I Do and I Don't Read online

  (Photo Credit col1.1)

  This Is a Borzoi Book

  Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2012 by Jeanine Basinger

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Basinger, Jeanine.

  I do and I don’t : a history of marriage in the movies /

  Jeanine Basinger.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96222-5

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-26916-4

  1. Marriage in motion pictures. 2. Marriage in popular culture—

  United States. I. Title.

  PN1995.9.M3B37 2012

  791.43′655—dc23 2012036283

  Front-of-Cover photograph: Carole Lombard and James Stewart in Made for Each Other.

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  Frontispiece: Myrna Loy and William Powell in After the Thin Man, married but not domestic

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to the man I married

  at a Justice of the Peace office in Saratoga Springs

  on September 22, 1967.

  O the wo that is in marriage!

  The Wife of Bath

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE:

  THE SILENT ERA

  PART TWO:

  DEFINING THE MARRIAGE MOVIE

  IN THE STUDIO SYSTEM

  The Couple

  Their Problems

  Their Situations

  PART THREE:

  THE MODERN ERA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Photographic Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have always been fortunate in having superb family, friends, colleagues, and students who have supported my efforts in everything I’ve attempted. There are many to thank. At Wesleyan University, I have the best fellow film faculty anyone could want, superb sounding boards one and all: Steve Collins, Lisa Dombrowski, Scott Higgins, Leo Lensing, Marc Longenecker, Katya Straub, Jacob Bricca, Krishna Winston, and Wesleyan’s President, Michael Roth. Everyone who works around me, Joyce Heidorn, Sal Privatera, Joan Miller, and most especially and most exceptionally, Lea Carlson, deserve thanks. The list of former students who contribute ideas to my work would be endless, but for this book I’ll single out Jeffrey Lane, Sammy Wasson, Eric Lichtenfeld, Joss Whedon, Paul Weitz, Miguel Arteta, Eric Levy, David Kendall, Ed Decter, Domenica Cameron-Scorsese Frenzel, Owen Renfroe, and especially Jeremy Arnold, who also did amazing photo research. I always find great conversations about anything to do with movies from old friends such as Leonard, Alice, and Jessie Maltin; Richard Schickel, Annie Schulhoff, and Richard Slotkin. For this particular book, both Molly Haskell and David Thomson gave me great advice on the pitfalls of attempting to write about marriage, and Clint Eastwood provided thoughtful insight into unusual “married” relationships in our conversations about his film J. Edgar. I thank Ron and Howard Mandelbaum and Buddy Weiss of Photofest, and Maxine Fleckner Ducey at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research for their research efforts, deep knowledge of film history, and intrepid location of stills, and Robert Osborne of TCM provided both insight and access to Seventh Sin. Many thanks go to all the people at Knopf who contributed to this book: the talented and sensitive designer, Iris Weinstein; the scrupulous and patient production editor, Kevin Bourke; the brilliant jacket designer, Carol Carson; the indefatigable Roméo Enriquez; and eager editorial assistant Dan Schwartz.

  As ever, I thank (and thank again) my editor, the fabulous Bob Gottlieb, who has never been anything but patient with me (and my lack of a computer), and who always asks the key question at the key moment. His ability to find exactly the right film (Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice) or the right television show (Friday Night Lights, Borgen) to make the right point is simply amazing. And he’s funny, too.

  For my family goes an extra truckload of thanks, since this project took much support from everyone: my husand, John; my daughter, Savannah; my granddaughter, Kulani; and my son-in-law, Rob (who had to help with computers). From one and all I received good ideas, encouragement, and the reassurance that “I do!” can still be a viable form of the marriage story.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a book about marriage in the movies, and yes, I am married. I have been for forty-five years, and to the same saint of a guy. When we first announced we’d wed, his friends gave it five minutes, and mine about ten. Yet here we are, forty-five years later, long after most of them have hit the divorce courts at least once. (Somebody once told me, “You two are like one of those movie marriages where he’s a cowboy and she’s a fashion designer and the whole audience knows it’s never gonna work, but the movie claims it will.”)

  In writing this book, I am doing something unfashionable. I am describing stars and stories and business strategies, and I am not analyzing sociological and cultural influences, discussing psychoanalytical theory or the differences between the male and the female gaze. These things are all worthwhile pursuits, but this book is an overview of how commercial movies told the story of marriage, and how they used it to draw audiences into the theater. The book is descriptive, historical, and personally speculative. It’s about what the average person saw and heard at the movie theater. Nothing more and nothing less. It’s written in plain language, and it just tries to describe what was there up on the screen over a few decades of American life. It is not heavily footnoted (except with personal asides), but it is carefully researched. In presenting it, I am well aware that scholars won’t think it’s scholarly enough, and general readers will think it’s too scholarly. It’s a book for people who like movies and want to share a conversation about them.

  This book does not represent how I teach my film classes: it’s a book about content rather than a formalist examination of movie aesthetics. I chose to do this because in watching marriage movies, I felt that they were pitched at the audience’s own level of experience more closely than any other type of movie I had seen. These movies were about content. They were talking to an audience who knew the subject, knew the subtext, knew the reality. I think this is one of the reasons that the topic of marriage in the movies, unlike the American West, horror, melodrama, combat, crime, and others, has not yet captured the full attention of academia. There are books on romantic comedy, and books on runaway brides, and Stanley Cavell’s well-respected book on comedies of remarriage, but very little on marriage itself.

  Cavell’s book uses a series of celebrated screwball comedies from the 1930s and early 1940s to discuss the well-known characteristics of the genre but also to use the films to ask philosophical questions: What is a marriage? Is marriage merely habit? If the habits aren’t working, should the marriage be broken up? And what are the habits that American popular culture encourages audiences to pursue? Cavell discusses the transformative process of marriage between a man and a woman, and he uses recognizable film-studies issues such as the way movies begat movies, how they always refer to each other (concepts of film genre study), and how movie stars become real to viewers as a persona they carry from film to film. Cavell translates philosophical issues onto popular Hol
lywood comedies. He understands that people who went to the movies experienced them as a conversation carried from film to film, a conversation that influenced the way American filmgoers thought, felt, and responded to life. Cavell’s thoughts are beautifully expressed, and his appreciation of the films he writes about is deep and joyous. My book differs in one simple way: he uses movies to think about philosophy; I use them to think about movies.

  I have already written about certain movie marriages in A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960, so I did not redescribe any of those films, some of which, such as Week-end Marriage, Roughly Speaking, and I’ll See You in My Dreams, are significant. I also had to select which other movies to write about, and there were many choices. This means that some movies with interesting marriages aren’t discussed: The Arrangement, Dust Be My Destiny, So Goes My Love, Come Live with Me, Cinderella Jones, Good Sam, Next Time We Love, She Married Her Boss, There’s Always Tomorrow (both versions), The Letter, Written on the Wind, Seems Like Old Times, The Enchanted Cottage, The Stratton Story, Such Good Friends, Hot Blood, Home from the Hill, Wild Is the Wind, Invitation, My Foolish Heart, Walls of Jericho, Mr. Skeffington, Craig’s Wife (and the remake, Harriet Craig), I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Illicit, Ex-Lady, Woman in Hiding, aspects of Preston Sturges’s films, and countless others. As I completed this book, a new interest in marriage seemed to be surfacing after a period of time in which the institution had become almost anachronistic. I hope that new interest will carry over to this book, and into a willingness to hear through these pages what older movies had to say about the subject.

  “Marriage,” said Eddie Cantor, long wed to his Ida and the parent of five daughters, “is not a word. It’s a sentence.”

  INTRODUCTION

  Once upon a time, I decided to write a book about marriage in the movies, and I had no idea that might prove to be a problem. Both Molly Haskell and David Thomson told me it would, but I didn’t listen. I had even been warned about it by filmmakers. (Frank Capra said, “Embrace happy marriage in real life, but keep away from it onscreen.”) I had read research in which executives such as Sam Briskin, RKO’s production chief, complained about the married couple in John Ford’s The Plough and the Stars: “Why make a picture where a man and woman are married? The main thing about pictures is love or sex. Here you’ve got a man and woman married at the start—who’s interested in that?” I didn’t pay any attention. I just wanted to write a book about marriage in the movies.

  I started out by asking friends and colleagues to tell me their favorite marriage movies. In almost every case, they stared at me blankly and had no answer. A few imaginative souls came up with the Thin Man series or The Awful Truth, but that was about it for the suggestion pile. Of course, the Thin Man movies and The Awful Truth aren’t really marriage movies; they have marriages in them, but that doesn’t make them marriage movies. The Thin Man is about a detective who solves murders. He has a wife and she tags along, looking extremely chic, and the two of them are utterly charming together whenever they cohabit the screen. But the movies are not about marriage per se; they are about who murdered whom while other guests at the table were dining on breast of guinea hen. As for The Awful Truth, it’s a delightful screwball comedy in which a married couple gets divorced in the first few minutes and spends the rest of the movie romping around and insulting each other until they fall in love all over again. There’s no domesticity on display.

  In short, no one came up with a list of real marriage movies for me. But why? Why weren’t people bombarding me with titles, the way they’d always done with every other subject, whether I wanted them to or not? I knew perfectly well that movies told stories about marriage. Starting my research, I read the original reviews of hundreds of movies in Variety and The New York Times and combed through my extensive collection of vintage movie posters, magazines, pressbooks, and reviews from the era of the studio system.

  The first thing that struck me came as a surprise. In plot terms, there were relatively few sound movies that were only about the state of being married. And even though fan magazines such as Photoplay ran monthly columns (“Brief Reviews”) designed to give readers a quick reference guide to plot types, there was no generic category designated as “marriage movie” (“domestic drama” sometimes, but never “marriage movie”).1

  This advertising practice was consistent. The September 1939 issue of Photoplay indicates how clearly (and easily) the guidelines worked: Dodge City (western); Bridal Suite (madcap comedy); Big Town Czar (gangsters); Clouds Over Europe (mystery); Back Door to Heaven (social-message picture); Confessions of a Nazi Spy (propaganda); and The Wizard of Oz (musical fantasy). (Variety also identified movies by type. As Husbands Go [1930] was “a drawing room comedy-drama.”) In these columns, any movie built around a big-name star was identified as such (“a Shirley Temple film” or “the latest Deanna Durbin”), or even as imitative of a successful star (“a Sonja Henie film without Henie”). Sometimes movies were defined by other movies (“kind of a Mr. Deeds” or “another Informer,” because Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was a box-office hit and The Informer was an Oscar winner). But there was no “marriage movie,” and advertising conformed to this practice.

  For example, the 1951 film Close to My Heart is a marital soap opera in which a husband (Ray Milland) has a serious conflict with his wife (Gene Tierney) over adopting a child. Magazine ads feature a large picture of Milland and Tierney, his lips hovering over hers in a hot embrace. Shown full-face, Milland looks suave and handsome, and Tierney, in profile, looks willing and submissive. The tag line says, “This thing called love … and the wonderful things it makes happen … There’s the best reason in the world for everybody to see this picture: it’s great and makes you feel great!” Nobody’s doing the dishes, taking out the garbage, changing any diapers, or mentioning “marriage.” Down in the corner, however, there’s a very small photo of Tierney holding a baby. Beside it runs the line: “We’re not going to tell you how Danny fits into this picture … Let’s simply say that he’s one of the reasons that moviegoers of every age, everywhere, have taken Close to My Heart close to their hearts.” Looking at this ad, potential ticket buyers would inevitably focus on the hot-looking Milland and Tierney. As to that kid hovering way down in the corner—why is he there? Are Milland and Tierney by any chance married? The ad writers are not going to be the ones to tell us.

  Movies about married couples were almost without exception sold as “love” or “romance” instead of “marriage.” Romance was the motion-picture cash cow, but any kind of misdirection would do. In The Homestretch (1947), a couple marry outside their own class backgrounds and suffer for it. (“Your kind of romance!” said the poster.) In Over 21 (1945), a middle-aged pair struggle with the changes World War II brings to their marriage. (“Theirs is the kind of fun that makes the world go round!”) An Innocent Affair (1948; also known as Don’t Trust Your Husband), starring Fred MacMurray and Madeleine Carroll, tells a discouraging tale of imagined infidelity, but it was sold as “a saucy, glossy comedy.” In Rachel and the Stranger (1948), in which William Holden purchases and weds an indentured servant (Loretta Young), the story was marketed as “an unusual pioneer picture”; and when a postwar GI (Holden again) and his youthful, pregnant wife (Jeanne Crain) can’t find housing or enough money to live on in Apartment for Peggy (1948), the movie ads claimed that the story had “humor, wisdom and sentiment.” No mention of marriage woes and pressures. Even Pitfall (also 1948), a film noir in which a husband (Dick Powell) strays, shoots a man, and messes up his relationship with his wife, was disguised as “a strong domestic drama.”

  Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning Best Film, Rebecca (1940), based on Daphne du Maurier’s famous book, featured an unlikely marriage, a possible murder, and a mansion haunted by an ex-wife. Ads told would-be audiences that the film was about “a man … a young girl … gloriously in love … a great dramatic romance.” The Very Thought of You (1944) was a World War II rel
ease starring Dennis Morgan and Eleanor Parker, a tender story of the problems a young couple encounter when they marry after a brief courtship just before he ships out. The film conveys an honest wartime sadness that adds up to a depressing portrait of a dysfunctional American family, but the ads trumpeted happily: “Want to see one great big honey of a picture about Rookies and their Cookies? … Here’s a screenful of huggin’ and kissin’ where every hug and kiss feels like it’s meant for you! Want to have some—what we mean—fun?” Perhaps the ultimate in deception in movie advertising was for Madame Curie (1943). Boasting the presence of “the romantic stars of Mrs. Miniver” (Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon), the prevue trailer describes the wedded union of the Nobel Prize–winning scientists Pierre and Marie Curie as “a strange journey into the unknown … the love story of the most exciting woman of her day.” No mention of radium, science, or the Periodic Table of Elements.

  Even when the subject was implied in the film’s title, the ads misdirected. Father Takes a Wife (1941) is a story of a wealthy older man (Adolphe Menjou) who weds a famous actress (Gloria Swanson) over the objections of his grown‑up children. “There’s glamour on the screen again because Gloria’s back!” the advertising campaign claimed. The film was categorized as “romantic comedy” and variously described as “hilariously amorous … about two lovebirds … a screaming comedy.” Marriage Is a Private Affair (1944), starring Lana Turner, was dubbed “a wartime romance” in movie review columns, though it’s actually the story of a hasty wartime marriage that goes on the rocks. The sales poster featured a very large (and beautiful) drawing of the luscious young Turner at the peak of her new stardom. Under her name in giant letters is the film’s title in a smaller type. The tag line says, “It’s So Romantic!” and a corner box notes Lana’s thirty-five costume changes.2