The American Film Institute database lists 42 films released in 1931 with divorce as a plot element, major or minor. This is the highest number of such films for any year in the database, with some close rivals in the late 1910s and early 1920s.
That high number declines in the second half of the 1930s. For instance, in the four-year span from from 1931 through 1934, 138 movies are listed with divorce as a plot element, yet from 1938 through 1941 there are only 78. And the real drop-off comes right after: just 30 movies with divorce as a plot element released during the years 1942-1945.
While the AFI subject index is not the most precise metric, these numbers confirm the sense I get from the divorce-themed films of 1941. 1941 feels like new territory in American film. The madcap romantic comedies of the 1930s with their divorce-and-remarriage plots are overshadowed now by anxiety, by a spiritual contraction. The radiant and playful competitiveness of the couples in films such as It Happened One Night, The Thin Man, and The Awful Truth is dampened. The women stay much closer to their men, and the men do not need to earn their women.
This of course reflects the atmosphere of World War Two, even if the United States remained a non-belligerent until the Japanese attack at the end of the year. It may be, too, that we are witness to internal shifts in filmmaking: the dying of the last embers of pre-Code daring; the disappearance of the joyous anarchy that Stanley Cavell has described as an eruption of Shakespearean comedy in 1930s screwball comedy guise; Hollywood’s tendency toward ever more stale repetition.
Of course there are exceptions to this fading, none greater than Preston Sturges, who would release two of his most sublime screwball comedies in 1941 (The Lady Eve) and 1942 (The Palm Beach Story). But the example of Sturges shows by way of contrast the general trend in the divorce theme in 1941. In The Palm Beach Story, Claudette Colbert tells her husband that, were she a single adventuress and courted by millionaires, the smallest boat she would deign to set foot upon would be “three hundred feet with a crew of eighty.”
In Skylark (1941), however, Colbert settles for a little two-person sailing yacht. How far she has fallen from Rudy Vallee’s deluxe yacht in Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story, or the gargantuan boat owned by her character’s father in Capra’s It Happened One Night, becomes all too clear when, in one of Skylark’s final scenes, she attempts to make coffee on the yacht during a storm and winds up sprawled on the lower deck with the coffee grounds. The yachts get smaller in 1941.
Skylark (1941)
In Skylark, directed by Mark Sandrich, Colbert runs away from her husband (Ray Milland), who only cares about his advertising contracts. She wants to get to Reno for a divorce, one of her many cinematic dashes for freedom. This time, her husband temporarily catches up with her on a crowded subway. This being New York, everyone in the car weighs in with their opinion. One of the straphangers, a radical with a Russian accent, sounds the new unease about the place of romantic comedy in a world at war.
“I think both of you should be ashamed of yourselves,” says the Russian, “talking of divorce at a time like this! […] With all the agony in Spain, Poland is laid out in a corner, France is a shamble, China is rumbling like an earthquake, and you, you are worrying about something exclusively personal!” He ends his dressing down by declaring: “I am not interested. It hasn’t got no social significance!” Then, in a great sight gag, he returns to reading his magazine: Fortune.
“I think both of you should be ashamed of yourselves, talking of divorce at a time like this!”
Colbert gets her Reno divorce, yet she will never really leave Milland, because her character is something of a weakling. On the boat of her new fiance Blake (Brian Aherne) she gets seasick, spills the coffee, and finally breaks down in tears, sobbing pitifully for her ex-husband. Milland, meanwhile, shows his better nature not by becoming a better husband—he is mostly an annoying, grabby pest—but by taking on a government job that will send him to South America to work on “problems of hemisphere defense.” “I can use everything I know about advertizing and public relations!” he tells a friend.
When Colbert has her breakdown, Blake gallantly turns the boat around and takes her home. Before seeing her to her door, he gently questions her decision to give up their happiness together: “You’re trading it in for an apron and a vacuum cleaner,” he says. But, unlike her husband, Blake graciously withdraws when Colbert is clear about what she wants, which is to support Milland in his old-new job.
The most interesting scene in the film is one in which Colbert, rather than tell her ex-husband that she is going to marry Blake, tries to scare him off by telling him that she will sleep with him as a kind of short-term alimony payment, knowing that this will disgust and horrify him. It does, but he cottons on to her act and pretends to accept her advances—now to her disgust and horror.
This viscerally felt taboo against extramarital sex between divorced spouses is notable—I don’t think I’ve seen it in previous films, and it is the condition for an even more extraordinary scene in another film of the same year, Lady Be Good. I am curious how formerly married couples’s post-divorce sex is presented in films to come.
Penny Serenade (1941)
If Skylark gives us a reduced version of Colbert from It Happened One Night, Penny Serenade gives us a beaten version of Irene Dunne and Cary Grant from The Awful Truth. Dunne may have been a creature of elfin fire in The Awful Truth, but in Penny Serenade we are immediately arrested by the weariness and sorrow in her eyes. This is a movie about marriage as a little storm-tossed boat, vulnerable to storms of pain and loss, and that must hold together for the individuals involved to have any hope of survival.
The film opens with Dunne and Grant about to finalize their divorce. Their marriage has foundered on the rocks of bereavement: their adopted daughter has died of illness, Grant has withdrawn into depression and self-recrimination, and Dunne lacks the energy to keep them both afloat. Playing a series of phonograph records, she reminisces about the chapters of their marriage, one for each song. Film historian Jeanine Basinger, in her superb book I Do And I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies, explains that this episodic retrospection at the point of marital sundering is a classic structure by which American movies have sought to portray something that perhaps can not really be captured in film: the sweet, difficult, endlessly ordinary experience of a long-term marriage.
The marriage in this case is represented by the extremes of birth and parenting: miscarriage, infertility, adoption, and bereavement. Raising a child is certainly the deepest core of marriage, yet the adopted daughter here feels like something of a mechanism with which to organize the film. A very cute prop, to be sure. The scene in which the old hand Applejack (Edgar Buchanan) shows the terrified new parents how to give their infant a bath is adorable. And there is a real streak of realism in the panic of the new parents, and the changed sleeping arrangements when they bring home their baby.
Yet when, at the end of the movie, the adoption agency lady calls them up to offer them a two-year old with “blue eyes, curly hair, dimpled chin,” clearly as a means of saving their marriage, it comes off a bit creepy.
In The Awful Truth Dunne and Grant have a clear child-substitute in their wonderful dog Mr. Smith (the fox terrier Skippy, who also plays Asta in The Thin Man movies), ensuring that the film’s exploration of coupledom need not take children into account. Yet Penny Serenade does not always feel more like the portrayal of a real marriage, even if it has children in it.
Love Crazy (1941)
Colbert reduced to serving coffee and tears. Dunne and Grant wandering in stunned grief. This fall of the 1930s screwball deities continues with Love Crazy, a pairing of William Powell and Myrna Loy. In the Thin Man movies, Powell and Loy create their own impenetrable, indomitable sphere, even when they are temporarily at odds or taken up with other people and distractions. They are the gods of the film, with perfect trust and shared joie de vivre.
Not in Love Crazy, where Powell and Loy are all too ordinary, easily brought down to earth and into the divorce lawyer’s office by such unworthy antagonists as a busybody mother-in-law and a randy neighbor. Nick and Nora would have stopped these pests at fifty paces—or toyed with them in order to amuse each other. Alas, not here.
In the second half of the movie, Powell, trying to forestall Loy’s divorce action against him, pleads insanity. Rather than a convenient six month delay of the case, he is committed to a mental institution. The “lunacy boards,” measurements of the medulla oblongata, and psychiatric experts with Russian and German accents could all be part of a Hitchcock horror movie, and the version here, while played for laughs, does not entirely escape a nagging sense of dread.
Coming next: Rosalind Russell in 1941.
Cf. Harvey 2001, 43, 45, 72.