A British film of 1964 laid the groundwork for the 1970s feminist marriage movies, which ask the question “What’s in it for women in marriage?” The Pumpkin Eater was directed by Jack Clayton, starred Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch, and James Mason, and was written by Harold Pinter from a Penelope Mortimer novel. These heavy-duty credentials sent a serious message to the moviegoing public: if it’s a marriage movie you want, prepare to step up and suffer. Bancroft plays the mother of eight children. She just can’t stop marrying and she just can’t stop giving birth. Her world goes awry when she finds out that her third husband (Finch) is unfaithful. The Pumpkin Eater is an intelligent film, but a grind, sending a message about the emotional confusion of traditional motherhood, marriage, fidelity, and the woman’s lot in life as an alert to what lay ahead in the next two decades. Everyone—that is, everyone who went to see it—had full warning.
The 1969–1979 feminist marriage movies were not so much stories about marriage itself as they were about how marriage was not working for modern women. Such movies demonstrated how unfair marriage was to women, how it stunted their lives and creativity, blocking them from the successes they could otherwise have had, and how the men they married were fundamentally a bunch of selfish idiots.3 In that sense, they are women’s films. Some of them, such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), don’t present anyone living in a real “marriage” day by day, but most of them set up the status of marriage, and the couple undergoing it, with clarity. These feminist movies make a serious point, and they answer their own questions by saying a woman is better off alone than unhappily married, and that love doesn’t have to be eliminated from an unmarried woman’s life any more than a career should be eliminated from a married woman’s.
The feminist marriage movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s are few but significant, and they carried a large impact in their day. They have subtle variations. For instance, Petulia (1968) is about a divorced man (George C. Scott) and his romance with an unhappily wed free spirit played by Julie Christie. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) confronts the new issue head-on from the man’s point of view. A feminist wife who needs her space (Meryl Streep) walks out on a hard-driving, up-and-coming executive (Dustin Hoffman), leaving him alone to care for their small son.4 The presentation of women who want to be free is the raison d’être of these two films. Three other movies focus more exclusively on the female character and tell real stories about marriage: The Happy Ending (1969), Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), and An Unmarried Woman (1978).
The Happy Ending is about an unfulfilled housewife (Jean Simmons, nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for the role) who is slowly sinking into alcoholism, sitting around by herself watching Casablanca on late-night television. The story of how she suddenly finds the courage to walk out on her husband (basically a nice guy) and return to college in an attempt to find the youth she lost is a woman’s film with a detailed picture of married boredom and how destructive it can be. Diary of a Mad Housewife shows Carrie Snodgress stuck inside a dull marriage to a fool of a husband and finding release in an affair with an equally dubious, self-centered man (Frank Langella). An Unmarried Woman shows how a woman (Jill Clayburgh in an excellent performance) copes when her husband walks out on her. Well written (and directed) by Paul Mazursky (who also did Bob & Carol), the movie’s presentation of Clayburgh’s bonding with her female friends is significant. As the women sit at lunch together, giggling and letting their hair down, they openly discuss their sex lives. These scenes are the forerunners of the latter-day Sex and the City scenes, but they’re funnier, better written and acted, and carry more honesty.5 An Unmarried Woman is a fitting end to the few marriage movies of the 1970s, and it helps explain why there were so few of them. Women moved on—and as moviegoers, they moved on, too. The films existed to explain what was happening to marriage in the culture, and they’re couched in female terms because it was the women who were calling the shots, the women who were questioning the point and asking themselves if marriage was a fate they really wanted.
In 1973, one interesting film about how both a woman and a man could be blocked and live together without real fulfillment or communication was released. Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams is another of the rare films about a marriage between two older people—in this case, Joanne Woodward and Martin Balsam. They play a couple who’ve been married for over twenty years. Woodward is unhappy, estranged from her beloved son, always quarreling with her daughter, intimidated by her mother (Sylvia Sidney, in her last great role), and cold and unresponsive to her husband. “You don’t have enough to occupy your brain,” Sidney tells her. Woodward lives in the past, dreaming of her childhood, of a youthful crush she had on a farmhand who was killed in World War II. When her mother unexpectedly drops dead of a heart attack while watching an Ingmar Bergman movie (someone had a sense of humor!), Woodward goes into a tailspin. Her daughter tries to shake her mother out of the past: “It’s all gone … your childhood, the hired hand, your plans for the future, Grandma and Grandpa … It can’t come back with a taste of raspberry jam with the label 1940 on it.” To help her and, he hopes, distract her, Balsam takes Woodward on a trip to Europe.
As the couple make the obligatory visits to monuments and shops, Balsam asks Woodward the familiar marriage-movie question: “Why did you marry me?” He demands an answer, but never gets one. Ultimately, they visit the site of his World War II service during the siege of Bastogne. During his emotional meltdown there (as he tells her of the horror of combat), a kind of connection occurs between them. Later she tells him she knows she’s undemonstrative, but it’s not because she’s really cold—but they then fall back into playing their familiar roles of concerned husband and neurotic wife. The movie ends, however, on a small, hopeful note: “When we get home,” she says, “I’d like to move into a smaller apartment.” For her, as is always true for a woman in a woman’s film, the home is everything. Her willingness to move is a symbol of her possibly being able to let go of the past. The movie tries hard to be European and sophisticated, and falls short, ending up rather muddled and clichéd; nevertheless, it remains one of the few honest portraits in its time of the mystery of a decades-long marriage between two people who have never really communicated with each other.
During this period, the marriage film struggled to find fresh takes on old ideas. The most common ploy was a simple update that reversed former attitudes. An example of the shift that held on to the original format is provided by comparing 1952’s The Four Poster, starring Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, and 1978’s Same Time, Next Year, with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn. The Four Poster is based on a successful stage play by Jan de Hartog (which later was translated into the hit musical I Do! I Do!). It’s the story of a marriage, decade by decade, issue by issue, as a couple experience bliss, survive infidelity and aging, etc.6 Same Time, Next Year, on the other hand, is the story of an adultery. Two married people meet each other for one weekend per year over a twenty-six-year time frame. The structural idea is the same, but where Harrison and Palmer faced changes in themselves as they aged, Alda and Burstyn face changes in America: loosening morality, hippiedom, and drugs. The shift is away from a couple and their personal problems over to a couple and their social situation—and, of course, from a legally married couple to an adulterous couple as protagonists.
The 1980s seemed to restore some interest in the subject of marriage, but without generating any real changes. During that decade, there were quite a few comedies about marriage: Overboard (1987), The Four Seasons (1981), The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), Ruthless People (1986), She’s Having a Baby (1988), Seems Like Old Times (1980), etc. They were a form of retreat, hoping to regenerate a romantic context for marriage or rework old themes about divorce, murder, money, and the battle of the sexes. Irreconcilable Differences (1984) tarts up the old format of the divorce movie by presenting the story of the love affair, courtship, marriage, and ultimate collapse of the relationship of Shelley Long and Ryan O’Neal as a story being told
by their ten-year-old daughter (Drew Barrymore). The twist? She is suing them for divorce.
A reliable pattern for a movie story about marriage appears in The Four Poster. Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer (wed in real life at the time) enact a marriage in scenes that move forward through time, from wedding-night innocence … (Photo Credit 3.4)
… to sophistication across a variety of troubles and temptations, through boredom and disappointment, to the ultimate stability and appreciation. (Photo Credit 3.5)
Comedy seemed to be the major draw for marriage during these years, particularly since it maintained the staple that had been in place since the days of DeMille: the opportunity to present beautiful kitchens and bathrooms. There were fewer melodramas made, and most did not present a portrait of the daily life of marriage in any new way.7 Falling in Love (1984) was an American version of the British Brief Encounter, starring Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro as two married commuters.8 Shoot the Moon (1982) told the story of how a divorce affected the emotional lives of a couple (Diane Keaton and Albert Finney) and their children. Honeysuckle Rose (also 1980) was yet another version of the triangular infidelity story, this one with a country-music setting, with Willie Nelson, Amy Irving, and Dyan Cannon.
A little-known but touching film, Twice in a Lifetime (1985), put a new twist on the adultery theme. The movie is realistic, with no neatly wrapped‑up happy ending. Gene Hackman plays a middle-aged man who falls in love with a younger woman (Ann-Margret). For once, the terrible pain and anger that all the participants must endure as a result (including Hackman’s wife, played by Ellen Burstyn, and daughter, Amy Madigan) is not simplified or even settled. The story is an old one, but the approach (including superb acting) is original and the ending unpredictable.
Another exceptionally honest portrait of marriage was Heartburn (1986), the screen adaptation of Nora Ephron’s best seller about a sophisticated couple (disguised versions of herself and her former husband, Carl Bernstein). The marriage looks from the outside like the ideal mating of brains, talent, and wit—Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson—as they host fabulous dinner parties in their chic Washington digs. Everything goes to pieces when the wife discovers her husband is being unfaithful to her while she’s pregnant. (“If you want monogamy, marry a swan,” her dad tells her.)
Heartburn is the updated story of marriage from the woman’s point of view. It presents the wife’s side, but without being a screed against the husband. (“Marriage doesn’t work,” she says. “You know what does? Divorce.”) The movie is intelligent, human, and genuinely funny, and it doesn’t hurt that its married couple are played by Streep and Nicholson in their prime. Looking at Heartburn, it’s easy to see how movies that want to tell stories about marriage have changed. During the heyday of the studio system, marriage was dramatized. Its daily world was shaped into an arc of events that built from ordinary and recognizable, into an emerging set of problems, toward a crisis and some final reconciliation. Marriage was the social contract of those years, and although in real life it might be a bit dull and dramaless, on screen it had to pop—it mattered too much not to be made dramatic. By the time of Heartburn, couples could marry or not marry, and the importance of marriage, though not eliminated, was nevertheless greatly reduced. Thus Heartburn’s story has no single high point, no true crisis. It moves from a random wedding (where the couple meet) to courtship (in a bar, kissing under a marquee for a theater that’s showing Mephisto, surely a bad omen), to their own wedding, and then dinner after dinner after dinner. Marriage becomes about being with other couples, having babies (two), and consuming excellent food.
Once marriage movies took place in nightclubs, country estates, or around dinner tables (the servants were in the kitchen). If the couple weren’t that wealthy, they were in their living room or bedroom in a little cottage, and if poor, perhaps in their tiny cramped apartment; but the new movies suddenly located almost everything about married life in a gloriously updated kitchen. It’s ironic to think that just about the time people started eating out in restaurants because both the husband and wife worked, movies about the husband and wife started living in kitchens. And not just any kind of kitchen: giant kitchens; stainless-steel kitchens; granite-topped kitchens, with yards of spice racks, double and triple sinks, wine coolers, backsplashes, and decorating schemes to die for. (Contractors reported that clients often asked them to re-create movie kitchens, particularly those of Diane Keaton in 1991’s Father of the Bride remake and 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give.) In the old films, if the people were in kitchens, they were stirring pots on top of a stove or opening the oven to pull out a turkey to baste.9 In these new movies, people were chopping things—chopping, chopping, chopping, with expensive German knives. The work of the kitchen was yuppified and given a vague anger.10 Since women don’t have to cook, they cook because they have a superb palate, and because inside their career-driven hearts is the soul of a nurturer. (She used to nurture—now she cooks fancy dishes on the weekend.) Couples who both work have chic, tony jobs. They gossip and exchange pleasantries and information around tables laden with excellent food in restaurants and homes, and on picnics. Marriage continues its modern trend of being about discussion, if happy, and debate, if unhappy. Since nobody has to be married to meet social standards, how could it be otherwise? The marriage movie had to become a slow-moving conversation, a set of observations about events that are happening (largely offscreen) in an undramatic way. Heartburn presents Meryl Streep’s debate with herself about why she shouldn’t marry (because it didn’t work for her the first time, and it never worked for her parents), why she is so terribly happy after she does it again (especially when she becomes a mother, which she loves), why she should not stay with her husband after discovering his infidelity (his “I’m going shopping for socks” excursions), why she should go back to him (he comes to get her and bring her back), and ultimately why she should leave him for the final time. (He’s unfaithful and always will be.) Heartburn rolls out, rather like marriage itself, in a series of daily chores—shopping, cooking, cleaning—until the light bulb goes on in Streep’s head. The shape of the marriage story is no longer a dramatic arc.
The very modern marriage movie Heartburn puts the couple (Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep) into a sophisticated group that talks incessantly about the status of their relationships. (Photo Credit 3.6)
Heartburn and Twice in a Lifetime both give the viewer the feeling that he or she is watching a real marriage unfold. Little touches, little insights, little details reveal to any married person what is recognized as the day-to-day of married life. Heartburn is witty and amusing, but it contains great anger and pain. Twice in a Lifetime has compassion, deep regret, and the sense of loss that accompanies any kind of divorce action. These two movies prove that the audience for the marriage story existed, and the people who could write intelligently about marriage still were out there. Perhaps they stand out of the period 1970–1990 as two unusually solid marriage movies for one simple reason: both are the stories of real people’s marriages and divorces: Heartburn was Nora Ephron’s, and Twice in a Lifetime was that of Bud Yorkin, its director.
Two other movies set inside marriages in the 1980s found their “modern” twists: Mr. Mom (1983) and Married to the Mob (1988). The former has a sitcom setup. When the husband and father of the family (Michael Keaton) gets fired, the wife and mother (Teri Garr) has to go out and earn the living, which she turns out to be super-good at. Dad has to stay home and learn how hard it is to run a household. The latter film follows the old idea of using the word “married” in the title in a clever way that skirts the issue, but it presents no real sense of married life. Rather, it’s a comedy in which the wife of a hit man has to escape the clutches of the mob after his assassination.
None of these films inspired new waves of marriage movies, although there were always movies that found ways to incorporate marriage into a larger context in a clever way. Prizzi’s Honor (1985) is a hilarious and terrifying gangster film gro
unded in the problems marriage can bring into your life—especially if you’re a hit man and you marry a hit woman. One movie about marriage in the 1980s, however, generated great debates among moviegoers: Fatal Attraction (1987). It was a riff on the adultery movie, and old-fashioned in that sense, but as a riff it was really only a riff. Michael Douglas has a one-night stand (in a freight elevator, riding up to her loft) with a pickup (Glenn Close). He goes home happy—and has to wake up scared. (Fatal Attraction was really a ripoff of Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial debut, Play Misty for Me. The main difference was that Eastwood’s character, menaced by former girlfriend Jessica Walter, is not a married man.)
The 1990s just kept following the old paths, with an occasional hit that involved marriage, but with an astonishingly small list of major movies on the subject. There were the usual comedies, making an attempt at being romantic: Honeymoon in Vegas (1998) and So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993). Men continued to either kill their wives or try to kill them, mostly for money: A Perfect Murder (1998), Reversal of Fortune (1990), and A Shock to the System (1990). Wives became alcoholics and ruined everything (When a Man Loves a Woman, 1994), and in-laws disapproved of the choice in mate, spoiling things (Only You, 1994). Husbands died and had to be reached through mediums (Ghost, 1990). Women still have to enlist the aid of some stranger to pretend to be their husband when they go home to their families (A Walk in the Clouds, 1995); women still take revenge on their exes (The First Wives Club, 1996); and old marriage movies start being remade: Father of the Bride (1991); The Preacher’s Wife (1996).11 Real-life stories are presented as cautionary tales (What’s Love Got to Do with It, 1993). All-black casts appear in Waiting to Exhale (1995) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998). Corrina, Corrina (1994) focuses on an interracial couple.
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