This “falling in love” is not the event in which Tracy met and wooed his wife, Colleen Moore. After “He fell in love” is heard, the audience is shown Tracy’s rural childhood, his lack of formal education, and the deep bonding between the two boys, Morgan and Tracy. The film then moves forward to them as old men; Tracy is president of a railroad and Morgan is his secretary. They work side by side high up in a huge and expensive urban office. Tracy is shown browbeating his board of directors, overruling them about a transaction to buy a faltering rail line, the Santa Clara. He is calm, confident, and cruel. He is also articulate, well dressed, and sophisticated. The movie then returns to another point in his past: when he was twenty, illiterate, and a low-level track walker on the rail line. In this sequence, he first meets Colleen Moore, a schoolteacher who will teach him to read and write and do arithmetic, during which they become close and decide to marry. (“And they stayed happy for a good long time,” says the narrator.)
The story then returns to the two older men, and a scene in which the president of the Santa Clara brings his daughter to meet Tracy. Tracy’s son also arrives, bringing the news he’s just been kicked out of Yale. The son is a spoiled young jerk, whose mother (Moore) has allowed him to grow up to be a useless, irresponsible wastrel. At home that evening, Moore and Tracy quarrel angrily over the boy because Tracy has said he’s had enough of the kid’s nonsense—he’s putting him to work as a low-level, poorly paid bookkeeper. (“I won’t have him treated this way,” cries Moore.)
The strength of the movie’s structure becomes apparent when the film immediately returns to the past, with Tracy and Moore as loving newlyweds. In this scene, Moore expresses her ambitions for their future. She dreams of clothes, a better house, a horse-and-buggy. She wants Tracy to “try to be somebody.” She volunteers to walk track for him while he goes to school, supporting him while he becomes educated. The narrator says that walking the track at night in harsh weather turned her hands permanently red and raw, and that’s why she always wears gloves. It is after this scene of marital unity and sacrifice, of shared purpose and vision, that the film returns to the place in time in which Tracy has fallen in love with Helen Vinson and is forced to tell Moore the dreadful words: “A terrible thing has happened. I’m in love.”
Money, especially the rise to enormous wealth, is always trouble for a couple who marry in poverty, and then everything changes. The Power and the Glory shows Spencer Tracy and Colleen Moore loving and happy in their railroad shack … (Photo Credit 2.49)
… and estranged and miserable in boardrooms and furs. (Photo Credit 2.50)
At his office, Tracy explains to Moore that he has “fallen in love” with Vinson. Moore then leaves, appearing at street level, wearing her fur jacket, her long gloves, and her diamond pin. The narrator tells viewers, while they watch, that she went to where “her big, beautiful car” was waiting, dismissed her chauffeur, and threw herself under a streetcar, a modern Anna Karenina. Moore’s car, her fur, her diamonds—even her gloves—haven’t made her happy or saved her marriage. Wealth has been useless when it really counted. Since Tracy’s idea of “love” is thus defined as infidelity, the audience begins to see everything ahead in a negative way: Tracy’s character, the narrating friend’s judgment, the Tracy/Moore marriage, and the birth of their son. Infidelity intrudes and will lead to not one, but two suicides, both Tracy’s and Moore’s. The problem at the root of the marriage turns out not to be Tracy’s infidelity, it’s his money. Infidelity is the by-product of his having made too much money.
The scene that follows Moore’s death shocks an audience, because they are taken directly back to the sight of Moore and Tracy as a young couple, blissfully happy—and poor. Moore tells Tracy she’s pregnant. “They’ll never stop me now!” he says, and after his son is born he goes to his wife in awe and gratitude. “You … you gave me a son.” The couple are again seen as united in devoted parenthood. The cut that follows this scene takes the audience forward for another glimpse of that worthless son. Tracy, preparing to have his own fun by marrying Vinson, advises the young man to have fun in life because “you only live once … I guess I can earn as much money as you can spend.” Unfortunately, the young man takes his father’s advice to heart.
The inevitable trouble comes when Tracy marries the beautiful Vinson, who only wants his money. Vinson plays what was known as a “socialite,” a term once in wide use but seldom heard today.5 In some films, the socialite is venal, but that is not a necessary characteristic of the type. The socialite must become a society matron to survive—and that means marriage. Vinson’s father is a successful businessman who needs a large infusion of cash for their way of life to continue. His beautiful daughter—a young but sexually experienced divorcee—is the perfect pawn for him to use in his game of finance. The pawn herself is eager to keep up appearances, as it were, and will be happy to scoop up Tracy … and his money. Tracy, with his poor-man background, is unable to see past Vinson’s veneer. When she gives him a second son, he is once again thrilled. Unbeknownst to him, however, the son is not his, but the son of his son, who is having an affair with his stepmom (another infidelity powered by money). When Tracy discovers this, he shoots himself. The Power and the Glory shows what happens to marriages when there is too much money. All values are lost, all hope is lost, all reason is lost. All is lost. Tracy and Moore were happiest when they had nothing.
It’s no surprise that the 1930s presented many different kinds of pictures that featured a couple who were strapped for cash. Sometimes the most minor film lays out the barest truths, as in Love on a Budget (1937 or early ’38), one of a series of movies about the Jones family.6 The Joneses were a bargain-basement version of the Hardys. Where the Hardy papa was a judge, the Jones patriarch (Jed Prouty) was a small-town mayor. Where the Hardy series developed Mickey Rooney into a star, the Jones family made do with Bonnie, the mayor’s oldest daughter, played by Shirley Deane, who never became a name and is forgotten today.
Love on a Budget opens up just as Bonnie returns from her honeymoon. She and her husband (Russell Gleason) have taken up residence “in their beautiful new cottage.” All seems idyllic. Bonnie sings in the kitchen and her husband shaves. Unfortunately, there’s no hot water, the icebox isn’t working, the toast burns, and she scalds her hands, crying out, “Why can’t we have things like other people? I want a new stove and a dining-room set and dishes and … ” Bonnie sings the blues that women in movies always sing: I want things. The entire movie turns out to be a warning about buying on credit. (“This foolish extravagance is the cause of most marriages going on the rocks,” says her dad, who steps forward to advocate a balanced budget.) But Bonnie must have things, and when the couple buys a full set of household furnishings on the installment plan, disaster occurs.
It’s remarkable how often a youthful marriage goes to pieces over furniture and appliances. “Keeping up with the Joneses” is not a mythical concept in American culture. The Joneses, in this case, are driven by their own desires, particularly those of the wife, who just wants everything in her home to be perfect—and to be perfect right now. The sense that young women were looking at magazine and newspaper ads and movie sets and feeling that all this stuff they saw—this chic couch, that toaster—should belong to them is palpable in the movies. Things. A consumer-driven society that went to the movies learned what they should have, yet also learned that having it might ruin their marriages and plunge them into debt. What, really, did anyone think was going on with these obvious contradictions? Variety didn’t seem to care, praising the movie as “a box office asset” and pointing out that the series was building a “consistent audience following.” (When it’s all over and settled nicely, the mom of the Jones family, Spring Byington, offers her own marriage wisdom: “The first hundred years are the hardest.”)
Sometimes a movie about a poverty-stricken family was distanced (and thus softened) by setting the movie in another country. Frank Borzage’s beautiful drama Little Man, What
Now? (1934), starring the forgotten Douglass Montgomery and the luminous Margaret Sullavan, is an example. This film arrived on American screens with a very lofty purpose, as stated by the head of Universal Studios, Carl Laemmle: “In presenting Little Man, What Now? to the screen, I strove to render a social service. The story of Little Man is the story of Every Man, and the question of What Now? is the WORLD’S DAILY PROBLEM, a problem that men can only hope to overcome by a courage born of great faith in the hearts of women. Against the tide of time and chance, all men are little, but in the eyes of a woman in love, a man can become bigger than the whole world.”
In other words, you are poor and miserable, your marriage is a shambles because you haven’t got enough money; but love and the little woman will see you through. Love, not marriage, is established as a goal. (Love was always Hollywood’s alternative to marriage.) The realistic side of the film pulls no punches. Montgomery and Sullavan travel out of town to visit a gynecologist. The music for “Here Comes the Bride” is heard only after they receive the news about a baby and learn they cannot obtain an abortion. “We met, we loved, we married, and we’re gonna have a child … that’s paying the full price for the privilege of living,” says Montgomery. When their son is born, he says, “Poor little fellow, what now?” She is stronger. “We created life, so why should we be afraid of it?”
Little Man, What Now? is a tender and touching film, beautifully directed and played, but it walks the line between showing audiences what they had (not enough money) and what they didn’t have (riches) and ends up with everything sorted out for them through a hollow miracle. (A former friend of Montgomery’s who moved to Amsterdam suddenly comes back to Berlin and hires him.)
The ability of Hollywood to update a Depression story and resolve it positively for a postwar audience shows how the marriage movie could adapt the money problem from decade to decade. A mature person in a movie theater in 1946 had been through both the Depression and World War II and was now facing rehabilitation and return to life in a postwar economy. From This Day Forward, starring Mark Stevens and Joan Fontaine, keeps its drama small, tied directly to the marriage of an average couple. Identified in the American Film Institute’s catalog as a “domestic drama,” the movie was based on a 1936 novel by Thomas Bell entitled All Brides Are Beautiful. RKO bought the rights to the novel in 1940, planning to make it into what would have been a typical Depression story of a marriage undergoing financial pressures. The war delayed production, so when the film was finally made (in 1946), the story was updated to include World War II service by its hero (played by newcomer Stevens, who was introduced to audiences in the role). The movie begins in an employment office after Stevens has been discharged from the army. Overwhelmed by the job hunt, he remembers the story of his marriage in flashbacks. Stevens and Fontaine were a young couple who, despite warnings from Fontaine’s older, married sister, went ahead and wed on slim prospects. They were ecstatically happy in their early days, but then Stevens is laid off from his factory job and can’t find another. Although Fontaine works in a bookstore to cover their basic expenses, Stevens feels humiliated, and things begin to go downhill not only for the couple but between them. Ultimately, they move into a tenement, and the early promise of their love and devotion begins to shatter. World War II bails them out. The film ends with a return to the employment office for a happy hiring by sympathetic postwar employers. No matter whether America was in financial famine (the Depression) or financial boom (the war) or financial adjustment (postwar), money was always a viable marital-story problem. Even as late as 1993, in an easy-credit economy, Indecent Proposal floated an unlikely story of a super-rich gambler (Robert Redford) offering a cashless husband (Woody Harrelson) a million dollars for a one-night sleepover with his wife (Demi Moore). Harrelson’s acceptance destroys the marriage—until the final scene.
The Breaking Point (1950) is an example of reused Depression issues, including John Garfield’s 1930s star persona of the guy that society “pushes down.” The film is a tense story about a husband so desperate for money that he’s willing to smuggle illegal immigrants on his boat. The Breaking Point is based on Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, and unlike the earlier film of that title starring Bogart and Bacall, this version sticks close to the original material.7 Garfield plays the husband and Phyllis Thaxter the wife. The movie opens up with Garfield’s sad and melancholy voice-over saying, “You come ashore and it starts … you’re up to your ears in trouble and you don’t know when it began.” When he arrives home, his wife is still in her bathrobe and is washing dishes in the sink. Her news? “I can think about you anytime and get excited.” His news? “Everybody in town is squeezing me for money … No sooner do I get my head above water than someone pushes me down again.” Money is dominating his sex drive. He’s briefly tempted by a good-time girl (Patricia Neal at her hottest), giving as his excuse the ages-old male logic: “A man can be in love with his wife and still want something exciting to happen.” Even then, however, the pressure of his money worries drive him away.
Poverty crushes Phyllis Thaxter and John Garfield in The Breaking Point, based on Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, but their marriage endures the hardship. (Photo Credit 2.51)
The Breaking Point was shot on location, and the little house occupied by Garfield and Thaxter (with their two daughters) is a little house. His boat is small. His world is small. There is an authentic sense of a couple truly trapped in limited financial straits. There is honesty and real anger in Garfield’s tension. When casually asked, “What’s the good word?” he snarls, “Crud. That’s a good word.” When he and Thaxter quarrel, it’s ugly and raw. Their household is a grim little world, but Garfield loves his kids and his wife. He has to get his hands on some money … so he agrees to take eight illegal Chinese aliens into the country.8
The Breaking Point presents an onscreen image of marriage that’s not prettied up, not romanticized. Although it says these two people love each other and will gut it out, it’s clear that not having enough money will continue to chip away at their love and their self-worth. Although, like most movies that show marriage too grimly, with no resolution, The Breaking Point didn’t make money, it’s well remembered and respected by those who have seen it.
An example of how married conventions can be varied is illustrated by comparing The Breaking Point, black-and-white and noirish, to a Technicolor musical, Has Anybody Seen My Gal?9 directed by Douglas Sirk in 1952. The Breaking Point is about an average couple who are being destroyed by having no money. Has Anybody Seen My Gal? tells a tale about a happy, ordinary family of the 1920s who unexpectedly inherit a fortune, and the money ruins them. Luckily, the stock-market crash bails them out and sends them back to normal.10
The familiarity of money as a primary marriage problem is validated by how quickly its story can be told. In a taut ten minutes, That’s Why I Left You (a 1943 short from the famous Passing Parade series) clearly outlines how money can ruin a marriage. A young couple meet, marry with great joy and optimism, and settle into their life. They have very little, but are happy to “live on love,” the traditional Hollywood form of sustenance. As time goes by, however, the husband (James Warren) feels burdened by the pressures of money, and one day the wife (Jacqueline White) sees a white envelope shoved under her door. It’s a letter from her husband that explains “why I left you,” an action that’s taken place between cuts, as it were. As the husband’s voice-over is heard on the sound track, he explains clearly how he longed to get away from the financial pressure and have the adventures he’d always dreamed of. Audiences see the sailboat he worked on as he traveled to the South Seas, photographed in gorgeous moonlight on Tahitian waters. The glory of escape, exotic travel, and total freedom is explained, but then the voice says it was wrong of him to feel this way, and “that’s why the writer of this letter is waiting now outside the door for your forgiveness.” The young wife laughs and runs to the door, where she finds her husband—who has merely gone out to buy a
bottle of milk—sitting and waiting. As they tease and embrace, the audience is told that he’d never really leave her … he’s sorry for even having the dream.
That’s Why I Left You locates a problem that causes marriage to fail—money—and builds the marital story around it swiftly and economically. The audience could fill in details—from other movies and from real-life experience. Happiness turns to restriction and to financial problems and failed dreams. Escape is enjoyed visually, but not really endorsed, and order is restored. This pattern deviously affords audiences nothing new. It’s the usual one employed for the women’s film, the crime film, the gangster film—a formula well defined for the marriage film in the silent era: let the audience enjoy what it doesn’t have and is never going to have, a form of the Roman Saturnalia, in which for a few days at the end of the year, the slaves became the masters before being sent back to the scullery.
Money problems that beset young couples who find themselves in over their heads often lead audiences to a sentimental affirmation of love as currency. “You have love, therefore you are rich.” An odd offshoot of this concept is its corrollary: “You are poor, but you have love, so you’re rich.” Movies that concern themselves with couples who live in poverty, or outside normal social circles, are generally about the entire family structure: Tobacco Road, The Yearling, The Sundowners, and The Southerner, for example. Tobacco Road (1941) is the filmed version of the long-running stage play by Jack Kirkland, which was based on the best seller by Erskine Caldwell. It’s a quirky comedy about folksy backwoods Georgia. Not really a marriage movie, it has at its center a couple, Charley Grapewin (as Jeeter Lester) and his wife, Elizabeth Patterson. They accept poverty because Jeeter doesn’t want to embrace work, and, after all, they have each other.
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