1941: The Yachts Get Smaller (pt. 2)
This Thing Called Love (1941), Design For Scandal (1941), Affectionately Yours (1941)
This Thing Called Love (1941)
Rosalind Russell starred in two divorce-themed movies in 1941. The first is the comedy This Thing Called Love, in which she plays an insurance company executive who is concerned about the divorce rate and its costs to the company. Not only that, she is also a child of divorce and her sister is about to be divorced, so her desire to avoid the trap of belatedly discovered incompatibility is personal as well as professional
She comes up with a supposedly rational and scientific plan: married couples should go through a trial period—but not in unmarried cohabitation. (That would be impossible to suggest in 1941, and was perhaps the reason that the movie was prohibited by the Legion of Decency before some lines were excised.) Instead, Russell proposes that the first three months of marriage should be unconsummated, so that the couple can get to know each other without sex muddying the waters.
And she has a way to try out her idea. She is engaged to Melvyn Douglas. They are giddily in love but have only known each other for a few days, as he had to take off for South America on business. (This is one of 1941’s South American focused films, like Skylark and The Lady Eve, I guess an echo of the Good Neighbor Policy and possibly a way of avoiding Europe as the overseas destination.) Russell and Douglas are to be married the day of his return from South America but, as she explains to an outraged Douglas, there will be separate bedrooms and no sex for three months as they get to be friends.
Russell is even more confirmed in her plan’s merits when she and Douglas stop off, on the day of their wedding, at the divorce court to support her sister. They don’t know which room her sister’s hearing is in, and so listen at several doors, hearing bitter spouses giving testimony.
Naturally, Douglas is not happy when Russell tells him about her plan. He calls his friend and lawyer, who is going through his own bitter marital separation, but who tells Douglas not to worry: “This is one of those silly ideas the female hatches out now and then. One week they go in for art, the next week it’s fortune telling, then they switch to crocheting their own snoods, and when they get tired of that they take up the four day banana diet.” Marry her, says the lawyer, and then turn on the charm. She won’t last a day, let alone three months.
The film doesn’t seem to get enough mileage out of the question “Can they avoid sex for three months?” At least, it feels compelled to trowel on a number of complications, including a dinner party at which the lawyer and his wife show up unbeknownst to each other, along with a wealthy South American businessman who must be made to believe that Russell is pregnant because he will only give business loans to family men. Later there are attempts to make the other spouse jealous, seeming infidelities that aren’t, Douglas declared insane and put in a straightjacket (like William Powell in that year’s Love Crazy), and finally Russell about to board a flight to Reno to get a divorce.
But, typically for 1941 and its turn away from divorce, Russell never gets on the plane. She returns home and she and Douglas disappear into one of their two bedrooms, leaving a South American fertility idol leering on the table behind them.
If this all sounds a bit dumb, it is. Yet the movie was banned in Ireland and Australia, condemned by the Legion of Decency, and provoked numerous complaints, both for its depiction of Douglas trying to bed Russell, and for the pregnancy joke sequence.
Gen X double vision: at those moments in the film when Russell is required to act bewildered, she reminds me of Winona Ryder.
Design for Scandal (1941)
Here, Russell is a female judge presiding over a divorce court. She forces an expensive (and entirely justified) settlement on newspaper tycoon Edward Arnold who is disposing of his latest showgirl-wife. Arnold turns to his star reporter Walter Pidgeon for help and, in exchange for promises of a huge raise and transfer to the D.C. office, Pidgeon hatches a scheme to fake his own engagement, seduce Russell, and have his “fiancée” discover the romance—thereby creating a scandal that will remove Russell from the bench and allow Arnold to have his case retried. As you might expect, the plan goes awry when Pidgeon and Russell genuinely fall in love with each other.
As with other films of 1941 this film has the familiar ingredients—and cast—of screwball, but of a tired and diminished sort. Pidgeon plays a smarmy pest with little to recommend him apart from his jawline. The year previous, Russell was herself the most intrepid and capable of newspapermen—or women—in His Girl Friday, but here she goes from judicial ice queen to weak-kneed schoolgirl as soon as Pidgeon’s newspaperman gets her to a beach in the moonlight.
When Pidgeon is arrested for his involvement in the scheme, he proposes to Russell during the trial. She is able to resist for the moment, but outside the courthouse he takes the mildest of tumbles on the sidewalk and she rushes to his side—followed by a scene of them singing together on a bicycle built for two.
In the romantic comedies of the 1930s, the women stand by coolly as their men fall down. Not in 1941. Everything is more fragile now.
Affectionately Yours (1941)
Another flat attempt at screwball, haunted by a war just beyond the frame, Affectionately Yours gives us a rake of an international reporter (Dennis Morgan), who likes his overseas flings until he learns that his wife (Merle Oberon) has finally divorced him and is soon to marry everyone’s favorite patsy, Ralph Bellamy. Now Morgan is determined to stop the marriage and win his ex-wife back, evidently by cheating on her, faking injuries, getting slobbering drunk, and being mean to Bellamy. As with so many of the other men in the romantic comedies of 1941, Morgan is a pretty face with no character or wit, and it is mystifying why Oberon is still attached to him—though she does not have much of a character here either. Hattie McDaniel (cook) and Butterfly McQueen (maid) are both cast in black stereotype roles.
While the film stays out of the theater of war, it opens in neutral Portugal. Morgan has also been stationed in Moscow and he tells us at one point: “I was in France that sad day they forgot to blow up the bridges.” It is as if the movie’s mind is on Europe and, like its reporter protagonist, isn’t entirely sure why it has returned to the United States to muck about in a stale comedy.
The two good things in this “pitiful imitation of frivolity” (Bosley Crowther’s verdict from the time) are, first, a misused Rita Hayworth, popping in as if from another, better movie. In another sign of the times, she is a newspaperwoman who will never be considered for Morgan’s plum job except as an empty threat his boss uses to keep him in line.
Second, there is “Pasha,” Morgan’s sidekick, a Turkish photographer played with excellent comic timing by stage and character actor George Tobias. It is also through Tobias that the “war in Europe” noses in. When Morgan’s boss (who wants to keep him single) sends some toughs to prevent him from interrupting his ex-wife’s wedding, Pasha is worried that they are Gestapo agents. “What you do in Europe? You do something bad?” he frantically asks Morgan. “Don’t be stupid,” says Morgan, as if commiserating with the audience. “Europe has nothing to do with this.”
Coming next: a better batch, including the best of 1941’s divorce-themed movies.