, which are not usually associated with a positive portrait of the American home front. When Parker returns home at three a.m. after a date with Morgan, the family is waiting up. Mom: “You lied to me … Did he make love to you?” She slaps Parker hard and adds, “You set a filthy example for Ellie [the teenage sister].” King says all a woman gets from a wartime marriage is “a swift kiss, a swift kick, and bingo, you’re a war widow.” Morgan says the home front is a difficult situation: “It takes more gizzard to be a soldier’s wife than it
does to fight.” When King’s husband returns home unexpectedly, he bitterly discusses what the patriotic “sell” of the war effort really is: “They don’t show what home really is. It’s not all Mom and apple pie.” He adds that, furthermore, they don’t show what combat is, either. “It’s not all fighting … it’s waiting.” He says that he kept himself going by hanging on to what he could believe in. “It wasn’t like in the ads with me. It was home.” He accepted all its flaws. Such bitterness and disappointment—and definite questioning of the surface portraits of Americans at home—found its own acceptance with the audience, and in the end, all is resolved. The Very Thought of You ends in the bright California sunshine, with Clark and Morgan disembarking from a troop train in Pasadena to embrace their loved ones. Parker’s mom and dad are now apparently happy as clams together, and especially fond of their fat little grandson. (The audience wanted at least some connection to reality, but didn’t want things to end in tragedy if it could be avoided.) In showing negatives but reaffirming positives in the end, The Very Thought of You followed the tradition of the marriage film from its very roots, but its very strong negatives stood out in wartime.

  All the visual details of the marriage movie were adjusted for the war. Because of the shortage of hotel rooms, Eleanor Parker and Dennis Morgan spend their wedding night camped out on a beach in The Very Thought of You. (Photo Credit 2.99)

  As the war moved to its close, more and more movies began to stress problems married couples would be facing in the postwar era. Soldiers developed severe psychological and physical difficulties, as in I’ll Be Seeing You (1944) and Pride of the Marines (1945). Infidelity on the home front surfaced. The Unfaithful, actually made in 1946 and released in 1947, illustrates how rapidly attitudes were shifting. From 1941 to 1946, marriage movies had taught that women should be faithful to husbands who were overseas, but The Unfaithful defends a wife who committed home-front adultery. Ann Sheridan plays a wife who had an affair while her husband was overseas. When her lover blackmails her, she stabs him. Sheridan’s lawyer excuses her, pointing out that, had there been no war, which upset everyone’s lives and sense of order, she would not have strayed. Even more significantly, Sheridan’s bitchy friend, brilliantly played by Eve Arden, stands up for her to the wronged husband (Zachary Scott), telling Scott that the two years he was gone were a long time (to go without sex, it is implied). “I managed it,” he tersely replies. “In the South Pacific,” shoots back Arden. “Try it on Wilshire Boulevard.” Arden also tells him it’s only his “manly pride” that is really hurt.17 Ads for The Unfaithful spelled it right out: “It’s so easy to cry ‘Shame’ … If she were yours, could you forgive?” “Could you forgive?” was now a useful postwar question for a marriage movie—where before, the rule was “You shouldn’t have cause to forgive.”

  By late 1944 and early 1945, and even into 1946, the motion-picture business adjusted its home-front movies and began to point them toward the postwar period. A series of such movies presented tales in which a husband returns home and his wife has to readjust to his presence. These films address the postwar problems of hasty marriage—now you have to live with each other even though you’re barely acquainted. Because it was still wartime, however, the stories are optimistic. They’re sober in presenting the problems, but suggest that everyone must live with the decisions they made.

  One of the most representative of these stories was The Impatient Years, released in late 1944. Jean Arthur and Lee Bowman play a couple who married during the war after a whirlwind courtship, and when he left her behind, he left her expecting their child. Now he’s home and finds himself living not only with a wife he hardly knows, but also a demanding one-year-old son and his wife’s father.

  Demonstrating that this was a real issue, well understood to be more than a fanciful plot—that it was an honest problem couples would be facing more and more—the advertising for the film laid the dilemma right out in front of potential audiences. “Mr. and Mrs. Soldier—This Is Your Love Story!” screamed the posters, and the prevues carried this copy: “Charles Coburn is the wise old Cupid who knows his daughter’s problem was the problem of millions!” “The problem of millions” was looming on the horizon—a postwar phenomenon of returning GIs who had married in haste. The Impatient Years was designed to show the audience that phenomenon.

  After a very short time, Arthur and Bowman discover they can’t stand each other. Into the divorce court they go—but the judge isn’t having any. He’s seen enough wartime marriages go on the rocks. He orders them to “relive” their romance, scene by scene, to find out what happened. What did they see in each other, and why did they marry in the first place? In showing Bowman and Arthur the answer, the movie shows it to an audience and also updates the familiar prewar marriage format of the divorce movie, now designed as a postwar training manual with laughs. What drew audiences to the train-wreck concept of a hastily married couple who want a divorce but are forced to remember what they once had but can no longer recall? Obviously, movies of this type are speaking directly to those in the audience who are in the same boat, and perhaps there was romance in asking postwar couples to try to put themselves back into the wartime frame of mind. They’re expected to believe that love, hopes, and dreams can all be regenerated, like the arm of a starfish. The Impatient Years is a return to the romantic comedy of the past, dressed up in new clothes.

  Janie Gets Married (from early 1946) was designed to capitalize on the success of 1944’s hit film Janie, which starred Joyce Reynolds in the title role. Janie was based on a highly successful Broadway play, the kind of little topical play that’s never seen on Broadway today: a pleasant ramble about a small-town girl who’s crazy about the soldiers billeted in her small town. (Her dad [Edward Arnold] sees the nice young GIs as love-starved predators.) Janie Gets Married, a postwar sequel, begins with the premise that Janie (now played by Joan Leslie) has at war’s end quickly married the nice guy she met in the first film (Robert Hutton). Janie’s job will be to become a good wife and help her husband adjust to civilian life. Everything about the movie is designed to connect to the arrival-home experience and to reassure everyone that it’s all a hoot and will turn out just swell. The narrator tells us “two years ago, the boys went off to war … And now these boys are coming home” to their “average, homey little American city.”

  Yet for a movie that wants to reassure everyone, there’s a lot of negative dialogue. (“There are times when you’ll want to cut her throat,” the groom’s stepdad tells him. “Just expect the worst and you can’t be disappointed.” And: “Marriage … they ought to give a Purple Heart for it … It was never an easy deal.”) An audience sits (grimly) watching everything go wrong. Hutton is working in a job Leslie’s dad arranged for him, and he’s no good at it. Leslie can’t manage the home, and her maid bosses her around. (Since Margaret Hamilton is the maid, this is believable.) His mom is paying half their rent so they can live beyond his salary. Both their mothers want to buy the drapes for their new house, resulting in an in-law war of window treatments. Janie tries to cook (in apron and pearls); his old army buddy turns up and she’s a gorgeous WAC (Dorothy Malone), so jealousy rears up. What a mess! All the old prewar issues of marriage movies are on display—money, incompatibility, in-laws—illustrating how the established format will now return for the postwar era. (In the end, Joan Leslie cheerfully embraces her husband and says, “A girl can’t learn to be a wife all at once.”) Like The Impatient Years, Janie Gets Married is a return to an old marriage-movie format. The “situation” (World War II) has ended. Movies like these are about the need for everyone to adjust to change (it’s good for you), to come together in postwar unity (we’ve won the war, now let’s win the peace), and to get things back to where they were, if possible (although both movies admit that things are different now).

  Postwar marriage movies dealt with the adjustment necessary when couples who married in haste faced each other after the war. In The Impatient Years (released in l
ate 1944) Jean Arthur tells her dad (Charles Coburn) she doesn’t know why she ever married Lee Bowman. Bowman seems equally dubious. (Photo Credit 2.100)

  But sunny movies like Years and Janie were not the only presentation of the married-in-haste issue. Running alongside such optimistic comedies were films that would later come to be known as “film noir,” dark stories that had something different to say about wartime marriages. Often the day-to-day of a couple’s conflicts wasn’t actually presented, but the story would be grounded in marital strife and disappointment. A typical example is The Blue Dahlia (1946), starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Ladd is a veteran returning home from combat in the South Pacific. He finds his wife (Doris Dowling) living in a hotel bungalow, togged out in gold lamé and tanked up on scotch. He arrives during one of her riotous cocktail parties and finds her more or less in the arms of a married nightclub owner (Howard Da Silva). When Ladd finally gets her alone, a vicious (and violent) quarrel erupts, and she tells him the truth. While he was away, she got bored and started partying. She was driving drunk with their little son in the car and he was killed when she lost control of the vehicle. (She had written Ladd in the Pacific that their son had died of diphtheria.) Now she wants rid of Ladd, too, and can’t turn back time to become a little housewife after loose living, good clothes, and nightclub excitement have permanently changed her. Dowling ends up dead, and Ladd ends up with Lake, and no one tries to convince the audience that a wife who found a different way of life during the war was likely to want to go back to the old ways. (“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm … ?”)