The movie business always tried to find a way to please as wide an audience as possible. As early as 1927, writing in a book entitled Building Theater Patronage: Management and Merchandising, J. F. Barry and E. W. Sargent reminded readers that “photoplays cannot be made with only one type of audience in mind. Nor can they be made for any particular community … In fact, in every photoplay there are different highlights which when brought to the attention of different groups or different classes of the community … can be selected around which to build an advertising campaign.”
In selling their movie dreams, Hollywood studios understood that the best way was to connect as directly as possible to the audience’s real-life experience, and then draw them up and out of it and into a dream world. First, the friendly reality … then the luxurious escape hatch. Start with a poor little girl working in a department store or a box factory—preferably some “poor little girl” like Joan Crawford. Take her out of that store upward and onward to furs, jewels, penthouses, caviar, champagne, and Clark Gable. (Now you’re talkin’ audience values!) Marriage could be used that way. It could be disguised, reshaped, broken, and rebuilt, put to other purposes. Hollywood didn’t throw away anything useful, and it always searched for the positive. The marriage story might be a challenge, but wasn’t it also a useful, ready-made direct link to the audience—that “built-in” connection to “audience values” the business was always looking for? Couldn’t it function like the horror film, by showing us all the bad and scary things, and then making them go away?
Marriage was a given, a kind of freebie for movie stories. The ghost of marriage hangs over all kinds of films. What did Shane, the lone cowpoke, ride away from? A marriage, with a home and a family. What did men in combat think about, talk about, and write home to? The wives and marriages they had left behind. What was a no-no for an on-the-run gangster, because it would finally trip him up? Marriage. And what, of course, was the goal of all romantic comedies, and dramas? Marriage, marriage, marriage.
Marriage was out there, ready to be used. But what could the marriage movie do for audiences that was positive? To entertain them, reassure them, lift them up and away? To motivate them to buy tickets? What could be its purpose? Satirization of an institution everyone knew was flawed but needed to sentimentalize anyway? A few shared laughs over a set of restrictions that had been set by society and agreed on? The killing of the contract through death, murder, train accidents—anything that could suddenly liberate a married person to move to another genre? What?
Because marriage was a finish line, not a starting place, it made a good background for other types of stories. It could be a supporting player. It served with distinction as a tragic backdrop for stories about deaths of children and mates, and wives driven by poverty into prostitution. It was effective representing the stable household that the roving western hero could not (or would not) attain, and explaining stolid characters like Andy Hardy and George Bailey, who were products of traditionally defined “happy marriages, normal households.” It was highly suitable for true-life biographies. These stories were gender-flexible. Émile Zola writes, Mrs. Zola hands him a dish of pie. Madame Curie titrates, Monsieur Curie hands her a petri dish. Audiences could see that men like Zola and Louis Pasteur were able to do what they did because they were happily married, and Marie Curie could discover radium because she was Madame Curie, with a convenient, Nobel Prize–winning husband (until he got absentminded, the way husbands do, and walked in front of a carriage and got run over).
Marriage could be used like a chemical element. It could stand alone, merge with another element, lie dormant inside other elements, or become part of an alloy involving the combination of many elements. Its property—a marriage certificate that never changes—can be transposed into something else by such catalysts as history, society, and emotional recklessness. It is a status that can appear anywhere, at any time, in any film. It was like characters such as doctors, or settings such as kitchens, or actions such as driving a car. Doctors can be doctors (in medical films) or subjects for biopics (Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet), or love interests (in both versions of Magnificent Obsession). They can also be western heroes (The Hanging Tree and My Darling Clementine) or war heroes (The Story of Dr. Wassell, Homecoming, Battle Circus), or comic heroes (M*A*S*H, People Will Talk, The Disorderly Orderly). Kitchens can appear in screwball comedies (My Man Godfrey), westerns (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), melodramas (Imitation of Life, 1934 version), gangster movies (The Public Enemy, The Godfather), and many others. Driving a car—or a wagon, or a stagecoach, or a mule, or a spaceship—is ubiquitous, and the point is that some kinds of characters, settings, and actions are so adaptable that they can literally go anywhere. Marriage is like that.
Whenever a marriage movie came onscreen, it could ask a series of questions that audiences could clearly recognize as issues in their own lives. Who wears the pants in the marriage? Did you choose the right mate? Are your values the same? Do you have enough money or too much money? Are you keeping your marriage vows? Does your mate “understand” you? Do your in-laws interfere? Do you get along on a daily basis? Can you trust each other? Can you deal with pressures that fall on you that are outside your control? Did you marry outside your class? Do you want a divorce?
Having concluded that marriage in the movies was that damned elusive Pimpernel, I began watching the films anyway—films across decades, across different genres, and with different tones of voice (drama, comedy, musical). I watched a constant stream of movies that were either about marriages or had marriages somewhere in them. At the end of three years of screenings, I summed up the basics I had learned:
1. Writing about marriage in the movies was indeed a problem.
2. There were movies that were strictly about the condition of being married, but there weren’t many of them, and there were fewer and fewer as film history advanced.
3. The film business was consistent in almost never labeling a movie a “marriage” film, and it avoided the word as much as possible in all forms of advertising unless it could be made comic or eroticized.
The bottom line was that the marriage movie was a difficult story to both tell and sell, because to find dramatic purpose, it had to become negative about itself in a positive way. It had to both link to and escape from reality, and it had to remember that the audience already knew its secrets.
The business didn’t trust it, audiences didn’t really want it, but marriage could never be ignored. It was everywhere and nowhere, the genre that dared not speak its name, the ghost that hung over the happy ending of every romantic comedy. As a subject, it existed to be achieved (jolly comedy, great love story), destroyed (death, murder, tragedy), or denied (divorce). If it was achieved, the movie was over. If it was destroyed, it was no longer there, gotten rid of and abandoned once and for all. If it was denied, it was only temporarily shelved (for some fun) and could be reassuringly restored. The more I studied it, the more I realized that although marriage was indeed a very difficult topic to locate and identify in movies, its history was an example of how audiences and filmmakers influenced each other, reflected each other, and defined each other. It was a problem because at its core it contained a contradiction. “I do,” it said—and also “I don’t.” I decided that it was the very contradictions and complexities of the marriage film that made it worth writing about.
1 Sometimes “marriage” would appear in a title as a joke or to suggest something slightly racy or intriguing: He Married His Wife, but such a film was usually a screwball comedy. Sometimes “husband” or “wife” would be used in a title for sexual innuendo. For My Favorite Wife, there were “two blazing brides—and only one blushing!”
2 The poster uses “marriage” in its title at a time (during World War II) when the audience was particularly concerned about its sanctity, with men overseas and wives left behind at home. The ad images ignore it for the bigger sales appeal of its star and her wardrobe.
3 “People are
married by time,” says Frank Morgan to his wife of many years (Spring Byington) in 1942’s Vanishing Virginian, “not by the marriage vows.”
4 All film historians know that “the Hollywood happy ending” was only one part of the complex outpouring of movies from the studio system. It’s an oversimplification to imagine that’s all there was, but the romantic escapist movie fit the pattern.
5 Comedy dialogue about marriage is often shockingly misogynistic. In Women Are Like That (1938), a character sagely advises that where men went wrong was that “society made a mistake when it separated women from goats and took the women into the home.”
6 This Singapore dialogue was typical, and a real crowd-pleaser. Knock marriage, everyone will get the joke—but later on, sell love (Dorothy Lamour) and keep hope alive.
7 Later, Andy tells the truth: “All’s I ever get out of you are these man-to-man talks.”
8 These disparaging remarks have not disappeared from movies. Characters continue to tell us it’s a dreary and frustrating business. In Woody Allen’s celebrated Annie Hall (1977), a couple are interviewed separately as to how often they have sex. The man complains, “Hardly ever. Three times a week.” His wife rolls her eyes and says, “Constantly! I’d say three times a week.” In the distinguished literary movie The Last Station (2009), Count and Countess Tolstoy tear at each other viciously. When the countess (a superb Helen Mirren) becomes overly tragic, the count (Christopher Plummer) yells, “You need a Greek chorus!” Even in a movie aimed at the young-adult audience, marriage is savaged. In 2010’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the young heroes adventurously cross the river Styx to find Hades yelling to his wife, “Persephone! What’s taking you so long? Get over here!” She coldly replies, “Or what? I’m already in Hell.” It’s a definitive statement on many marriage movies.
PART ONE
THE SILENT ERA
In the silent-film era, movies told the story of marriage straightforwardly, as a familiar situation—and audiences cheerfully accepted it as such. The idea that marriage might be unappealing at the box office, or perhaps a depressing plot development, didn’t seem to exist in the same way it did later, in the studio-system years. Silent-film makers presented marriage as something audiences could and would recognize, and therefore enjoy seeing on the screen. In embracing the subject, they had available current history, past history, imaginary history … different tones, attitudes, moods … myriad events and characters … the works. Although it was a rigid or fixed social event, marriage could still be used flexibly. It could be the main event, the comic relief, or the tragic subplot. And, of course, it could always be linked to the surefire box-office concept of love.1
Unlike in later decades, many silent movies openly carried the concept in the title: The Marriage of William Ashe (1921); The Marriage Maker (1921); Man, Woman, Marriage (1921); The Marriage Chance (1922); Married People (1922); The Married Flapper (1922); The Marriage Market (1923); Marriage Morals (1923); The Marriage Cheat (1924); Marry in Haste (1924); Married Flirts (1924); The Marriage Circle (1924); Marriage in Transit (1925); Marry Me (1925); The Marriage Whirl (1925); Married? (1926); Marriage License (1926); The Marriage Clause (1926); Marriage (1927); Married Alive (1927); Marriage by Contract (1928); Marry the Poor Girl (1928); The Marriage Playground (1929); and Married in Hollywood (1929); etc. And this doesn’t include titles with the words “bride,” “groom,” “wife,” and “husband.”2
The marriage film found its basic definition in the silent era, and had no trouble doing so. Why would it? All anyone had to do to tell a story about marriage was to present a couple in love, get them married in the first scene (or open with them already married), set them up in a home of some sort, give them a recognizable problem, make the problem worse, and then resolve it. Couple, situation, problem, resolution: this is the pattern silent audiences saw and embraced, and their responses to it were clear. They would laugh at it. Or they would cry over it. Silent films were a beautiful art, and they were never simpleminded, but many of them often presented marriage in a basic mode, happy or sad. They went bipolar: raucous comedy or stark tragedy.
Both types could be shaped into cautionary tales. The comedy version provided audiences with release as they laughed at their own problem in a safe form, and the tragic one warned them things could be much, much worse. In other words, the pattern for stories about marriages was simple enough: Was it going to be a yes or a no version? Was it “I do” or “I don’t”? Would it divert or warn?
This “bipolar” approach to the basic setup (couple, wedding, home, problems) was a useful business discovery. It was one thing to treat marriage as a joke—that was predictable. The really significant thing was to accept it as a failed enterprise. Once it became clear that viewers had no trouble accepting the idea that marriages could turn into problems, that romance could fail, movies could show marriage as a disappointment without offending married couples. Up there on the screen, marriage didn’t have to be sacred. Entering a movie theater apparently was an absolution. Long before they had arrived in their seats, boy had met girl, boy had got girl, and boy had married girl. That part was over, and they apparently felt it was now okay for all hell to break loose on the screen. Nosy neighbors, hideous in-laws, naughty children, snotty and ungrateful children, interfering children, lost children, kidnapped children, crippled children, evil children. Uppity cooks, oversexed maids, lippy gardeners, and butlers with more class than their employers, because, lord knows, you just couldn’t get good help. Adultery, competition, bankruptcy, arson, death, murder, and suicide. Incest. War and plague. Earthquakes and typhoons and a household of terrible furniture never fully paid for.3 Marriage on film could be a world of woe, all the direct result of merely saying two words: “I do.” Marriage could be—and was—accepted as a hangover, the “after” of the happily-ever-after.
The hilarious comedy version was common in two-reelers, where lampooning marriage had great appeal for audiences. For filmmakers, it was an easy shorthand with which to connect to what men and women knew—and get them to laugh about it. In particular, Mack Sennett comedy shorts made use of marital conflicts between two incompatible mates. (Bring on the rolling pin and the mother-in-law jokes!) The mockery of marriage liberated everybody—audiences, who roared at what they recognized, and moviemakers, who rolled freely over its sacredness in all directions. Two great examples from Sennett star the wonderful team of Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand, talented clowns of the silent era. In 1915, Fatty and Mabel made two gems, That Little Band of Gold and Fatty and Mabel’s Married Life. In the former, an entire romantic comedy is neatly wrapped up with one single title card: “A Kiss, A Pledge, A Ring.” (So much for the meet-cute.) Immediately following, after the marriage, trouble arrives. Another title card says it all: “And now she waits for him.” A few frames later, she’s being told “Your husband is sipping wine with a strange woman”—and suddenly it’s “all over but the alimony.” Mabel’s mother is very helpful in this brief but eloquent scenario. With no need for a title card, she is seen clearly mouthing the traditional words “I told you so” to Mabel when Fatty begins to misbehave.
One of filmdom’s first (and funniest) mismatched married couples: Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand in He Did and He Didn’t: how tight will she (should she?) tie that bow? (Photo Credit 1.1)
Fatty and Mabel’s Married Life, a self-labeled “farce comedy,” lays out what would always be a typical conflict in movies about marriage: the man goes out to work, and the woman is left home alone. When he comes back at night, he sits and smokes his cigar, and she has nothing to do but sew. Progress in their relationship is depicted by Mabel getting mad and throwing things and by Fatty falling down a lot. In the end, the police arrive and the neighbors are shocked. Crammed into the brief two reels of running time are such further developments as kisses and promises, mistakes and misunderstandings, apologies and accusations, tears and laughter—not to mention some gunfire, an organ grinder, and a monkey.
All these things are pretty much what will become the basic elements of the marriage movies of the future, only with more gunfire and no organ grinder. (The monkey stays in the picture.)
Even comics such as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, who created their own specific and original universes on film, used wretched marital behavior as basic material. In Spite Marriage (1929) Keaton becomes the victim of a sophisticated stage actress (Dorothy Sebastian) who marries him only after she’s been jilted, hence the film’s title. Keaton, a pants presser by trade, is then stuck with a tantrum-throwing bride who gets dead drunk on their wedding night and creates an awful scene in a nightclub. In My Wife’s Relations (1922), Keaton is yoked to an unloving Polish wife who has four huge and horrible brothers who constantly torment him physically and mentally and, despite everything, hilariously. Keaton is, in fact, a kind of house slave.4 Things change when the brothers mistakenly think Keaton’s inherited a fortune. “He’s rich,” one grouses. “Now we’ll have to be nice to him.” Another brother is more cerebral: “Let’s murder him first and then kill him.” When it came to marriage, Keaton’s character was snakebit. He and his new bride are happy in One Week (1920), but when they try to work together and assemble their little prefab house, nothing goes right.
Harold Lloyd made a charming two-reeler called I Do in 1921, in which he and his beloved surreptitiously elope, never realizing that her parents, who are dying to get them married, are facilitating their sneaky actions all the way. Lloyd’s best film about marriage is feature-length: Hot Water (1924). As the movie begins, the audience is treated to the following title card:
Married life is like dandruff—it falls heavily upon your shoulders—you get a lot of free advice about it—but up to date nothing has been found to cure it.
As the plot gets under way, Lloyd’s character says no matter what he’ll never exchange his freedom for marriage, but bang! He spots the lovely Jobyna Ralson, and his life is suddenly defined as: “A honeymoon—then rent to pay.” Lloyd has to support not only his wife but also her hideous family: a lazy lout of an older brother, a Dennis-the-Menace younger one (an artist with a pea shooter), and one of film’s most horrific mothers-in-law, played by Josephine Crowell. Crowell is described as having “the nerve of a book agent, the disposition of a dyspeptic landlord, and the heart of a traffic cop.” (And what’s more, she sleepwalks.) Lloyd earns a living for the sponging brood, runs their errands, puts up with their insults, and endures comic interludes that include his struggle to bring a live turkey home on a crowded streetcar as well as a terrifying ride with the family in his new automobile (“the Butterfly Six”). With help from his in-laws, the car is totaled.
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