I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  Hollywood probably thought that many couples in the audience would welcome a letter from Victor Moore, because the “oops” movie was popular. It was the Great Escape. Audiences apparently liked to see a couple split up for no reason of their own, a hand-of-fate divorce. Clearly, judging by the box office, audiences were responsive to (as well as curious about) what getting out of marriage might mean. It was an attractive idea—wake up one morning and a letter from someone you don’t know tells you that you’re free. Hollywood was happy enough to learn that audiences might like divorce better than they liked marriage. Many people in Hollywood, after all, felt the same way.

  . . .

  Another interesting strategy for presenting a pure (or honest) form of marriage was used when the subject was moved off-center and out of the spotlight. It was an excellent supporting player. As such, it usually had a character actor’s schtick: it was wacky (Ma and Pa Kettle); it was idealized (the Hardys) or glamorized (Nick and Nora Charles). Hollywood played with marriage, dropping it into the mix here and there for a laugh or a heart tug or a warning. Keeping marriage on the screen as a secondary player kept it familiar, kept it fresh, kept it as a touchstone—but also kept it at a distance. As any typical movie story progressed, a marriage of some sort—usually hideous—might pop up, like a little yoo-hoo to the audience, a sort of visual drive-by. These “drive-by” marriages are a way of acknowledging the condition without either dealing with it fully or treating it as an idyllic state. Such scenes are escape valves and act as reminders of reality for audiences. The fact that these scenes are often brutally honest indicates that they were the marriage stories that Hollywood understood. In fact, when it came to showing what didn’t work—and making it funny—Hollywood knew how to get it right and almost always did so from the very beginning.

  These little marriage reminders often appear in screwball comedies, and almost always present a short vignette of a quarreling couple. For instance, in It Happened One Night (1934), Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, two relatively unacquainted characters from completely different backgrounds, can easily, hilariously fall into an improvisation of a “typical” married couple at a motor court. Colbert and Gable come from opposite ends of the social scale, but they both know what a bad marriage looks and sounds like. She whines and cries and accuses. He snarls and complains and threatens. Inside the romance of It Happened One Night lies a cruel but amusing glimpse of what “happily ever after” could bring.

  In The Awful Truth (1937), Irene Dunne discovers her husband (Cary Grant) has lied to her about going on a business trip to Florida. The implication is that he stayed around the city, having a high old time, and resorted to lying under a suntan lamp for his alibi before going home with a load of oranges (which turn out to be from California). Dunne has already found out “the awful truth,” and she lays a trap for him. They quarrel, and she decides to divorce him, immediately calling her lawyer. The audience is shown this well-dressed, older man in his lavish home as he speaks to Dunne on the phone. He takes a condescending tone to what he obviously sees as “the little woman” in one of her “female” moods, and tries to jolly her out of her plan for divorce. He speaks slowly, as if she isn’t very bright: “Now, now, my dear.” As he speaks, his own wife appears in the background. A somewhat Wagnerian figure, she is neither beautiful nor chic, and she is clearly angry at him. She interrupts the call to tell him to come to dinner. He pays absolutely no attention to her. “As I was saying, Lucy,” he tells Dunne, his tone highly conciliatory, “marriage is a beautiful thing, and when you’ve been married as long as I have, you’ll appreciate it, too.” His wife has, in her turn, also paid no attention to him, carrying right on with “Your food is getting ice cold. You’re always complaining about your food. How do you expect me—?” The lawyer interrupts her, very angry, covering the phone so Dunne cannot hear: “Will you shut your big mouth? I’ll eat when I get good and ready, and if you don’t like it, you know what you can do! So shut up!” Then he turns back to the telephone, his voice once again patient, soothing, gently reassuring. “Lucy, darling. Marriage is a beautiful thing.” The film immediately cuts to a divorce court.

  In the multiple-character story Dinner at Eight (1933), Jean Harlow and Wallace Beery have a great scream-out in her boudoir (“You big lug!” “Oh, yeah?”). He’s old and overweight, and she’s young and greedy. The only thing they have in common is their vulgarity. She married him for money, and he married her for sex, and they both know it. They are hilarious, and deeply frightening. They are, however, supremely united in their social climb. When they realize the proposed dinner invitation has something for both to gain, they suit up together. Beery puts on the Ritz with his tuxedo and top hat, and Harlow breaks out her backless lamé and white furs. They soldier forward like the couple they are not, because the “dinner at eight” gives him the business connection he wants and puts her silver slipper in the social door. They sweep into Billie Burke’s dinner party in a dubiously united marital front, ready to do battle together if they have to. There’s a naked honesty in their unified purpose.

  Perhaps the most perfect example of the short little “yoo-hoo” marriage is the famous breakfast-table sequence in Citizen Kane (1941). In a brief six minutes, Charles Foster Kane and his beautiful society bride, Emily, enact a full marriage story from start to finish, and it’s one any audience can recognize. As Joseph Cotten narrates in left-screen foreground, the nursing home he lives in fades out, to be replaced by a deep-focus image of the youthful and happy Kanes. Cotten says, “After the first couple of months, she and Charlie didn’t see much of each other … except at breakfast. It was a marriage just like any other marriage.”

  The story of this “marriage just like any other marriage” then advances in six scenes across time through the use of swish pans. It begins with the young Kanes in lavish evening clothes, just coming home from a ball. Charles Kane is resplendent in tuxedo, and Emily softly feminine in a shoulderless gown, graciously pouring tea. He is her “waiter,” bringing her a little dish of something, grandly sweeping a napkin over his arm, stooping to plant a loving kiss on her head and then sitting down within touching distance beside her. Obviously young and deeply in love, they cannot take their eyes off each other. They murmur, their dialogue overlapping in unison, mingled in their eagerness to tell each other what they are thinking and feeling. She’s saying she’s never stayed up this late, and he’s telling her, “You’re beautiful … you’re very, very beautiful.” As she begins to make little protests to deny his compliments, he continues to reiterate how beautiful she is. She says, about the lateness of the hour, “I don’t know what the servants will think.” He replies, “They’ll think we enjoyed ourselves. Didn’t we?” She responds with sweet petulance, “I don’t see why you have to go straight to the newspaper,” and he admonishes her with “You should never have married a newspaperman. They’re worse than sailors … I absolutely adore you.” Looking truly lovely, her bare shoulders reflecting candlelight, she delicately introduces the topic of bed: “Charles, even newspapermen have to sleep.” Easily persuaded, and looking totally smitten, he says, “I’ll call Mr. Bernstein and have him put off my appointments until noon.” She smiles. “What time is it?” he asks. “Why, I don’t know,” she replies. “It’s late.” Grinning somewhat lasciviously, he says, “It’s early,” and leans in close to her. All audiences can read this charming love scene correctly.

  However, a swish pan suddenly takes the viewer rapidly forward in time to a different view. Mrs. Kane is now wearing a negligee and speaking from her end of the table in a bored, rather arch tone with which she clearly means to spank her husband in a correctly wifelike manner: “Charles, do you know how long you kept me waiting last night while you went to the newspaper for ten minutes? What do you do at a newspaper in the middle of the night?” In a glamorous dressing gown, lighting his pipe at his end of their long table, Kane sardonically replies, “Emily, my dear, your only co-respondent is the Inquirer.”


  The next swish moves ahead to Mrs. Kane looking peeved, dressed primly for the day. Her tone is clearly disapproving: “Sometimes I think I’d prefer a rival of flesh and blood.” Mr. Kane has obviously heard this before and doesn’t care, concentrating on his breakfast. “Emily, I don’t spend that much time on the newspaper.” (A few brief lines of dialogue then lay out what is obviously a familiar morning quarrel over politics.)

  Swish again, and this time Mrs. Kane is haughty, superior, and condescending. There’s real coldness in her as she tells her husband, “Mr. Bernstein sent Junior a most incredible atrocity yesterday, Charles. I simply can’t have it in the nursery.” Her spouse is controlled but angry: “Mr. Bernstein is apt to pay a visit to the nursery now and then.” “Does he have to?” “Yes.” It’s firm and it’s grim.

  The next swish has her saying, “Really, Charles, people will think—” He cuts her right off, no longer interested in anything she says or feels: “—what I tell them to think!”

  In the last swish to the final scene in the story of their marriage, Mrs. Kane is seen pointedly reading the rival newspaper, the Chronicle, looking up to see if Mr. Kane notices. He glances up from his Inquirer but doesn’t care. He ignores her, engrossed in his own world and his own ideas.

  As the Kanes fade out of the image and are replaced by the nursing home once again, the film’s narrator asks Cotten: “Wasn’t he in love with her?” Cotten responds simply, “He married for love.”

  Each of the six swish pans moves Charles and Emily Kane forward in time to show how a change has taken place in their marriage: a growth in animosity and a diminishment in communication. The table grows longer, so they sit at greater distance; instead of being together in the same frame, they are cut apart. Their attitudes sharpen, their naturalness disappears, and their attire indicates they no longer sleep together. She becomes more formal with him, and he becomes ruder to her. The story of their marriage from start to finish is depicted through the cinematic use of swish pans, settings, lighting, costuming, performance, and dialogue. The issues for this kind of marital problem are clearly demonstrated: his dedication to work, her stuffiness, and their different backgrounds (she is from high society, he is nouveau riche).

  Citizen Kane is not a marriage movie, but if its breakfast-table sequence were expanded, with all the gaps between swishes filled in, it would be, because its goal is to tell the story of the marriage between Charles and Emily Kane. It certainly asks, “What happened to the Kanes?” Welles and his filmmaking team knew their little marriage would be fully understood by an audience that was living between the gaps. It is a full marriage movie miniaturized: affirm and destroy, but don’t reassemble.

  Another short vignette, not unlike the breakfast scene in Citizen Kane, occurs as the climax of The Lady Eve. Henry Fonda plays a hapless groom who, on his wedding night, is forced to listen to his con-woman bride (Barbara Stanwyck, posing as “Lady Eve”) suddenly reveal her former life of lovers, husbands, and various amorous adventures. Under the skillful writing and direction of Preston Sturges, the “story” plays out through an extended montage of the speeding honeymoon train, screeching train whistles, whirling train wheels, Fonda’s appalled face, and Stanwyck’s nonstop verbalization (never heard by the audience). Clackity-clack, clackity-clack. An audience watches the disintegration of a marriage unfold in quick time, as Fonda is observed moving from a mood of blissful romance and sexual anticipation toward the inevitable finale of a bad marriage: disillusionment, disappointment, and the grasping of the knowledge that the person you wed with such optimism is not who you thought she was. It’s hilarious and horrible, a combination of elements often seen in marriage movies, and it’s also efficient.

  The marriage vignette as a background to a larger story is not always comic. Movies that directly address other issues often contain honest small portraits of marriages. In Watch on the Rhine (1943), based on Lillian Hellman’s successful play, Bette Davis and Paul Lukas play a devoted couple who have faced the horrors of Nazism and the oncoming war in Europe. In the movie version (for which Lukas won 1943’s Best Actor Oscar), their relationship palpitates in every frame. Davis, once a wealthy Washington, D.C., young lady, now knows what hardship is in every definition of the term, but she has never questioned her choice in marriage, never doubted her husband’s nobility, and never let him down when he needed her to sacrifice. For his part, he is grateful, and values her character. They work in perfect unison. Every look they exchange speaks volumes. Davis’s loyalty and devotion to her husband are heartbreaking. (Those who think she could only play a strident diva should look at this low-key performance, in which she totally harnesses her star power to serve Lukas. A lot of his Oscar was due to her cooperative performance.) Theirs is a model movie marriage in a time of international stress.

  A lifetime of complications and commitments is expressed simply through one final scene between Ida Lupino and Robert Preston in Junior Bonner (1972). The movie is far from a marriage film—it’s a modern story of a former rodeo champion played by Steve McQueen; Lupino and Preston, two pros, no longer young but each with a lifetime of show-biz experience, enact his separated parents and reveal in brief form the story of their marriage. Just before Preston leaves for Australia (“This time I’m really going”), he and Lupino have their final argument/love scene. “That’s all you are,” she says, “just dreams and sweet talk.” After he asks her if she remembers the sweet dreams he used to give her, she slaps him … hard. He ruefully admits he had it coming. After a long pause, she says that if he’s going, it’ll be their last time together, and then, after stroking his reddened cheek, she leads him upstairs. The scene represents the inexplicable nature of what happens between a man and a woman, why they can’t stay together, why they have to stay together, and why they don’t stay together. In a subtle tour de force of acting power, Lupino and Preston convey what’s underneath their relationship, the years of fighting, disappointing each other, and disagreeing with one another, yet still loving each other and caring about the children they’ve raised.

  The vignette is often the best “marriage film,” because it can contain both love and hate, success and failure, and move on without any need for detailed explanation. The dark shadow of a bad marriage hangs in the background of The Wings of Eagles (1957), a movie that tries to ignore—or even deny—its disappointment. Eagles is an exuberant tale based on the life of screenwriter Spig Wead, a World War I aviation ace. (After an accident left him partially paralyzed, Wead became a writer.) John Wayne plays Wead, and his longtime co-star Maureen O’Hara is his wife. As the movie unfolds, moving from a hijinks military comedy into a darker tale of a man who loses direction, their marriage also moves into troubled times. In the background to the story of the military, war, rehab, and Hollywood lies the Weads’ courtship, early years, and family life. Bad things lurk in the marriage beneath the surface. Their jolly times are too drunken. Her protests about his neglect of his family are too angry. His fun away from her is too liberated. Their ultimate separation comes as no surprise, even though what caused it is never fully delineated and isn’t the main thrust of the story.

  Sometimes much information about a marriage is presented in something even smaller than a vignette. There are moments of an almost sublime visual eloquence about marital frustration in simple gestures. One of John Ford’s best Cavalry films, Rio Grande (1950), stars Wayne and O’Hara as an estranged couple. Their relationship collapsed in the Civil War when he, a Union officer, was ordered to burn her family’s southern plantation. Years have passed, but now their son has flunked out of West Point and turned up in his cavalry troop out west. O’Hara, highborn, with a view toward privilege and rank, has come to buy the boy out of service. Wayne, hard-core military and duty bound, says his son enlisted to serve and serve he will. (It’s a variation of the Civil War drama idea of brother against brother: wife against husband.)

  From the moment O’Hara arrives in camp, the physical pull between the couple hover
s in the air. As they eat dinner by candlelight, listening to the howls of wolves, it’s palpable, almost tactile. But the perfect gesture of marital frustration comes when they are not together—when Wayne and his men are on patrol beside the Rio Grande. As the light wanes, and the frame slowly darkens, Wayne walks alone down by the river. His regimental troops, sitting around a campfire, begin to sing: “My gal is purple … I know deep inside me she’s the fairest of the fair … Tears get in my eyes when the purple shadows die.” The odd lyrics, their poetic quality that conjures an image of a woman lost, left behind as purple darkness falls, cause the lonely Wayne to strike his cavalry hat against his thigh—one simple gesture that says it all. He loves her. He wants her. She loves him. She wants him. They both care about their son. Why can’t it work out for them? Why are things so difficult? It’s “What happened to us, Johnny?”—but this time with no words, only the frustrated slap of a cavalry hat.

  The marriage on film—vignette or feature-length—visually focused on the same components. Because the audience knew all about the subject, these were simple and basic. Only three story elements were necessary: the couple, their problems, and their situation.

  1 For Scarlett O’Hara, marriage is not much more than a career move. She weds her first husband to cover her embarrassment about losing Ashley, and her second to pay off the taxes on Tara. She marries Rhett for everything he can give her. In the novel, Rhett was actually her fourth husband.

  2 “Hunger for the lips of lotus,” as explained in the trailer.

  3 Today it is often labeled film noir, even though it was shot in glorious Technicolor rather than black-and-white. In its own day it was “melodrama.”