I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  For Hollywood, the postwar years would be the beginning of the end of the golden era known as the studio system, and changes would occur to the marriage movie as a direct result. By 1948, the basic elements that would ultimately kill old Hollywood were in place: antitrust laws that forbade the studios from both making films and owning the theaters that showed them; the defection of big-name movie stars from studio long-term contracts; wider distribution of foreign films that created new appetites in audiences and provided new sources of competition; the House Un-American Activities Committee, which decimated and divided Hollywood talent; and, of course, the one that most people think killed the system all by itself: the arrival of television.18

  Hollywood had to come down from the all-time high of movie attendance during the war years and face these changes, and as always, the business was flexible. To offset the arrival of television, it initially advanced new technologies (stereophonic sound and wide screen would both take hold in the early 1950s). Movies became bigger, much bigger, but at the same time, in order to compete with the new foreign product, films were made that were grittier, more realistic. Movies also got smaller, much smaller. (Hollywood films began to polarize into large, wide, and colorful versus small, narrow, and black-and-white. As far as television was concerned, the business initially was content to ignore it, lampoon it, and warn its stars against it.)

  What was the role of movies about marriage for this period of time? It was obvious that movies about marriage didn’t need to be “bigger and bigger” but would more likely fit the “smaller and smaller,” money-saving strategy. By the start of the 1950s, the majority of marriage films being made and released by major studios were of a type known in the business as “programmers.” Programmers were a low-cost form of an A-level movie and are often erroneously called “B pictures.”19 The “programmer” was not a B—it was an inexpensive way for a studio to use its A-level stars and make money at the box office without a lavish production budget. Programmers were often written and directed by top-of-the-line talent, and they were well advertised in fan magazines and newspapers. As the studios faced losses of profits in the 1950s, the low-cost programmer became more and more important to profitability—and more and more the format for marriage movies. The onscreen “situation” was dictated by necessary budget practice.

  The programmer was a perfect format for a small black-and-white film about marriage designed to connect to the postwar audience, and a comparatively large number of marriage programmers were released between 1947 and 1960. Such quick-and-easy dramas were not only affordable but found a direct connection to the viewing audience. Without much money, and often with small children, young American couples were looking for cheap entertainment, and as always, it was the movies that could best provide it. The movie business acted rapidly to start creating films about these young couples and the situations they were living in. The return of the men who had fought the war brought a parallel emphasis on home, wives not working, family, togetherness, and, inevitably, marriage. Just as marriage in the 1930s was often escapist and glamorous, and during the war it had been full of patriotic purpose, it was now time for ordinary, low-key, “realistic” postwar married life. In other words, the postwar era deglamorized marriage, brought it down in size, and put it in the kitchen (which no longer was the size of a football field or populated by witty servants). Where once Clark Gable, a loving husband, had presented his perfect wife, Myrna Loy, with a surprise anniversary gift—a diamond bracelet hidden in her breakfast kippers—now a man bought a woman a washing machine purchased on the installment plan. In Topper (1937), the young married man-about-town and his wife were Cary Grant and Constance Bennett. Now they were Van Johnson, with his freckles and gee-whiz personality, and Janet Leigh, with her fresh-faced beauty. Grant was a rich playboy; Johnson is a veteran. Bennett shook a cocktail shaker; Leigh scrambles eggs. Bennett and Grant drove a fast roadster and stayed out all night, showing up for important bank meetings in tuxedo and evening gown. Johnson and Leigh, thoroughly domesticated, go to bed early in sensible pajamas and quilted robes.

  When moviemakers looked out their windows onto the California landscape, they saw tract after tract of low-cost homes being built and bought up by young couples who financed them through GI war loans. Movie settings shifted accordingly, from Long Island mansions, gambling dens, and cocktail bars to these little houses, usually set in small midwestern towns or some vaguely located suburb. These movies were mostly comedies, because no one in postwar America was in the mood for any more tragedy on the home front if they could avoid it. Marriage movies were stories about a young couple, maybe with kids, whose friends were other GI couples. Because the husband had served his country, he was no longer to be treated as if he were a silly fool. This responsibility was shifted over to his wife, tying in with a culture in which women who had just been out riveting airplanes were now told to go back into the kitchen and let the men do the thinking. The wife was supposed to listen to her husband (he had survived the war, after all) and to stay home before she went out and created some big mess. The problems the couple faced were the same ones as before—money, relatives, infidelity, etc.—because the postwar marriage movie was built from parts from the recycle bin. It was all just redecorated, reduced in size, and made cute. The new marriage movie was designed to reinforce “American” values (the ones we’d all been fighting for), stress togetherness in the home, ennoble family responsibilities, and celebrate the sheer glory of the ordinary over the glamorous. It was designed to bring things back to normal; its “situations” were directives.

  Examples of the programmer marriage movie that provided postwar transition are found in abundance in the eight-year period between 1948 and 1956: Apartment for Peggy (1948), Sitting Pretty (1948), Father Was a Fullback (1949), The Big Hangover (1950), Father’s Little Dividend (1951), Young Man with Ideas (1952), The Lady Wants Mink (1953), Confidentially Connie (1953), et al. There were colorful musical versions (Everything I Have Is Yours, 1952) and film-noir versions (Cause for Alarm, 1951). Three apt examples that demonstrate how old marriage formats were both used and updated are Dear Wife (1949), Phffft (1954), and Full of Life (1956).

  Dear Wife was a sequel to the wartime hit movie Dear Ruth, which had been a smash Broadway play. The original, written by Norman Krasna, told a topical wartime story about a bouncy teenager who pretends to be her older sister (the Ruth in the title) when she writes to a soldier overseas. The play and the resulting film brought welcome laughter to home-front audiences. (In fact, the characters were so popular with filmgoers that another sequel was made, Dear Brat. Neither of the sequels reached the same height of success as the original.)

  Dear Wife (written directly for the screen) is a typical postwar marriage programmer. The lovebirds from Dear Ruth (Joan Caulfield and William Holden) are now married. The war is over, and Holden is out of uniform. The couple are living with her parents in her old room, because they haven’t yet been able to find affordable housing. Holden does have a job—but it’s the very same job his wife occupied during the war: she has had to vacate it as her patriotic duty to make room for her husband. (Where once her patriotic duty was to work to take a man’s place, now it is her duty to walk away. This uncomfortable situation is made worse by the fact that his new boss, the inexplicable Billy De Wolfe, used to be his wife’s boyfriend.) The movie has thus connected to two major issues for the audience’s real-life situation: women in the workforce being sent home, fired or demobilized to create jobs for returning GIs, and the serious postwar housing shortage. Dear Wife, set in “Van Buren Heights, New York, twenty miles from Manhattan,” also creates two plot points for the postwar era: expansion and media influence. The town is considering building a new airport in the community and facing the role the rise of advertising is playing in politics. (Since Dear Wife was released in 1949, it was too soon historically for the advertising to be on television. The movie uses radio, but clearly demonstrates how commercials would intrude into peace
ful homes and exert strong media pressure both in creating consumer desire and in determining political winners.)20

  Dear Wife is an amalgamation of old marital woes (jealousy, suspected infidelity, money—her dad buys Ruth a dress her husband couldn’t afford) and new, more topical ones (putting the wife back in the home, media dominance, suburban living, and the return of the GI). Its events are episodic—and situational. Dear Wife, in fact, looks like a cheap television sitcom, even though Ruth’s parents are well off and have a long-suffering maid to wait on everyone. The film is obviously pared down, less glamorous, with a lower budget for production values. It’s a classic example of the marriage film in transition, with everything solved happily, leaving the teenager of Dear Ruth, still in the picture, to intone, “In the battle of the sexes, nobody ever wins.” The final image shows Caulfield and Holden moving into their very own little tract house.

  Phffft21 takes the marriage movie back to its divorce roots, but with a new kind of sexuality. It provides the new version of 1930s romantic comedies like The Awful Truth. The Awful Truth couple (Irene Dunne and Cary Grant) were wealthy sophisticates without any apparent means of income. Money? They just have it. The stars of Phffft! (Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday) have jobs. Lemmon’s a former navy lieutenant who’s become a partner in a law firm, and Holliday’s a former magazine writer and now a highly successful ($40,000 per year) writer of a television soap opera, Serena Noble, Doctor’s Wife. As the movie opens, they’re wed, living in the postwar idea of a perfect home in the country, and enjoying the 1950s good life (by Good Housekeeping or Ladies’ Home Journal standards). Everything looks ideal: a fire in the fireplace, a maid serving after-dinner coffee in china cups, and Holliday in a lounging outfit. Lemmon is reading a sexy murder mystery of the Mickey Spillane type (He Stooped to Kill) while Holliday sits nearby, bored to tears and very unhappy. She finally says out loud the very first lines of meaningful dialogue: “Robert. I want a divorce.” To her surprise, he agrees, and the entire first scene plays out as a terrible quarrel between them as they get ready for bed. Their argument? Which one of them first had the idea to divorce. Sounding melancholy, Lemmon (in voice-over) says, “It was just like a movie. They got married and lived happily ever after—until eight years later, when they got divorced.”

  Within seconds, she’s in Reno, and it’s over. (“Wasn’t that a beautiful, beautiful divorce?” asks her lawyer. “A lovely ceremony?”) The movie is now free to tell the story of their divorce, which is not just the story of how they have to rediscover their love for each other, but also the story of how nothing will work for them except the boundaries of marriage. Their problem is that they are old-fashioned. (They should be in a prewar marriage movie.) The new part is the presentation of the freer morality by which the couple is surrounded, the possibility of easy sex and an introduction to the world of the emerging “swinger,” à la Playboy (the brand-new sexy magazine that published its first issue in December 1953). Written by George Axelrod, a man who really had the number of the 1950s, Phffft stresses money, accepts the presence of TV, plays lightly with the swinging bachelor world, and says everyone ought to drink martinis and have more fun. It even dares to put into the mouth of Holliday’s mother the ideas that are beginning to float around: “You’ve got to stop thinking like a high-school girl. Love—whatever that is—occurs rarely … Meanwhile, life must go on.” Obliquely telling Holliday to just go out and get laid, she suggests her daughter think of sex as “medicinal.” Jack Lemmon (in his early comedy phase) is set up to be a perfect identification figure for most men in the audience—he gets to party with Kim Novak—as well as a perfectly reassuring figure for the women: he turns out to be a homebody who loves his wife.

  Phffft’s married couple find themselves lost in the emerging world of sex, consumerism, quickie divorce, loose morals, and cocktails. (Martinis are made, discussed, and consumed so often they are practically co-stars. In the 1950s, martinis are signposts to sex.) Lemmon, always perfect as a schlemiel, wants to swing—he really does. He tries to learn. But he just can’t do it, even when Kim Novak22 shows up. Her cheerful let’s-do-it attitude scares him witless. (Postwar America might have new issues, but Hollywood still knew how to work its old formulas: give them what they want to see, but pretend it’s naughty and reinforce old values. Phffft is a DeMille movie without a sunken bathtub.) Holliday also tries hard to be modern. She says she’ll be “a combination of Sadie Thompson, Amber St. Claire, and Scarlett O’Hara … passion’s plaything,” but she can’t do it. She takes French lessons; he takes painting lessons. He grows a mustache; she lets her mother redecorate her bedroom with a round bed. He buys a sports car and flashes a new wardrobe; she buys furs and uses a long cigarette holder. They buy, but they don’t really consume. Unbeknownst to each other, they both take rumba lessons, which leads to a dance-off when they show up at a nightclub with other dates. Inevitably, they try to out-rumba each other, but when the band switches to a hot mambo, they grab each other (familiarity needed) and go wild, the perfect metaphor for how they really feel about one another—and about the frightening changes that have occurred in their lives. This mambo scene defines the typical early 1950s marriage: the couple want all that bad stuff Playboy is telling them about, they can even buy it and wear it and dance it, but what they really need is an old-fashioned ending, the DeMille kind of reassurance. And soon enough they get it, back together, clinking martini glasses, sitting on the round bed, all the old verities restored.

  Full of Life represents the new in marriage movies because it’s the story of a pregnant woman. Up until the postwar period, the condition of pregnancy was never really seen onscreen. A woman became pregnant. Cut. A baby was born. Or a woman who was pregnant stood around briefly in a well-cut maternity frock, flat-tummied, with no apparent bump on her front, and someone had to tell us she was “expecting.” (Women on film who were pregnant never showed. It was one of the perks of stardom.)

  Full of Life was one of the movies that changed that. It opens right up into a pre-credit nighttime sequence in which Judy Holliday pads downstairs and makes herself a Dagwood sandwich (bologna with gobs of mustard and onions). The audience is allowed to see her feet, her face, and then a strategic camera pullback to reveal her situation: she is hugely pregnant. (Audiences actually gasped in the theater I worked in at the time.)23 It was a new presentation of “realism” for the postwar baby boom.

  The movie develops a small story that could easily have been presented as several short episodes in a TV sitcom. Richard Conte, Holliday’s husband, is an ex-GI now working as a writer at home, struggling to finish a second book while they live on his savings from the first. It’s a sitcom situation—husband at home every day, man and wife getting in each other’s way. There are neighbors to drop in, a black maid to make sarcastic comments (the couple have no money, but they have that kind of money), workmen who come by to overcharge them and make smart-ass remarks, and the inevitable in-laws. In particular, there’s a colorful character, Conte’s father, played by the former opera star Salvatore Baccaloni. He’s a stereotypical Italian, with his own ideas about family, religion, male/female roles, houses, fireplaces—all of it irritates Conte. The primary setup occurs when the kitchen floor of the old house they’ve purchased collapses under Holliday—it’s termites—and as she hangs in the hole, they figure they’re going to need his father to move in and help them repair things. For any sitcom, this opens the door to weeks of episodic storytelling, with daughter-in-law and father-in-law becoming close, husband getting more and more irritated, things getting done that aren’t wanted and things not getting done that are wanted—it’s a whole season. Full of Life, however, is told on screen in ninety-one minutes. It straddles the two formats, and thus reflects a new kind of marriage movie. There is no single, focused crisis for the narrative to resolve; instead, there’s a series of issues that hang on so that characters can meander around and through them, day by day.

  Full of Life understands what it has
that is unique for moviegoers: there’s a constant conversation about Holliday’s pregnancy, its effect on Conte (no sex, he’s cranky) and on her (she’s uncomfortable, afraid, and jealous when he looks at another woman). She says, “It takes a long time to have a baby,” and he says, “When I think of you being slender again I almost pass out.” She expresses what young wives in the audience might be feeling: “Look at me! I’m a cow, a big fat cow. No one loves a pregnant woman.” Holliday and Conte show audiences a new kind of young couple—they are pregnant and having to cope with it. Additionally, Full of Life talks about the expenses of home ownership, needing help from families, birth control, pressures from parents to behave the same way they did, etc. Every attempt is made to suggest to audiences that this movie, because of the pregnancy, will be honest with them.24 When the time comes for Conte to take Holliday to the hospital, she just says, “Don’t get excited—it’s time,” and they go. There’s no bug-eyed husband falling over his feet. No mad dash to the hospital with Irish motorcycle cops. No fainting, no slapstick reaction,25 just a simple realism. As Holliday feels her first serious pains, she calmly sends her husband away from her in the style of the times; and in the end, they come home with their new baby.

  None of these little comedies that introduce fresh takes on old material are remembered today. The definitive postwar marriage film that addresses the return of the husband to his half of the American married couple is The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), one of Hollywood’s finest films of the postwar period (or any period), and it defines the marriage film’s new social awareness. It showed audiences that change is change, and there are few laughs to be had. Some married couples can adjust and some cannot. Presented partly from the male point of view, it tells the story of three men who are each in his own way afraid to return home, knowing they’ve changed, afraid of what they’ll find. The war has redefined each man’s social status. Dana Andrews, a former drugstore employee, became an officer and a bombardier. Fredric March, a banker, became an infantryman. The character “Harold Russell,” famously played by a non-professional, lost his hands (for real) in the service and now uses hooks for normal activities. Each man must face a woman on return: Virginia Mayo, who married Andrews for his looks, his uniform, and his paycheck; Myrna Loy, faithful companion to March, who has nevertheless gotten comfortable not having him around; and Cathy O’Donnell, engaged to Russell before the loss of his hands.