Best Years of Our Lives plays out a story of acceptance and adjustment, a life-must-go-on scenario. Everything that should be right becomes right again, and negatives are overcome. Loy and March love each other and are able to recover their former relationship (good marriage restored). O’Donnell sincerely loves Russell and overcomes his fears and reluctance so they can wed (good marriage undertaken). Andrews ditches Mayo and teams up with March and Loy’s lovely daughter, Teresa Wright (bad marriage abandoned, possible future good marriage). There are many side issues—housing shortages, etc.—but the audience is given an uplifting story about what the sacrifices of the war have done to the lives of “ordinary” people, and how those sacrifices were worth it. It also teaches them that they can’t turn back the clock; they must live with the consequences of war, realize that the war years were a time of unshared, unspoken experiences, and accept the changes in their partners.
The charming British film Vacation from Marriage (1945) is more of a comedy than Best Years of Our Lives, but it taught a similar lesson, and proved a hit when released in the United States.26 Basically, the plot seemed to say that what most marriages need is a jolly good war to shake them up. Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat are a bored and boring, totally uncommunicative married couple when the film opens on April 4, 1940. She has no glamour, no pizzazz. He’s a clerk among clerks. Together they make a totally unromantic pairing. And then he joins the navy … and she becomes a WREN. Away from each other, they blossom, and they dread getting back together on leave. When they reunite, each determined to divorce the other, they meet outside during a blackout. They can’t see each other, and in the dark they agree to divorce. Later, inside in the bright lights of a pub, each is shocked by the sight of the other. He’s handsome and fit, and she’s Deborah Kerr! (During their ten-day leave, they will, of course, reunite.) What Vacation from Marriage suggests is that the changes everyone has undergone are a good thing. We’re all better for having suffered and served. The postwar message about marriage via the motion picture was that everything will be all right if people can live with the changes.
By 1950, it was clear that World War II had been a turning point regarding the context (or situation) in which marriage movies were set. The war solidified the use of marriage as an explanation of and primary location for social change. What was learned was the power of marriage as such a catalyst. The subject still had its familiar internal problems and its couples, but now it took on more fully than ever before in movie history a development that almost moved marriage into the “social problems” movie category. After World War II, the “social purpose” form of the marriage movie became more common than the pure marriage movie. In the decades that lay ahead, marriage would be used to showcase the issues of communism (I Married a Communist [1949], Conspirator [1949], The Iron Curtain [1948]), the threat of nuclear weapons (I Married a Monster from Outer Space [1958]), postwar adjustment (No Down Payment [1957]), the Sexual Revolution (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice [1969]), race relations (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner [1967]), and many others. By 1950, however, there was a new factor influencing what would happen to stories about marriage for the American public, which Hollywood was not fully prepared for: television, the home of the sitcom marriage.
Marriage stories took place in the home and were always, in some fundamental way, about furniture. Television sat in the home and was furniture. Over the 1950s, the marriage story largely left motion pictures and moved next door, to television. This constituted a significant change. Movies were an escape; television was a distraction. When you entered a darkened motion-picture theater, often into icy-cold air conditioning (or cozy warmth, depending on the season), you left behind the outer world and sank into a plush seat, ready to soar away from everything known. When you watched TV, you were in your own home, possibly doing another task, subject to interruptions from the telephone, the doorbell, family members, etc. Television even interrupted itself—with commercials. Whatever was happening on TV also happened in your living room, or bedroom, or wherever you were watching. The screen was smaller than you were, and you looked downward toward it, not upward as you did for the gigantic movie show. What you saw on TV could be anything—local and international news, weather, game shows, variety shows, westerns, sitcoms—but they were all there in front of you at the same time. You could control them, moving up and down on the dial; no longer did the image take over and dominate you. The reverse happened: you dominated it, easily eliminating anything you didn’t like and changing to something else. The TV shows that were narratives were not lavishly decorated or detailed. They were usually set in one main room where the majority of the action took place, with side trips to other cheap-looking places—a bedroom or two, the kitchen, or a yard. There were no long sequences without dialogue in which the camera lingered over a star’s face, allowing a viewer to feel, think, and empathize with the character, imposing his or her own feelings onto the actor. Audiences just sat and listened, because everything was dialogue-driven: an actor and talking was what the little set could provide. Movies featured stars who were bigger than life and who audiences imagined were playing themselves, but television developed stars who played the role they were cast in. (Gable is Gable; Dennis Franz is Andy Sipowicz.)
The most celebrated movie about postwar adjustments for veterans and their families was The Best Years of Our Lives. Air force glamour boy Dana Andrews finds a dissatisfied spouse (Virginia Mayo) who doesn’t like him without the uniform and the wings and the money … (Photo Credit 2.101)
… while former infantryman Fredric March returns home to his sympathetic wife (Myrna Loy). (Photo Credit 2.102)
Despite these significant differences, or perhaps because of them, the little television box turned out to be an excellent place to set the kind of small marriage/family drama that would come to be known as a “sitcom.” The television sitcom about marriage had the same essential goals as the movie about marriage: to connect to what the audiences knew and understood. The difference was that the movies expected to move away from the known and off into someplace exciting or dangerous or funny to release the audience from its doldrums. It then expected to return, with everything restored. The television marriage, by comparison, was never going anywhere except to the next episode. It maintained a balance, a status quo, that could be amusingly threatened within its half hour (“Oh no, the maid is quitting!” or “Oh no, we accidentally gave Daddy’s favorite sweater to Goodwill!” or “Oh no, little Billy’s softball game conflicts with sister Mary’s spelling bee!”). In the movies, marriage was a roller-coaster ride; on television, it was a merry-go-round.
In a movie marriage, everything goes wrong. In the TV version, little things happen. The former is a two-hour build to crisis, followed by resolution. The latter is a forward movement with little ups and downs that surface and disappear. They are dissimilar because the media they appear in are dissimilar.27
The sitcom families of 1950s television are an indelible part of American pop culture and are now the subject of courses in colleges and universities, but the “sitcom family” wasn’t necessarily something new to American audiences, or even something originally defined by the small box in the living room. Movies had already established the template—low-budget movies that featured families in ongoing serial form: the Hardys, the Joneses, the Aldriches—and, of course, the Bumsteads, originally of the comics. Just as the television sitcom family appeared often—every week over several months—the serial movie family could appear as often as three or four times a year in films telling continuous stories, often picking up at the exact same moment where the previous release ended.28
In fact, looking at the low-budget programmer marriages in movies from 1948 to 1956, one can see how very much like the television sitcom they are. Slice them apart, and they become several episodes of a sitcom. Condense them down to their basic setup, and there’s a half-hour sitcom pilot. These movies are often forgotten today, and their link to the development of—and inspiration
for—the television sitcom is forgotten. Besides redefining the marriage movie, the late-1940s/early-1950s marriage programmers represent a transitional era in media history, the link between movies and television.29
A perfect example of the connection between the TV sitcom and the marriage-movie programmer is 1949’s Father Was a Fullback. Its format proves the point. Well directed by John M. Stahl, it is a sitcom; it’s just an hour and a half long. The characters include Fred MacMurray, the father of the title, a football coach at “State U” in “Riverville” (second only to “University City”); his loving wife, always calmly doing her mom/wife job (Maureen O’Hara); a teenage daughter (Betty Lynn) with boyfriend problems and a great sense of personal drama; a nosy, bratty little sister (the young Natalie Wood), who is a wise-ass and always knows what’s going on; a snappy, outspoken maid (Thelma Ritter); a next-door neighbor who’s a sounding board across the fence for MacMurray (Jim Backus); a fussy, impossible nemesis for MacMurray in the form of the president of the Alumni Association (Rudy Vallee). What more does one need for a sitcom that could run for years? The plot is made up of the kind of small, quickly resolved misunderstandings that often become the “sit” of the thirty-minute sitcom: MacMurray erroneously thinks O’Hara is pregnant; both parents erroneously think Betty Lynn is pregnant; Dad and his next-door pal hire a guy to date Lynn; Ritter places bets against MacMurray’s football team; a “secret weapon” player to win a big game backfires on them and they lose anyway; Lynn gets a story published in True Confessions in which she claims to be a fifteen-year-old bubble dancer. The movie takes place almost totally in the family living room, with excursions to a football field, the yard outside their home, the house next door, a gas station, and a banquet hall. It’s low-budget, focused on cheap sets with a minimum of variety, and based on small, intimate family issues, with the larger context being the genuine pressures MacMurray is under to win football games.30
As the movie business struggled with changes and the studio system collapsed, from approximately 1950 to 1966, television presented its golden age of the marital sitcom and took ownership of the concept of the moving-image marriage. Nobody really needed marriage movies anymore: marriage was all over TV. I Love Lucy was the Rolls-Royce of the type, but besides Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, there were the Kramdens of The Honeymooners, husband Ralph and wife Alice, a great pair of frustrated (her) and exasperated (him) characters—two people destined never to be really together but nevertheless locked step by hilarious step unto death … or unto the moon. There were also Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, who, like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, were a real-life married couple. Their show, entitled The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, was a fourteen-season success. Ozzie was a big-name bandleader, and his wife, the former Harriet Hilliard, had starred in such hit movies as Follow the Fleet, with Astaire and Rogers. (She played the love interest for Randolph Scott.) The Nelsons were the parents of teen idols Ricky and David Nelson. In their highly successful series, which gives an idealized portrait of suburban life of the 1950s, Ozzie was an understanding father, slightly bumbling, standing around in a cardigan sweater, and Harriet was a patient, all-knowing, all-accepting wife.31
There were I Married Joan and Blondie, shows that were essentially grounded in marriages, and also December Bride and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The Life of Riley, Make Room for Daddy, and others. Shows that were domestic but not really “marriage situations” were also popular. Bachelor Father was, obviously, missing the wife. The Real McCoys, Leave It to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, and others were focused more on the family or the children. Lassie focused on the dog. The Thin Man was about solving mysteries, and the couple were not a typical suburban marriage. Mr. Adams and Eve was about two movie stars married to each other, but who got along better onscreen than off- (played by Howard Duff and Ida Lupino, two married movie stars who also, as it turned out, got along better onscreen: they were soon divorced). TV became the pop-cultural home of the American marriage, and its definition began to lie there, not at the movies, where increasingly the marriage story began to fade away. What did the TV marriage give viewers?
When people talk about the TV marriage sitcoms of the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s, there’s a tendency to lump them together as if they were all more or less the same. This ignores a fundamental issue: some marriage (or family) sitcoms were designed to be “realistic,” while others were clearly a form of exaggerated comedy that grounded action in a marriage strictly for laughs. The former type offered viewers an ideal model for their own lives, a romanticized world in which all parents were understanding and sympathetic and all children learned the lessons they were supposed to learn. (These sitcoms are much criticized for these qualities today.) The other format tended to poke fun at marriage in a sympathetic and larky manner; marriage is used for a background to fun, and as a way to siphon off negative feelings and complaints about the spouse. (These sitcoms are usually beloved today.)
The “realistic” sitcom of the 1950s is exemplified by The Donna Reed Show, which first aired in 1958, and Father Knows Best, which went on even earlier, in 1954. Reed was an Oscar-winning movie star with nothing to prove. She moved into television to continue her career when the studio system began to collapse and she began to age. This was typical of many other actresses of her generation (Loretta Young, who pioneered television in its earliest years; Barbara Stanwyck; Jane Wyman; and others). Reed, a beautiful woman, looked young and fresh and slender, and had no need for special lighting and careful handling to be recognizable as Donna Reed. Her show presented her as a typical housewife and mother. Her husband, a successful pediatrician (who makes house calls), was played by the handsome Carl Betz. They lived in a small midwestern city with their two children, played by Shelley Fabares and Paul Petersen.
The Donna Reed Show presents a marriage that is happy, with parenting that works. There is a strong attempt at simplicity and honesty, no matter how sentimental. Since it’s supposed to be a reflection of the audience’s “real” world, it addresses basic problems that were “out there.” Its little problems—and they are little—are ones any family could have. The very first episode, “The Vacation,” shows the father as too busy to spend much time with his kids—or his wife. No one is happy about this, including him, but he seems to be bothered by it the least. Donna solves the problem, cleverly eliminating all the obstacles to a family vacation and establishing who the central character is going to be. Reed’s TV family also faced problems about budgets, nosy neighbors, sibling rivalry, challenges at school, report cards, and growing pains—but nothing heavy, nothing seriously threatening. The children are well behaved, although the son is sometimes the voice of cold truth. (“I thought she stunk” is his opinion of Mom’s performance of Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.) The couple are comfortable but not rich, and their home appears modest, not lavish. The episodes usually ended with the husband and wife, who clearly love each other, happily alone in their bedroom together. It’s made abundantly clear to viewers that Dr. Stone likes Mrs. Stone a great deal, and that she returns the favor. They’re always happy to find themselves alone, although naturally there’s nothing even remotely salacious about it. They love each other—that’s it.
Although people remember Reed as always attired in pearls and high heels, she is often wearing jeans and sneakers. She doesn’t just cook and clean, though. She acts in plays in her community theater, visits her husband’s hospital for various reasons, and influences everyone around her with her own little plots and schemes. She would not, however, be found stuffing chocolates into her bosom on a candy-factory assembly line. Her world is designed to be recognizable—not any truer than any plotted piece of entertainment ever is, just recognizable. Reed is often self-deprecating, and whatever plans she gets up to, her husband always wisely sees through them. (He seldom says anything about it, but an audience is allowed to understand that, as a children’s doctor, he’s able to pick up on anything concocted to fool him.) Everyone pays tribute to D
onna Reed’s looks—and her sweetness—and her success as wife and mother. She smiles gratefully, gives thanks, and moves on. If things get too sticky-sweet, Reed cuts them back with a wry look or word. When they get too harsh, she’s there to bring things back yet again with a soft touch. Reed is lovely, a skilled actress who handles her character well. One of the reasons The Donna Reed Show gets a bum rap is because she is so effective. She works so well that everything begins to seem too perfect, which sometimes became irritating to people whose lives were not perfect. Most audiences loved the show, but many felt burdened by its ideal standards. If Reed had been less charming, more strident, and not as beautiful, this might not have happened. The truth is that Donna Reed deserves a break. She’s effective, and her little low-key sitcom was just trying to entertain while presenting some wholesome values. Let’s let her out of Pop Culture Jail.
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