Working with childhood friends, cousins, Lucy’s brother, celebrity friends such as Bob Hope, business connections, etc., Lucie Arnaz searches—and finally ends up with a story that could have been a typical 1940s marriage movie: two people from very different backgrounds (class) meet and fall immediately in love (romance and glamour) while appearing in a movie together. They wed, become successful (money), but he is unfaithful (adultery). She plans to divorce him, but on the way to the courthouse she stops to see him and they reconcile. (That is movie number one, the “I do!” version. It is the true story of the Arnaz marriage prior to their sitcom success.)
In movie number two, the inevitable “I don’t!,” the couple become rich, rich, rich and famous, famous, famous (money), and issues of competition and control emerge. They stop communicating (incompatibility), and as they live together children are born, Lucy’s mom never likes Desi, and Desi’s mom is imperious toward everyone (kids and in-laws). Pressures arise for both, and Desi becomes increasingly unfaithful and a serious alcoholic (addiction). They do not kill each other, although Lucie recounts a horrific story of how, as a child, she heard her parents screaming at each other. She peeked in at them: “My mother was leaning over him with her long red nails. [Her hands] were poised at him like that [makes murderous gesture] and she said with her teeth gritted and her mouth in a horrible expression: ‘I wish you were dead.’ ” In the end, they divorce—the “I don’t” variation, this time played as “I really don’t.”
Sadly, Lucie Arnaz says to the camera, “They would have loved to have been the Ricardos,” but like so many others, they couldn’t manage a sitcom life offscreen, only on. “We’re haunted by The Donna Reed Show or Father Knows Best … There are no perfect families out there … We’re all struggling.” She remembers how she and Desi Jr. started showing The Parent Trap to their parents in the hope that it would influence them to reunite. (This illustrates the power of the motion picture even in the world of people who should know better.) Lucille Ball is shown on camera saying, “They must have shown us that movie about seven times before we had to sit them down and explain things.”
In the end, says Lucie Arnaz, her parents did the I Love Lucy show in order to be closer together in their work, and to be able to have kids and raise a family. The show worked, but the marriage didn’t. (“Why couldn’t they stay married?”)
Touchingly, Lucie is both willing and able to give her father and mother the happy ending life denied them. The final images of her unique documentary are those of her aged parents, happily splashing with their grandson in Lucie’s swimming pool. Lucille smooths Desi’s wet hair. They laugh, sing, and paddle around. Their plump little grandson bangs the water like a bongo drummer. On the sound track can be heard the old lyrics from I Love Lucy: “I love Lucy and she loves me. / We’re as happy as we can be … / Lucy kisses like no one can. / She’s my missus and I’m her man.” The film becomes a marriage movie, a TV movie, a real-life movie, and a documentary—but no answer to the question “Why couldn’t they stay married?”
As the 1950s and 1960s unfolded, the TV marital sitcom continued to be dominant. There were many examples, such as Green Acres, a “class” marriage with him (Eddie Albert) a farmer type and her (Eva Gabor) a woman dripping diamonds and feathers; and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Based on the I Love Lucy model, Van Dyke worked as a comedy writer in show business, and his wife, Laura (Mary Tyler Moore), wanted to be a part of his working life. The Dick Van Dyke Show was a cleverly constructed variation on Lucy, set 50 percent inside a typical at-home sitcom marriage and 50 percent inside the world of writing jokes for an egomaniacal comic. It was a smart format that offered viewers two different kinds of entertainment. (The Dick Van Dyke Show was different from I Love Lucy in that, although Ricky worked in show biz, the balance was always toward Lucy’s half of the show. Any episode that moved her out of the house and into Ricky’s world was still essentially about her.)
Meanwhile, as TV presented perfect marriages on a week-by-week basis, the subject became an irrelevant topic for movies, especially in an era in which movies were male-dominated. It would be years before marriage would make a comeback in the movie house. By making itself socially relevant, grounded in topicality, the marriage movie had made itself obsolete in the era of the TV sitcom—and in the new reality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, movies polarized into either studio product or the emerging, more independent movie. Films began to be more and more about men, with fewer great female stars and fewer roles for the ones that existed. By the mid-1980s, newspaper and magazine articles were lamenting the paucity of good roles for actresses, and this meant fewer and fewer marriage movies were going to be made. A general reduction in audience interest in the topic also caused the decline. Who needed to say “I do” with the new morality? And who needed to say “I don’t” if they hadn’t promised “I do”? Everything changed.
1 Wayne Morris is not well known today, but he was a handsome young leading man at Warner Bros. during the 1930s. His war record was the most distinguished of any movie star who enlisted. A navy aviator, he was awarded four Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals, having been credited with shooting down seven enemy aircraft in aerial dogfights, and with sinking a gunboat and two destroyers. His return to films found him unable to regain his former popularity. He died in 1959 at age forty-five, ironically from a heart attack he suffered while he was watching aerial maneuvers aboard an aircraft.
2 Movie attendance was at an all-time high during World War II.
3 During the silent era, many movies addressed the changing moral structure, and during the Depression, many were about unemployment. The 1930s Depression, in particular, was an earlier “situation,” in which movies about money problems in marriage increased, but many escapist movies provided a glimpse of wealthy marriages: the “other” view.
4 The Office of War Information had a list of seven questions as guidelines for the movies during World War II, one of which was simply “Will this picture help win the war?” The OWI also stated that in addition to being shown “becoming war workers,” American women in the movies should be “depicted as coping without their husbands or sweethearts.”
5 This idea was copied for a 2011 television series, Ringer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.
6 Similarly, the 1949 film noir Reckless Moment (remade in 2001 as The Deep End, with Tilda Swinton) depicts a married life in which the husband spends the entire film overseas in Germany on an important business trip. It’s nearly Christmas, and his wife (Joan Bennett) is left alone to juggle her daughter’s bad judgment in accidentally killing a blackmailer (Shepperd Strudwick). Bennett lives in a household crowded by her father-in-law, a sympathetic maid, and her young son as well as the daughter, but the film actually shows how a typical housewife is really a woman alone. Bennett, while planning menus and reminding her son to put his shirt on, also has to dump a dead body in the bay, attempt to raise blackmail money with no collateral or money of her own, and indulge in a wild car chase with her maid riding grimly at her side. During all this, it’s made clear she cannot find the words to write to her husband about it, nor speak of it to him on the telephone when he calls. She feels the need to keep things socially correct, and communicates only the safest, most reassuring and loving things to him. Even when the blackmail “collector” arrives (James Mason) and he sees her sympathetically, trying to help her, Bennett remains isolated emotionally. After enduring the car chase ending in Mason’s death, she fights tears to cheerfully tell her mate when he calls: “We’re getting a blue Christmas tree this year. Everything is fine, except we miss you terribly.” Presumably he’ll arrive home and never be the wiser that his daughter and his wife have been involved in criminal activities.
7 Each of Life’s “photo stories” was a “story in pictures”—that is, photographs with captions designed to move a reader through a series of images that tell a story: a magazine version of a silent movie.
8 Men in service earned only their
government pay, which meant a former executive or business owner with a family was facing a serious pay cut when called into the war effort. Colbert must deal with a major decline in household cash flow.
9 And both husband and wife are over twenty-one, which in and of itself is news, even though Dunne is very sparkly and youthful in the chic lounge suit she wears for a little dinner she puts together (by getting someone else to help her cook).
10 The basic situation came from the experience Ruth Gordon had in real life when she followed her husband, Garson Kanin, when he went to Officer Candidate School.
11 Similar movies about the lesson to become democratic did not involve marriage. For instance, in Meet the People (1944), Lucille Ball plays a famous movie star who goes to work on an airplane assembly line as a publicity stunt. After not fitting in at first, she becomes a real riveter, and just one of the gals.
12 Sisterhood also appears in movies in which women join the armed forces. Lana Turner plays a society girl who joins the WACs in Keep Your Powder Dry (1945), and she has to learn democracy, too. In women-in-combat films such as Cry “Havoc”! (1943) and So Proudly We Hail (1943), the women become the men, as it were, and undergo combat conditions on Bataan. In both these military movies, there’s a married woman at the center of the issue.
13 Even in a musical, women are forced into community living. In Tonight and Every Night, which takes place during the London Blitz, the showgirls decide to live at the theater together, dormitory-style, rather than risk going home in the blackout.
14 During the HUAC hearings, Tender Comrade came under suspicion for its possible “Communist” propaganda. One era’s plot point is another era’s poison.
15 Rosie the Riveter first appeared in a 1942 ad campaign for the Westinghouse Company. “Rosie” was a nameless image modeled after a Michigan factory worker named Geraldine Doyle and designed to be the symbol of the industrial, working American woman of World War II. Norman Rockwell’s version of Rosie, the one most people remember, appeared on the May 19, 1943 cover of the Saturday Evening Post. The use of Rosie in World War II encouraged women, both married and unmarried, to do jobs traditionally performed by men, because their country needed them. Women in American movies had previously been commonly pictured doing work, but seldom working the assembly lines alongside other women, or even men. Rosie was unique. There was also a real Rosie, Rose Monroe, who was a riveter at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Michigan. She wasn’t the inspiration for the ad campaign, but she fit its image well, and she was chosen to play Rosie in the promotional movies made during the war to recruit workers. The Rosie the Riveter ad slogan was “We Can Do It!” and a popular song, “Doin’ It for Defense,” had a female singer singing, “This ain’t love, this is war, / I’m doin’ it for defense.”
16 In the early months of the war, one movie upgraded a familiar marriage plot line, the “without love” marriage. On October 8, 1942, about ten months after America entered the war, Seven Days’ Leave opened. It was the story of an army private (Victor Mature) who, by the rules of his grandfather’s will, can inherit $100,000 if he can marry a specific heiress before he ships out. Mature has less than a week—his seven days’ leave is already under way—to chase down, woo, and marry Lucille Ball for all the wrong reasons. Since Mature is going overseas, a hasty marriage is understood to be not only necessary but prudent. Seven Days’ Leave has no particular message about anything, but slyly reboots the idea of the “without love” marriage for wartime haste.
Various former screwball plots were also harnessed to the wartime years. In The More the Merrier (1943) the housing shortage forces Jean Arthur to share her tiny apartment with Joel McCrea and Charles Coburn. In Make Your Own Bed (1944) Jack Carson is a comic detective on the trail of a racketeer. In order to solve his case, he and Jane Wyman pretend to be a married butler and maid in crowded Washington, where there’s a shortage of servants. These films update old formats to the circumstances of the home front at war.
17 Within less than a year, Hollywood has shifted ground in its attitude toward women at home, and in less than another year it will shift again to begin presenting married women as little homemakers in late-1940s and early-1950s movies.
18 The film business fought TV initially but soon enough embraced it, creating its own TV shows and stars and selling both old and new movies for showing at home on the small screen.
19 A B movie was specifically designed for the bottom (or B) half of a double-feature bill. “B” was not an evaluative term but a budget term. B films had low budgets, with no new sets being built. They had running times of under seventy minutes and featured no established A-level movie stars. (It was possible a former star could sink down to B level, or an up-and-coming player who would later become a star might appear in a B. For instance, Rita Hayworth, as yet unknown, was in Charlie Chan in Egypt in 1935, early in her career.) There were also B-level studios, such as Monogram, an organization that made movies for the bottom half of the bill or for the very, very small-town market. Major studios (such as Warners, MGM, Paramount, et al.) had B units with specific personnel hired for that purpose. The decision about what films would be A or B level was made in advance, before the picture was shot.
20 The son-in-law is pitted against his father-in-law, an accomplished townsman, in an election. When asked what experience he has that would entitle him to hold office, the son-in-law firmly replies, “Four years overseas.”
21 “Phffft” was a well-known expression of the day, used by Walter Winchell in his gossip column when he wanted to tell his readers that a couple had split up: they’ve gone phffft. (Sometimes the title is seen with an exclamation point, but there’s none in the actual onscreen title.)
22 Novak is at the very start of her successful career. In a tight, low-cut sweater, she more than holds her own, showing comic skills that were never fully utilized because of her sensual, passive quality, which her studio felt would sell more tickets.
23 The movies were following the lead of I Love Lucy, which had frankly presented Lucille Ball as a pregnant woman when she was expecting both in her private life and in the main story line of the show. Putting Lucy on TV—and thus in the American home—as openly pregnant was a very big deal, and partly made acceptable by the fact that she and her co-star really were husband and wife. (They weren’t allowed to use the word “pregnant,” however. Lucy was “expecting.”)
24 Today, it’s a bit of a shock to see Holliday as a pregnant woman smoking and drinking wine. Times change.
25 Not all the small programmer films of the era were situation comedies. There were low-budget, black-and-white marriages that were tragic but still fit the format of the returned GI, the little tract house, and family and adjustment issues. Three examples are No Down Payment (1957), with Joanne Woodward, which presented an amalgam of postwar marriage problems, all located in one of California’s tract housing developments. (There’s racism, rape, sexual immorality, money problems, and alcoholism.) In Japanese War Bride (1952), a sensitive story about a GI and his war bride, the couple face racism in California’s wine country. In Pitfall (1948), an outstanding film noir, a bored insurance salesman (Dick Powell) has a fling with a model (Lizabeth Scott) mostly because of his boredom. The violence he’s drawn into enters his cozy little tract home, and his wife (Jane Wyatt), who’s willing to forgive him murdering someone, turns angry when she learns of the infidelity. In the end, they are stuck with each other and agree to tough it out. (“We’ll try,” she says.) No one seeing the film could possibly believe it will work.
26 Vacation was produced and made by MGM in England through their London Film Productions wing.
27 One thing they do have in common is the rhythm of lying and confession, whether comic or tragic. Married people in the movies and TV—and their kids and relatives and friends—lie to one another about things big or small, and the lie will ultimately have to be confessed. Confessing in the medium of the moving image is an American ritual. After TV took h
old, public filmed confessions became familiar and very popular as a form of absolution. Politicians, movie stars, TV stars, celebrities, sports figures—everyone started confessing on television what bad things they did. Now “sinners” just cut right to the chase and tell us on TV they’re sorry for what they did. No confession needed, only the apology. The tabloids have already revealed the sin that was supposed to be their secret.
28 Hollywood knew that repeating characters in movies was good business. Sometimes movies were built around a single character—Nancy Drew, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, the Whistler, Boston Blackie, Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, Mr. Wu, Torchy Blane, and others. These characters were surrounded by their own “families” of familiar characters, but they usually weren’t about a married couple. They were also, however, very similar to what television would provide. There were also weekly movie serials that appeared in chapters, one per week, with such characters as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Ace Drummond, Superman, and others, going all the way back to silent days with The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine.
29 Radio shows are the usual parallel drawn to the TV sitcom, because they were often fifteen-minute or half-hour shows dominated by dialogue and featuring married couples, but the movie parallels are significant as well.
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