9 DeMille’s favorite star of his marriage/divorce movies, Gloria Swanson, was a similar spokesperson for the female side of the discussion. In the December 1919 issue of Motion Picture, in an article entitled “Gloria Swanson Talks on Divorce,” she told American women: “I not only believe in divorce, but I sometimes think I don’t believe in marriage at all … After all, marriage is just a game. The more elastic the rules, the less temptation there is for cheating. I think that divorce should be made more easy, instead of more difficult. Yes, I believe in divorce as an institution.” Swanson, aged twenty at the time, definitely proved she meant it: she married six times and divorced five.
PART TWO
DEFINING THE MARRIAGE MOVIE
IN THE STUDIO SYSTEM
Silent movies had successfully defined a purpose for the marriage film: comedy, caution, spectacle, a little sail-away into something rich and strange, but also as something that would, in the end, take viewers back to where they were in the first place. Marriage evolved on the movie screen and found success by going home. Everything about this seems clear, even simple. And yet after the silent era, marriage, the one thing that audiences really understood and had personal knowledge of, turns out to be one of the most elusive and confusing topics to tease out of motion-picture history. In the sound era, marriage is everywhere, all over any kind of plot or setting or genre or star vehicle. It’s Nick and Nora Charles. Judge and Mrs. Hardy. Tarzan and Jane. Bluebeard and all his short-lived companions. Pierre and Marie Curie. The Barkleys of Broadway. The Tuttles of Tahiti. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. The Dodsworths. And more than one Mr. and Mrs. Smith. It’s in the west, it’s in the east. Outer space, Transylvania, the frozen north, ancient Rome, modern New York, and Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Couples are happy, unhappy, old, young, and alien. They’re vampires and they’re Communists and they’re doctors and they’re lawyers. Marriages, all kinds, all shapes and sizes, are everywhere in the movies, yet nobody thinks to call one of them “a marriage movie.” Not then and not now. To write about the unnamed marriage movie, I first searched out films in which the plot was clearly about the state of being married, observing the way the stories were told and finding the strategies the studios used with which to vary them.
Despite the fact that no one I asked could remember any sound that were only about marriage, and despite the business practice of trying to pretend they didn’t exist, there are movies purely and utterly about marriage. They tell the story of domesticity … and nothing else. They are honed in. Their purpose is not so much to amuse or warn or provide spectacle—although they often do those things—as to reflect directly the circumstances of marriage in a recognizable form. The world they depict is the world of two people cohabiting, with or without family, but cohabiting under the pressure of a bargain they made with each other—a restrictive bargain that induces pressure. And thus a story of some sort, but a story narrowly focused on those same pressures and that same social bargain. As a result, a second purpose emerges: reassurance. “It’s all right,” say these movies; “it will be all right.” Stick with your bargain, and bad things will not happen. There will be no floods, fires, plagues, earthquakes, illnesses, or disasters like the birth of triplets. Nothing could be much more ironic, in that in order to make audiences believe this, bad things are made to happen. There are floods, fires, plagues, earthquakes, illnesses, and plenty more. The suffering will be worth it, says the marriage film, because in the end you will find you have love. You won’t be alone. Thus the marriage film is one of Hollywood’s most shockingly blatant forms of contradiction, and a great example of how audiences liked to be lied to about things they knew from their own lives.
To reassure everyone that married domesticity was a useful and rewarding enterprise, the movies needed a careful manipulation of narrative structure. It was all in the screenplay. The movie either told the story of a marriage in the popular moving-forward, active mode (young couple get married, things go wrong, all ends well) or they told it backwards as a flashback (everything has gone wrong after a young couple got married and things have so far not ended well). The first is the “I do” form, often, but not always, a comedy; and the second is the “I don’t,” which is the story of a divorce. These two forms were the main strategies found to present stories of marriage in movies.
There is a fine line to be drawn in actually defining a film as a pure marriage movie, because it is necessary to locate the difference between a movie that contains a marriage or uses a marriage as a background and a movie that is very specifically created to define marriage as an onscreen world. Just having a marriage in the story doesn’t make a film a “marriage movie.” If it did, two famous Oscar-winning films of the 1930s would be marriage movies, which they aren’t. Both Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Good Earth (1937) are full of marital issues and have plenty to say about the subject if we’d care to focus on it while we’re watching the North defeat the South and the locusts eat half of China. Gone with the Wind is, in fact, a grab bag of mismatched wedding pairs. Melanie and Ashley are devoted to each other, but possibly passionless; they marry because their families expect it. Scarlett and Rhett marry because they are loaded down by their obsessions, but they barely like each other. She wants the security of his money, and he just wants her. Scarlett’s parents were married across class lines, and Emmie Slattery and Jonas Wilkerson represent a cheap, shotgun example of a similar principle, having married on the sex-first-pay-later plan. Widows and old maids in the plot are defined primarily by their marital status, as is Belle Watling, a husbandless madam (with a son in military school) who makes her living off the needs of married men. The heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, is a rule breaker, and the rules she rails against are those by which women are supposed to comport themselves in marriage.1 Nevertheless, GWTW is not really a marriage movie. It’s a movie about a willful heroine during the Civil War in America, and what happens to people in her world when the Old South is destroyed. (Some of those people just happen to be married.)
The Good Earth, based on a best seller by a Nobelist in literature (Pearl S. Buck), tells an epic story about the lives of two peasants, Wang Lung and his wife, O-Lan. The film opens with their marriage and ends with her death, and during its running time the couple experience many marital woes: deep poverty, in-law problems, the death of a newborn child, and adultery.2 But their marriage is really the background for a story about the nation of China, war and politics, and the importance of the land to its peasants. (That same importance of land was also featured in GWTW.) The issues of The Good Earth, like those of GWTW, are larger than an individual marriage. The settings are historically real, and the purpose of each film is higher, going beyond the parameters of its basic married relationship.
A simple question to ask in order to decide whether a film is fundamentally about marriage is this: Could the characters undergo the same story line if they were not married? Would the focus be the same? Gone with the Wind would still be a film about a willful female in the Civil War and the changes to the Old South, and The Good Earth would still be about war and Chinese peasants, even if their main characters never married. The subplots might not be as interesting, but the events could go forward.
Leave Her to Heaven (1945) is an example of how to draw the line. It’s a disturbing story about a writer (Cornel Wilde) who marries an exotic beauty (Gene Tierney) shortly after he meets her. (Their marriage ceremony isn’t seen onscreen.) They become man and wife approximately 34 minutes into the film, which has a total running time of 110 minutes. Their marriage officially ends about one hour after it begins, because Tierney kills herself, setting up her death to implicate her supposed rival (Jeanne Crain) as a murderess. (Seventeen minutes of film story follow after her death.) Since nearly a full hour of the running time of Leave Her to Heaven is focused on an unhappy marriage between Wilde and Tierney, why isn’t it a marriage movie?3 It is grounded in a bad marriage, and it’s that marriage that brings on doom; but Leave Her to Heaven isn’t about marriage
—it’s about obsession and evil. Audiences never observe domestic bliss. The movie opens up in present time—the bulk of the story is told in flashback—as Wilde arrives to board a boat that will take him to his lake retreat. He has just been released from prison. He is not introduced to audiences as a married man, or a happy man, but as a man who has been in prison. It is his story that will be told, his character that will be explained. Why did he go to prison? Why is he alone? Is he a good man or a bad man? These are not marriage-movie issues.
Leave Her to Heaven doesn’t show domesticity between Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde. It’s all about obsession, desire, and murder. (Photo Credit 2.1)
It is only in the return to the past that the audience learns about the “her” in Leave Her to Heaven, and she is definitely not a role model for wives. No sympathy is ever intentionally created for her at any point. She murders Wilde’s crippled brother (by sitting in a rowboat and watching him drown) and aborts her own child (by throwing herself down the stairs in a negligee and satin pumps). Why? She doesn’t want to share Wilde with anyone. She wants him all to herself. She’s not interested in finding a way to balance their individual needs. In other words, this is a noirish melodrama that uses marriage in order to present a tale of suicide, obsession, and extremely bad female behavior—downright unwifely, in fact. Gene Tierney doesn’t become obsessive just because she marries Cornel Wilde. Marriage doesn’t make her selfish and evil; she was already that way. Marriage counseling isn’t going to help her. Her character soars past the boundaries of everyday behavior into a delicious hyped‑up hysteria (it’s a fabulous movie!). The film could present its story of a jealous woman who behaves irrationally even if Wilde never married Tierney. Except for the scene in which she aborts her unborn child (“I hate the little beast”), most of the same events could take place with minor adjustments to the plot.
Secrets (1933), starring Mary Pickford and Leslie Howard, on the other hand, is a marriage movie, done with a deft referential shorthand that indicates audiences were familiar with the format.4 Pickford, who has the larger role in the film (as fits her legendary status), plays a daughter of wealthy southerners who, against the wishes of her parents, boldly elopes with the penniless Howard, who takes her west in a covered wagon. Told in flashback from the point of view of their happy old age, in which Howard has just retired from a successful political career, the elopement is by default endorsed and justified.
The story of Pickford and Howard’s long marriage is boiled down to its main events: their elopement, their fight for survival (including living through the death of their first child), and his infidelity. In fact, the movie has only three extended scenes: the elopement, played as romantic comedy; the long and difficult struggle in the wilderness, played as tragedy and a triumph of courage and heroism; and an extended ballroom scene set at a gala celebrating Howard’s campaign for the governorship. The latter provides costumes, glamour, a little sex, and some spectacle for viewers. These three key episodes are glued together by montages that fill in the full story “behind the scenes,” as it were: their actual wedding, their arduous journey west, their long fight to build their business into extended wealth, the birth of their additional children, his successful rise into politics, etc. None of these are seen in detailed presentations, just in montages that speedily impart the information.
Secrets only has time for basic marriage issues: love (the elopement), union (the wilderness), and trouble (his adultery). The infidelity comes out of nowhere: an audience has seen Howard previously as a devoted, faithful, and almost worshipful husband to Pickford. At the big ball scene, a dark-haired, dark-eyed “Spanish woman” (code for madam or prostitute) suddenly arrives and confronts Pickford. Pickford is stoic (her lot in life). When she’s told that her husband has promised his mistress he’ll marry her if Pickford will let him go, she says calmly, “In that case, I will release him.” She calls her husband into the room and brings him up to speed. Seemingly a bit annoyed, Howard tells his mistress flat out that he has no intention of marrying her, and that’s that. (The movie assumes that audiences understood star power—there would be no leaving Pickford.) After the “Spanish woman” slinks off, Howard decides he needs to confess to his wife. Pickford says not to bother: she has known all along—not only about this particular woman but also about “all the others.” It’s news to Howard (and also to the audience). He’s crushed, but Pickford instructs him on what to do and say: “I know you want to tell me that none of this meant anything … I was always the one you loved.” After a return to the present in which the old couple steal their butler’s car to drive away for an adventure together, another “elopement,” their young and eager faces are superimposed over their aged ones. Once again, they’re back in their covered wagon, full of youth and optimism—and love.
Leslie Howard and Mary Pickford elope in Secrets, a sound remake of a silent film starring Norma Talmadge. The story of how over the years their union survives troubles from all directions makes Secrets a pure marriage movie. (Photo Credit 2.2)
Secrets knows the audience knows its story—the story of a marriage. It also demonstrates how movies work that story: key in on the romantic couple, ennoble their struggle, select one problem, and resolve it. Secrets is almost minimalist. (It could have been titled Secret.) No details are needed for the full story because everyone knows what it is. Affirm, question (sort of), reaffirm, and resolve, with a glamorous overlay of ballroom costumes and souped up with some western excitement. Secrets proves that an entity that could be called the “marriage movie” did exist, but Secrets was labeled a “historical saga” and a “love story” in ad campaigns and industry house organs.
As movies became American vernacular, a code of images emerged: the subtle presentation of the exotic “other woman” in Secrets shows clearly how movies could imply what they wanted an audience to understand.5 A couple who kissed passionately, followed by a cut to fireplace flames—or fireworks—or waves crashing on the shore—were understood to be going beyond the kiss when the camera discreetly moved to those flames, those explosions, and those waves. The audience got it. It was subtext.
There is no comprehension of Hollywood and its product without the realization that planned subtext is not a modern, after-the-fact discovery or interpretation. Hollywood was run by canny men who came out of salesmanship and poverty, and who had a desire to get more, get better, get up to the top of the heap—to win. Dissembling was something they understood. Stifled by censorship pressure, eager to attract and hold on to the very widest possible audience, moviemakers shrewdly hinted, covered up, misdirected, double-talked, and became vague. They’d show what they wanted to show in the way they wanted to show it, and then deny it in dialogue if necessary. Underneath every movie story runs another story, and it often contradicts or questions the one on the surface. This skill was very useful in tales involving marriage, particularly in the years of strict censorship. It allowed movies to deny love and still confirm it, to indicate sex but never show it, and to say marriage was hell but we should all want and respect it.
The great director Frank Borzage used subtext regarding marriage in Mannequin in 1937. The film starred Joan Crawford (as a girl from ye olde box factory) and Spencer Tracy (as a shipping magnate). It is a story of love, failed love, new love, new failed love, and, finally, love triumphant. Along the way there are marriages. First there’s the wretched marriage of Crawford’s parents, in which the mother slaves away in the kitchen and her unemployed husband calls for his supper. The mother (Elizabeth Risdon) tries to tell her daughter that marriage plans don’t always turn out the way you think they’re going to (“Make a life for yourself”), but Crawford still weds her irresponsible beau (Alan Curtis). At their wedding supper can be observed how eloquently Borzage creates subtext by using close-ups of three faces: Crawford’s, Risdon’s, and Tracy’s.
The supper (“eleven 85-cent dinners”) is held in a Hester Street Chinese restaurant (run by a man named Horowitz). Crawford�
��s beautiful face is radiant, tear-stained with joy. (People sometimes forget what a truly beautiful young woman she was.) Her close-ups show a tremulous happiness, a deep pride in her new status as wife, and an utterly unshakable belief in her future and her husband’s love. (He just sits by looking handsome.) In contrast, her mother’s face is a mask of grief. She is tight-lipped, and she looks away from her daughter and the festive table and tries not to show that she knows only too well how short-lived this joy is going to be. The third close‑up is of the wealthy Tracy. He only happens to be in the restaurant, having visited the poor neighborhood to attend a meeting of the longshoreman’s union. When he spots Crawford’s face (in her close-ups), his own close‑up reveals desire, loneliness, appreciation, yearning, a sense that watching such bliss happen will be his only portion in life. (He’s the audience surrogate.) Tracy pays for the dinners as his gift to a happy bride and groom, largesse from afar, the gratitude of a lonely man for his glimpse of their joy.
A triangle is present onscreen through these close-ups, which are also three contradictory statements on love and marriage. From the mother (no belief or hope) to Crawford (belief and hope) to Tracy (belief but no hope), the camera establishes for a viewer an explanation of three characters. It also simultaneously affirms the joy of romantic love and undercuts it. Crawford’s mother will turn out to be right: the new husband is a cad who leaves his bride in the lurch. Crawford then goes out on her own to “make a life for herself” and meets the wealthy Tracy, who marries her. Crawford makes a transition from hope to no hope to new hope as she really finds what she only thought she had. Tracy gets what he thought he’d never have, but in the plot also loses it when he thinks Crawford has betrayed him. When they are reunited, a new belief, a new hope provides the audience with an escapist dream ending. Mannequin illustrates the perfect Hollywood strategy for marriage films: reality needs to be somewhere in the picture, to affirm the audience’s knowledge, so that when tragedy occurs, they really want to believe they can be lifted out of it. This goal was achieved partially through cinematic strategies: in the case of Mannequin, the effective use of close-ups.
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