30 MacMurray, an underrated actor, was a top-of-the-line film personality who would go on to become one of television’s greatest sitcom stars in the long-running hit My Three Sons (1960–1972). Father Was a Fullback has an uncanny parallel to a serious film version of the pressures of being a coach released in 2004, Friday Night Lights. That Friday Night Lights would itself be turned into a superbly written and acted one-hour TV series of the same name is a further interesting development of how a story of this nature can fit well into both media.
31 Behind the scenes, Ozzie wrote, produced, and directed many of the episodes. His great achievement was figuring out how to incorporate the Elvis-like celebrity of his son Ricky into the plots. The presentations of Ricky’s musical performances in the show are considered by many to be the forerunners of today’s music videos.
32 Proof that Ball was considered a star lies in A Woman of Distinction (1950), starring Ray Milland and Rosalind Russell. When Milland arrives in the United States on a transatlantic American Airlines flight, a crowd of news photographers push forward, yelling, “Look, fellas, there’s Lucille Ball!” Ball deplanes with Milland, handing him her fur coat, her giant hatbox, and her little dog, in order to pose. This type of star cameo—the glamour arrival—was reserved for real movie stars, as when Ava Gardner gets off the same train as Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon. In 1950, Ball had not yet begun I Love Lucy. Her earlier film career is much more solid and varied than she is usually given credit for; it’s by comparison to her huge success on TV that it’s been underrated.
33 Although Ball continued in television after her divorce in 1960, her shows featured only herself, not Arnaz, and she always played a woman without a living husband.
34 Because Ball and Arnaz had careers that began in movies, they often grounded their show inside issues they had seen in movie marriages. For instance, Lucy’s mother-in-law comes to visit, confirming the basic mother-in-law-as-punch-line concept. (Ethel says, “A mother-in-law is a mother-in-law … Mine comes once a year all the way from Indiana just to look under the rug … If I thought she’d stay home, I’d send her the rug and a box of dirt.”) Lucy overspends her budget (money), Lucy gets jealous when she fears Ricky has a girlfriend (infidelity), Ricky forgets their anniversary (communication), and Lucy thinks she and Ricky aren’t really married (oops!). These are old problems, old issues.
35 In Forever, Darling, Lucy’s imaginary mentor (embodied by James Mason) defines who a husband should be: “father, brother, friend, sweetheart, guardian angel … with a touch of Prince Charming.”
PART THREE
THE MODERN ERA
In his sister’s documentary about their parents, Desi Arnaz Jr. defined the purpose of married life in the 1940s and 1950s. “Keeping secrets,” he said, was the code of the proper American marriage. “People pretended things were okay.” By the mid-1960s, however, “keeping secrets” was becoming less and less necessary. People began to live their secrets openly. The Sexual Revolution came along, with the pill to prevent unwanted pregnancies. There was a new attitude toward divorce and marital fidelity. Couples began living together without being married, even having children if they wished. Money issues diminished—easy credit was available for the wife who wanted that fur coat and all that new furniture right now. In-laws were having their own open secrets, and nobody had to live with them anymore anyway. In such a world—which was also the world of TV marriage—was there any role for the marriage movie? As I had tracked it historically, it had first needed to find a definition for itself (couples, etc.), then a purpose (showing the problems of marriage), and then a further purpose outside itself to remain relevant (its “situation”). Now what?
The social changes affecting the marriage format and the competition from TV were not the only challenges movies faced. In the mid-1950s and onward, the motion-picture business in America had also begun to change. These changes have already been mentioned: the studio system collapsed, to be replaced by a more international business ultimately controlled by large conglomerates; stars defected or were fired from their home studios; television became popular and prevalent, with many kinds of news programs, events, and genres; more foreign films were imported. Everything was different, and the number of people who went regularly to the movies decreased greatly, which meant fewer and fewer films being made. In the new, tighter market, with more competition from other sources, any type of movie had to have a wide appeal. This combination of a new social climate with the new moviemaking and marketing challenges inevitably made marriage uninteresting as a topic for a movie story. The issues of marriage seemed not only dated, dull, or possibly even quaint, but somehow irrelevant. Nobody needed any help with its former “secrets.” Slowly but definitely, from 1960 to 2000, the marriage movie settled into a small rut, with only a few interesting innovations. It struggled to find its purpose more than it ever had, and more than ever before its purpose was directly defined by current social situations.
Doris Day and Rock Hudson were one of Hollywood’s best onscreen couples. They played married impeccably in Send Me No Flowers, perfectly capturing an argument … (Photo Credit 3.1)
… and perfectly depicting the make‑up scene to follow, realistically depicted with hair curlers. (Photo Credit 3.2)
As the 1960s began, audiences could—and did—still go out to traditional stylish comedies about marriage. Two popular Doris Day vehicles illustrate the point: The Thrill of It All (1963) and Send Me No Flowers (1965). In the former, Day is the wife of James Garner, who becomes a neglected husband when she stumbles into a big-time career as a television ad woman. In the latter, the husband is Rock Hudson, a hopeless hypochondriac. Convinced he’s dying, he enlists the help of a lecherous friend (Tony Randall) to select a suitable new husband for Day, but without her knowledge. The latter script is witty, and Hudson and Day were a delightful screen couple, but neither of these films breaks any new ground for marriage comedy. They are topical (wife working and wife flirting with an infidelity pimped by her husband), but they only seem rakish; they really aren’t. Instead, they follow the familiar formula: induce problems and then solve them, remembering to show audiences plenty of wardrobe changes, well-appointed homes, and consumer goods along the way.
In the second half of the decade, these tired comedies continued to appear, but in smaller numbers: Marriage on the Rocks (1965), That Funny Feeling (1965), Not with My Wife, You Don’t! (1966), Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1968), With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), and others. There were also the usual melodramas about adultery (The Sandpiper, 1965; Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967), some interesting horror-film variations (Rosemary’s Baby, 1968, and The Stepford Wives, 1975), and an attempt to rework the old murder-your-spouse variation with comedy, as in How to Murder Your Wife (1965), in which Jack Lemmon marries Virna Lisi while drunk and spends the rest of the movie trying to kill her—until, of course, he falls in love with her. There were also prestigious “serious” marriage analyses based on Broadway dramas, such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), as well as the adaptation of successful Broadway comedies like Barefoot in the Park (1967), in which Robert Redford and Jane Fonda play newlyweds.
There were some minor harbingers of possible changes, pointing to the future, but still housed in the old formats: African-American marriages (For Love of Ivy, 1968); interracial marriages (The Great White Hope, 1970); the old Laurel and Hardy two-men-as-married-couple idea (The Odd Couple, 1968); the hint of feminist issues (Penelope, 1966, in which Natalie Wood, as a neglected wife, makes a statement by robbing her husband’s bank). One comedy in particular linked itself to the changing morality regarding marriage: A Guide for the Married Man (1967). Robert Morse, always an appealing little-devil surrogate, tries to teach the faithfully married Walter Matthau to become a swinger by providing him with a series of lessons on how to get away with infidelity.
Of all the 1960s marriage movies that repeat a familiar pattern, the two best and most significant are Divorce American Style (1967
) and Yours, Mine and Ours (1968). Divorce American Style is the updated version of movies like 1937’s Awful Truth. A couple who basically love each other have a misunderstanding and get a divorce, so the rest of the movie can be spent enjoying the comedy of their misery as they grope their way back to each other. The movie shows the difference between the Americas of 1967 and 1937 in all ways: style, clothes, and mores. The Awful Truth, as has been pointed out, is not really a marriage movie; it’s a romantic comedy that uses the divorce to unleash a new courtship period for two older, more sophisticated mates. The stars, Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, do not lead a domestic life and are never seen cohabiting in any sort of married tradition. They’re all glamour, nightclubs, tuxedos, and fur-trimmed evening wraps. The stars of Divorce American Style, Debbie Reynolds and Dick Van Dyke, are married by suburban rules. Like couples in the first postwar marriage programmers, they live in a ranch-style home, have kids, conduct an ordinary set of social gatherings with others in their neighborhood, and are thoroughly domesticated. They eat breakfast in their kitchen, they put their cars in the garage, and they brush their teeth, put on their pajamas, and go to bed. After they divorce, they both try to date, but inevitably end up back together, confirming the pattern of “affirm, destroy, reconcile” that is traditional to the marriage-movie format.
What Divorce American Style has to offer that’s fresh is a little peep at the new morality that’s in play alongside the new credit-driven economy. It presents a story about the problem of increasing divorce.1 The couple represent an old-fashioned boy and girl who married for love and who now face the upheaval of their original universe. There are new values out there, easy divorce being one of the most prevalent. Van Dyke has to learn that his wife will keep the house, the car, and most of the money, and he’ll see his kids only on weekends. Reynolds has to learn to date, and most men will expect that to mean paying for dinner with sexual favors. She has to cope with loneliness and loss of self-confidence. One of the movie’s main points is made when Van Dyke meets another divorced and penniless man (Jason Robards), who sets him up with his ex-wife (Jean Simmons) because if he can just marry her off, he can get out of his own alimony dilemma. (Divorce American Style is largely about the economics of alimony.) In the end, when Van Dyke sees Reynolds volunteer to be the victim of a hypnotist’s act in a nightclub (it’s the 1960s!), and he watches her sincere but free-spirited release of herself, giving everything she’s got, he realizes how much he loves her and how crazy they’ve been to surrender to the new morality. It’s déjà-vu Cecil B. DeMille, but with station wagons, patios, grocery stores … and alimony.
As I’ve stated, few movies present older people in a mature marriage. Proof that when such movies occur they are often better than usual (Dodsworth, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge), is the somewhat silly yet tenderly enacted Yours, Mine and Ours, starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda as a middle-aged couple who decide to marry in spite of their initial misgivings. Oh, they love each other all right; it’s just that they have a problem: she already has eight children and he has ten. Yours, Mine and Ours gives Ball moments for displaying her comic genius and gives Fonda time to be the excellent actor he is without either one suffering. The movie lurches from typical Ball comedy (a false eyelash that goes astray in a nightclub scene) to a typical Fonda “important speech” (when he discusses sex with one of their teenaged boys and tells him to watch carefully what Ball is going through as she begins to experience birth pains: “This is the end result of all that”). Fonda and Ball are good together, despite seeming to come from two different movie universes. (They had been paired in The Big Street in 1942 to good effect.) The movie is an update on the old kids-will-kill-you-and-destroy-your-marriage ploy, but despite its flaws it was a box-office success. It plays honestly and credibly with an authentic presentation of daily marriage, life, and problems with kids, and it opened the door for the possibility of modern marriage movies to become more honest, more detailed—possibly even duller—to reflect reality.
By the end of the 1960s, marriage movies did overtly ask audiences to question the institution by using current social terms. One was a huge box-office and award-winning success, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967); one was an independent feature directed by John Cassavetes, Faces (1968); and one ushered in a new sexual morality, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). The first, well-embraced by moviegoers and awarded Oscar wins and nominations, juxtaposed a happily married upper-middle-class couple (embodied by the aging Spencer Tracy, in his final film, and Katharine Hepburn) alongside a new kind of couple (Katharine Houghton and Sidney Poitier). Since Houghton, playing the daughter of Hepburn and Tracy, is white, and Poitier is black, when the daughter shows up to present her parents with the man she wants to marry, their liberal ideals are put to the test. (But not too much: the future son-in-law is a famous doctor, and he’s also Sidney Poitier.)
The hippie-era movie marriage: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. (Eliot Gould, Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, Dyan Cannon). It’s a group thing. (Photo Credit 3.3)
Faces frankly faces infidelities in various marriages with a new style of filmmaking that stressed honest emotion over easy solution.2 Cassavetes called his type of filmmaking “actor’s cinema,” because he brought together his own actor friends and let them improvise before the camera. Working from the blueprint of his script, actors such as Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes’s real-life wife) presented an in-your-face kind of realistic look at marital relationships. The actors were free to unleash any level of emotional intensity they could bring forward, and the result is not only an amazing demonstration of acting skill, but also a free-form telling of the marriage story, warts and all.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was one of the most talked-about movies of 1969. Both Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon were nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Actress Oscars for their performances, and the movie’s hipster take on the values of middle-class marriage made it a daring, cool conversation topic at suburban cocktail parties. The script was loaded with hot lines of dialogue that wrenched guilty giggles out of everyone before order was restored. (“I want a better orgasm” resides right alongside “The gazpacho was amazing.”) Gently but specifically poking fun at the “new” take on living taught by such California-based centers as the Esalen Institute, the movie presents an audience with two married couples: Bob and Carol … and Ted and Alice. One couple has already crossed the boundary from old-fashioned to clued-in (Cannon and Gould as Alice and Ted), but the other is only starting to learn the new lifestyle. The mantra for the new marriage is that what matters is “not what you think, but what you feel.”
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is a key transition movie in the marriage format. It’s slightly ahead of its time for the average moviegoer, but slightly behind the times re the morality that the younger college generation had already embraced. Changing partners, having orgies, learning to smoke dope, and doing what pleases you with the tennis pro became the topic of sly social humor. The movie says this is what’s happening, but also says this is what’s done by silly people who follow trends. In that regard, it presents the usual marriage trajectory for movies: say and do one thing, but suggest another. It also begins another tradition—that of discussing marriage in an ongoing dialogue. Where older movies moved toward a final scene in which one big spoken summary of wisdom is laid down for the audience about what the role of marriage is in the lives of a man and a woman—that is, in the lives of the ticket buyers—this movie shifts focus and does nothing but discuss … and discuss … and discuss. Discussion (and analysis) of what was once taken for granted begins to be one of the most important things about marriage in movies. Since we don’t have to do it, let’s debate it. In fact, analyzing it is pretty much the only reason to keep it around. Everything else about it that mattered—fidelity, companionship, family, an economic support system—is no longer necessary.
And so Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice “learn to open up” and tell each other everything they are thinking or feeling or wondering. Th
ey do the touchy-feely things, lots of group hugs, and generate tears and confessions. “I had an affair in San Francisco,” Culp tells Wood, so they can just discuss an issue that would have once been the central crisis in a marriage movie. (“You’re sharing something!” exclaims Wood happily in response, turning a potential disaster into a positive. She then promptly heads for the tennis pro to grab some sharing for herself.) The marriage story has become analysis and discussion. In this film story, freedom of choice and looser morality has led to paralysis, boredom, and selfishness. The Sexual Revolution for the older set is apparently mostly conversation that addresses experimenting in the field of sexual freedom.
In its day, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice seemed racy, and it is intelligently satirical. Culp and Wood don’t seem comfortable playing this type of modern screwball comedy, but Gould and the underrated Dyan Cannon are very good at it. Seen today, the movie seems to apply a European style of filmmaking to a very American attitude toward life. It’s the boredom of Antonioni’s jaded set of sophisticates presented in an upbeat tempo, and the heritage of Puritanism and the new definitions of marital responsibilities clash with each other. (“You’ve got the guilt anyway … don’t waste it” is one line of advice.) In the end, the two couples go to Las Vegas, the American Temple of Sin, to party together. (“First we’ll have an orgy and then we’ll go see Tony Bennett.”) For today’s moviegoers, it’s a long wait for a peep at an orgy (which never appears)—and they don’t get to see Tony Bennett, either. As the movie ends, the lyrics of “What the world needs now is love, sweet love” provide an ironic counterpoint.
By the beginning of the 1970s and throughout that entire decade, marriage movies practically disappear. For one thing, movie audiences were growing younger and younger, moving toward the heaviest attendance coming from teenage boys, who presumably were the least viable market for a story about married life. For another, it was a decade of renaissance for young filmmakers who had been trained in colleges. They brought new ideas, new styles, new attitudes, and new problems to the screen, and they were mostly young issues—young unmarried issues. The 1970s were the historical bottom of the marriage movie pit. Researching lists of American films released, the hundred top box-office draws, and the decade’s award winners turn up the fewest marriage movies ever made in America in a single decade. Of the sixty or so movies that even touch on marriage between 1969 and 1979, very few have remained significant. The Way We Were and New York, New York have already been discussed. In retrospect, we can see that the most significant other titles all have feminist messages.
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