Two great literary models of female adultery inspired Hollywood movies: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The first was filmed several times, most notably in 1935 (starring Garbo) and in 1948 (a British film with Vivien Leigh).19 Madame Bovary was filmed in 1932 as Unholy Love, then in France twice—in 1934, directed by Jean Renoir, and in 1991, directed by Claude Chabrol. The most celebrated (and lavishly produced) version was made in Hollywood in 1949, directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Jennifer Jones, Van Heflin as her husband, and Louis Jourdan as the wealthy lover, with a script by Robert Ardrey.
The two celebrated film versions of Anna Karenina both present her adultery with sympathy. There are three reasons why this works: she is played by a beautiful and well-loved star (Garbo or Leigh); her husband is coldhearted and domineering (Basil Rathbone or Ralph Richardson); and she is a loving mother to her little son (played by the shameless scene stealer Freddie Bartholomew for Garbo and by the lesser light Patrick Skipwith for Leigh). Anna Karenina—with its restrictive society, loveless marriage, and endorsement of a relentless passion that just can’t be controlled—was ready-made for Hollywood.
Madame Bovary, however, presented a problem.
When men and women needed love, Hollywood was right there with them, in plots as well as in ads. Love always meant money at the box office. And when men and women wanted to have (or at least see) beautiful things, Hollywood was right there with them once again—but not for the same reason. In Hollywood movies, wanting stuff could always tip the moral scales to the negative. “I want you to have beautiful things,” Mildred Pierce tells her daughter, and she supplies them so bountifully that the daughter becomes a murderess.
Madame Bovary is also a woman who wants beautiful things … and love … and excitement … but the novel lets everyone know that this is because as a young girl she was too heavily influenced by romance novels and false images that only a naïve girl could believe in. Hold on! Could those “romance novels” be just a little bit like Hollywood movies? (No wonder the 1932 version was titled Unholy Love, not Madame Bovary.) When the studio system finally made its high-budget Madame Bovary in 1949, the project was given to Vincente Minnelli, partly because he was one of the industry’s best directors but also because he was on the side of the audience’s need for beauty. He saw the love of beautiful things as poignant rather than greedy. His Emma Bovary is more than sympathetic; she’s also emblematic of women in the audience, although the 1949 Madame Bovary does not shirk Flaubert’s intentions. The movie begins with a framing device (much hated at the time) in which James Mason portrays the author on trial for censorship in France. Flaubert/Mason pleads for understanding for the young girl and her naïveté, telling “society” to see her sympathetically and understand where the responsibility for her errors really lies. After taking care of that, and locating the problem over there in France and back there in time, the movie that follows lets audiences sit in the dark, become Madame Bovary, and understand how right she really was in wanting to escape her restrictions and find love. When Jennifer Jones asks pathetically on her deathbed, “There’s not something wrong with things being beautiful, is there?,” the movie is practically begging for the audience to shout out “No!” (And then come back next week and see something else with really good clothes and furniture.)20 One of the best moments in any costume film is the great ball scene, in which Jones, spectacularly gowned in white with black-feathered trim, swirls and swirls and swirls around the floor, the camera following and following and following until she calls for air and servants smash open the ballroom windows. Minnelli brilliantly found a cinematic equivalent for her passion, which was coupled with a hunger for society, fashion, the affirmation of beauty, and a whirling, passionate physicality that ends in physical wreckage.
Greta Garbo brings to life one of literature’s most tragic adulteresses, Anna Karenina. Anna has everything: a wealthy and successful husband (Basil Rathbone), a lavish home, and a little son, but she throws it all away for love. (Photo Credit 2.63)
Madame Bovary ends tragically, of course, and reminds everyone how wrong the poor wretch and her downhill adulteries were. But, oh, that ball sequence, those clothes, and that haunting question: Is it wrong to want beauty … things? Is it wrong to go to the movies? The ability of the marriage movie to serve two different masters is well on display.
Madames Karenina and Bovary, of course, were great literary heroines, to be respected. Hollywood knuckled down and got serious with a lesser figure. Morals would and could be stretched for two great women of literature, but the cheap antics of Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest (1949) were not meant to be as easily accepted. Davis’s Rosa Moline is a kind of modern American “Anna Bovary,” a half-and-half version of the two women who wanted love and who ended up dead by their own decision to go there. Rosa Moline, however, doesn’t have the literary pedigree required for a totally sympathetic adultery, whereas Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary carried the endorsement of being characters from two great novels of understanding about the restrictive roles of women in society (both written by men).
Davis is married to a small-town doctor in Forest, not unlike Madame Bovary. This character, played by Joseph Cotten, is not coldhearted, but he’s very busy all the time and seems passionless. Davis wants to “go to Chicago”—that’s all, just have a trip to Chicago. When a wealthy cad (David Brian) shows up, she finds the excitement she’s looking for in an adulterous affair that she hopes will turn into marriage, or at least a ticket to the Windy City. This adultery is never condoned by the movie, and neither is Davis’s behavior. (Some women find sympathy for her anyway. She’s heroic in her raging boredom.) Davis’s adulteress cannot be condoned for two basic reasons: she shoots her lover and tries to abort her child. Censorship at the time could not okay either of these acts, much less both. (Davis dies just short of the railroad tracks, keeling over as she tries to board the midnight express.) Seen today, Davis can be an understandable figure of female desperation. She wants freedom, respect, her own identity, and, at the very least, something to do with herself. Today she’s like an angry Valkyrie demanding liberation, even if it’s only a train ride to Chicago. At the time, however, she was a villainess, although the ads told the truth: “Nobody’s as good as Bette when she’s bad.”
American moviegoers were always caught between a warning—“Don’t want too many things”—and a consumerist cornucopia of good stuff all over the screen. They were sold the idea that only the things they saw onscreen—the ones they could not touch or possess—were their portion in life. Just being able to see was a good enough form of ownership. One of the most successful goals of movie stories about marriage was this ability to give and to take away, to show generously but to warn against. For those trapped in unhappy marriages, or even those just stuck in the rut of an ordinary one, the movie marriage provided alternatives. To show the other and restore the usual—nowhere was this better accomplished than in the marriage movie about adultery.
IN-LAWS AND KIDS
There was one thing every moviegoer had in common with any marriage movie and all moviemakers: a family. Even orphans had a family—a nonfamily. No matter how awful some movie relatives behaved, an audience was willing to believe it: when it came to monstrous in-laws, the audience was out in front and ahead of the game. They would believe anything. Just tell them Fay Bainter, Joan Crawford’s sister-in-law in The Shining Hour (1938), burned the honeymoon house down over poor Joan’s head, and it seemed not only credible but probable. When it came to portraying hideous family behavior, Hollywood had a free ticket.
And they used it. All over stories about marriages are relatives who lie, cheat, steal, murder, connive, and at the very least interfere. It might even be said that to interfere was so much a relative’s purpose that movie in-laws came to represent fate. As such, they had rock-solid credibility with audiences, well able to appear as the unexpected thing you didn’t look out for that rises up, catches you unprepared, and unhinges
you. Joan Leslie in Born to Be Bad (1950) happily welcomes a visit from her cousin Joan Fontaine. Leslie is preparing to marry a very, very rich man (Zachary Scott), and she’s just so busy with the caterer and the color of her napkins that she doesn’t notice Fontaine has married him out from under her. In A Stolen Life (1946), Bette Davis’s naughty twin sister (two Davises for the price of one!) steals her fiancé just by flouncing around at a square dance. The Secret Heart (1946) has June Allyson (of all people) as a girl so obsessed by memories of her dead father that she tries to destroy any future life or happiness for her stepmother (Claudette Colbert).
The marriage movie with in-law problems—as well as problems with children—has very little to offer that isn’t obvious. Simply because it was so common, so well understood, the concept never seemed to find much that was really original. This type of problem was very close to the audience’s real life, but it also offered very little imaginative variation (unless it moved toward the murder scale). Once in a while there was a kindly old aunt (usually played by Edna May Oliver) who could help figure out marital woes. And sometimes a husband’s snooty family, such as the Brits in The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), learn to appreciate their very American daughter-in-law (Irene Dunne), especially after the United States enters World War I on their side. And sometimes they learn to accept a daughter-in-law from another culture, as in 1952’s Japanese War Bride. But for the most part, movie in-laws are just a very plain old disaster … and predictable.21 That very predictability was what made the in-law “problem” so popular in movies. And besides, it was the “problem” for which viewers felt no responsibility, no guilt.
In-laws were often used as plot devices to drive a happy couple apart, to destroy marital love and trust. Presumably because they had known one of the partners forever, they could tell the mate “the awful truth.” A sensitive marriage film (both comic and tragic) that illustrates how a family can destroy happiness is the 1940 Primrose Path, directed by Gregory LaCava, starring Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea, and Marjorie Rambeau in an Oscar-nominated role as Rogers’s prostitute mother. Based on a novel called February Hill by Victoria Lincoln, the movie needed deodorizing to get past the censorship office, so it opens with a printed quotation designed to excuse any bad behavior: “We live not as we wish to, but as we can—Menander, 300 B.C.”
Primrose Path is not really a movie about the in-law issue, nor is it even specifically a marriage movie. Yet it builds its story of romantic love turned to believably married life on one large problem: the bride’s family and what it represents seriously derails her marriage until the prerequisite happy ending. Primrose Path presents two marriages in subtle contrast. The first is that of Rambeau and her drunken husband, once a Greek scholar and now an unemployed bum (Miles Mander). Rambeau is forced to provide for the family, which consists of two daughters, Ellie May (Rogers) and Honeybell (Joan Carroll) and a perfectly cynical and odious grandmother (Queenie Vassar). The family lives in a shantytown (“Primrose Hill”) in sad and near-desperate conditions. Whenever it becomes necessary, Rambeau disappears with her “good friend Thelma” (Vivienne Osborne) “to go to the fair and have some fun.” When Mom returns, always in a prepaid taxi, she’s usually sporting some new glamour (like a fur piece), and she’s loaded with groceries and presents for everyone. Nobody, even little Honeybell, is very confused about these disappearances; but Rogers feels it necessary to put a good face on it: “Ma just likes to have a good time.”
The marriage between Rambeau and Mander sits on the screen as what it is, with no real explanation, no long apology—or reformation. Rambeau even comes home with a present for her worthless mate: money for booze. “Take it,” she says, “and have a good time.” She has accepted her life for what it is, which for her means her marriage as it has turned out to be. What can she do? She has to support her family; her only skill is the one she uses with as much dignity as she can. She tries to be cheerful, even when her husband threatens to someday kill himself. When he flops onto their bed, she sits down beside him, rubbing his head gently and murmuring, “Poor boy … poor boy.”
The second marriage in the movie is the one Ginger Rogers makes for herself with the handsome young Joel McCrea, who operates a hamburger shop at the beach. Until she meets him, Rogers has kept her hair in pigtails and hidden her body inside lumpy clothes, preferring to look like a kid so she won’t attract men. Her view of men and marriage is grim, but she respects her dad’s former scholarship (“He went to college”) and listens to his advice (“Keep your dreams, Ellie May”), because if she lets those dreams get away from her, they won’t come back, and she’ll “have to invent new ones and they’re never as good.” Rogers is a suspicious and angry young woman, well aware that Granny’s plan is to replace the meal-ticket mom with herself and later with the younger Honeybell. The in-laws that will be on offer from Rogers as a dowry are a Dogtown variation of the Gigi dynasty.
Everything changes, however, after Rogers meets McCrea. For the first time in her life, she dresses up: hat, purse, silk stockings, makeup. The couple act out a movie courtship that contains the recognizable anger of sexual attraction: their language of love is the trading of insults. Yet Ellie May knows she’s hooked, and sets out to leave her family and get her man. Understanding what has happened, Rambeau speaks privately to her daughter about love: “It just happens. We can’t help it. Pa’s weak, drinks too much, but I made my bargain and I gotta stick by it. Somebody’s gotta take care of the family. I’ve done the best I can.” She reassures her daughter, “Your ma’s with ya.” But after Rogers leaves, pushing off on her female destiny, Rambeau sits down at her miserable table and weeps. “Poor little Ellie May,” she cries. “Poor little Ellie May.”
After Rogers and McCrea wed, there emerges onscreen a second—and very different—marriage: one between equals, with honest fun and a genuine sexual component. Rogers works alongside McCrea in the hamburger shop, and their former trading of insults becomes an amusing patter that delights their customers. They turn their banter into a little vaudeville routine that everyone can see is happiness with an electric sexual current crackling underneath. When they take time to snuggle under an overturned boat on the beach, laughing and tickling, teasing and kissing, an audience sees a real relationship, a real marriage. All is well—except that offscreen await the in-laws. (The innocent McCrea thinks Rogers has a strict family who threw her out because she went for a man like him, one without money.)
In-laws waiting in the wings: the believable force of marital destruction that marriage movies could call up as needed. When McCrea finds out Rogers is really from Primrose Hill, he tells her, “I don’t like lyin’,” but finally, because he loves her, says they must go to visit because “they’re your folks, ain’t they?”
The disaster that occurs is an emotional roller coaster, half hilarious and half heartbreaking. Granny openly insults McCrea. Honeybell recites her “piece” for him, a ribald poem entitled “Don’t Swat Your Mother, Boys.” Mom tries hard, but when Dad reels in drunker than a skunk, he mistakes McCrea for Mom’s usual customer, Mr. Hawkins. As quarrels, shouts, and misery erupt all around, Pa defines McCrea’s in-laws for him: “Outcasts! All of us! Outcasts!” McCrea is suitably appalled, but Granny snarls at him, “What kind of a family did you expect to meet?” It’s the question he finally has to ask himself, and slowly, slowly, he zeroes in on the key issue: “Who works in this family?” he asks. Granny coldly replies, “Well, we ain’t on relief.” McCrea, nobody’s fool, replies, “I think I begin to get the idea.”
The happy marriage is ruined. The in-laws have killed it. Rogers tried to keep herself and her new life as separate from the taint of her family as possible, but in the end, her family could not be denied. When McCrea cruelly dumps her, Rogers softly murmurs, “Please don’t do this to me,” but her family has defined her. Since this is a popular movie with two big stars, love will be restored but not without plenty of in-law complications first: Mom is shot by drunken Dad; the crime is
covered up; Mom dies; Granny lies to McCrea when he changes his mind and comes to find Rogers; Granny makes McCrea believe Rogers has become a prostitute; etc., etc., etc. When Primrose Path ends, McCrea has returned, sucked it up, and put Granny in her place. He takes charge of Rambeau’s legacy, a family who’ll clearly be nothing but trouble all his life. The young marriage has survived, but what lies ahead? What is the bargain that McCrea has made for loving Rogers? Although Primrose Path has set its story inside a shantytown, a distance from the average viewer’s world, the lessons it offers are those they could relate to—particularly in the basic one about interfering, dependent, and destructive in-laws.
When you take your new husband home to meet his in-laws, no matter how nice everyone tries to dress up the situation there’s likely to be trouble ahead. Husband Joel McCrea meets wife Ginger Rogers’s nasty little sister (Joan Carroll) and even nastier grandma (Queenie Vassar). (Photo Credit 2.64)
Movies with interfering in-laws and kids are often presented as comic, the ridicule bringing welcome relief to beleaguered married folks suffering offscreen at the hands of relatives. In-laws tended to be treated like punch lines in a stand‑up comedy routine. To sit in a theater and see annoying in-laws ridiculed (or destroyed) was reassuring. A movie like that lifted burdens off weary shoulders. Even if the film only fulfilled an audience’s secret opinions by presenting these freeloading, interfering bums the way they were, it was comforting. Yes, that’s just how they are! Yes, let’s laugh at them! Let’s punish them! Let’s move away from them! Let’s kill them! This is good fun. The movies were always more careful with children, but even so, movies that could show the burden of little ones, good or bad, were a covert relief for some people who went to the movies to escape. Movies endorsed unwanted ideas by putting them into story form and resolving them up there on the screen. The goal was, as always, identification, but also relief.
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