1941: The Yachts Get Smaller (pt. 3)
The best of the bunch: Lady Be Good (1941), Come Live With Me (1941), Bedtime Story (1941)
Lady Be Good (1941)
Lady Be Good opens in a divorce court. Ann Sothern is one half of a husband-and-wife songwriting team, successful in the music business, less so in marriage. Through flashbacks, we learn how lyricist Dixie (Sothern) and composer Eddie (Robert Young) climbed to the top of the charts, got married, and now seek divorce on grounds of incompatibility. Taking the witness stand, Sothern’s best friend (Eleanor Powell) tells the judge that Young “went Park Avenue”—i.e., got too caught up in living the high life with his new socialite friends to pay attention to his wife. Divorce is granted.
Like other movies of 1941, Lady Be Good may be set in the United States and have little or nothing to do with geopolitics—this is a musical comedy—but it is haunted by events in Europe. One of the rationales for the movie’s production was to feature the song “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” written by Kern and Hammerstein in 1940, and that became immensely popular in the United States after the German invasion of France. With its Marseillaise piano opening and wistful lyrics, the song expresses concern for a war in which the United States was still a non-belligerent. The song is introduced in the movie as a “tender and affectionate salute to a lost city,” and the American people are credited as the songwriters’ “hundred million collaborators.” Sothern sings:
The last time I saw Paris,
her heart was warm and gay.
No matter how they change her,
I’ll remember her that way.
As she sings, her face is superimposed over scenes of pre-war Paris.
Lady Be Good was also contrived as a star musical vehicle for Sothern, already five installments into her popular B-movie “Maisie” series. Sothern possesses an often endearing, approachably American diner-waitress appeal, without the obvious rough edges or class resentments of a 1930s or 40s moll. The movie marriage in this case is of the more domestic, 1941 variety, with a childish man entitled to a woman’s help. Walking out of the divorce court, she is worried about picking up her ex-husband’s dry-cleaning, and in fact he can’t function without a wife to pick up after him. His apartment falls into laundry-draped disorder, and he admits that “it takes a woman to run things.”
But the real glue in this marriage is the songwriting. Southern pauses from straightening her ex-husband’s apartment when he finds a once-abandoned song. They work on it all night until it turns into another gem and, forgetting they are divorced, they go into the bedroom and get undressed for bed. This is an extraordinary scene, briefly introducing a dimension of moral and erotic seriousness elsewhere absent in the film and its relationship. Southern sleepily asks Young to unzip her dress, stands for a moment in her slip, and suddenly recalls that they are no longer married. The state of undress permitted within matrimony is now as shameful as it is in post-apple Eden. Southern grabs her clothes and scrambles out the door. “I don’t live here anymore!” she cries.
There is one other ripple in the film’s very placid surface that occurs when Young, thinking that his ex-wife is being courted by a handsome singer, phones up and threatens to come over with a gun. Southern and her friend Powell notice a newspaper with a headline that sends them into a panic.
The movie may be musical comedy, but its newspaper headlines are noir.
Nevertheless, the ex-spouses continue their songwriting collaboration. The title song, a 1924 composition by George and Ira Gershwin, is particularly infectious. “Oh, Lady Be Good” is accompanied by an extended montage showing how the new hit is taking the country by storm. We see and hear variations on the song, performed by upscale nightclub orchestras, California beachgoers, Chinese jazz players, black shimmy-ers in Alabama, Italian window washers. Hit charts and sales notices are interspersed with sheet music and rising columns of vinyl records. It is a celebration of a mid-century American popular culture that is both diverse and united—and lucrative.
Husband and wife get remarried, and—within hours of the remarriage—have a spat and go back to the divorce court. Southern charges Young with “intolerable cruelty,” but admits to the judge that she still loves her husband. This time, the judge does not grant the divorce. “Young lady,” he tells her, “when I was a boy there was a strange custom in this country that when a fella and girl fell in love with each other they got married and stayed that way.” Young arrives late and, not realizing what has happened, pleads to the judge that he loves his wife. The judge cleverly chastises him for his “negligence and indifference as a husband” and sends him off, thinking he is divorced. He finds Southern and begs her forgiveness. She embraces him and, confused, he says “But we’re not married!” She responds: “Eddie, will you do me a favor? Will you keep right on thinking we’re not?”
If I consider this trifle the best divorce-themed film of 1941 it is because of the abovementioned ripples that disturb its surface, and because of the musical numbers. Eleanor Powell delivers two famous tap scenes, one performed with a dog who walks between her tapping feet, the other directed by Busby Berkeley. The Berry Brothers execute two extraordinary dance numbers with their unnervingly acrobatic daring.
And the movie has Virginia O’Brien. O’Brien’s weird performances—she often sang her numbers with glassy-eyed affectlessness, interrupted by abrupt syncopations, clicks, eye-brow raises, and impromptu comments—are usually filed away as a comic gimmick. Especially given her extraordinarily fine voice and accuracy, I credit them as canny deconstructions of popular song performance, anticipating punk icons such as Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen.
Come Live With Me (1941)
The war in Europe is even closer to the surface here, as Hedy Lamarr plays an Austrian refugee in New York who will be deported by American immigration police in a week. The ravishing Lamarr was Jewish in real life, but that isn’t referenced here. We only hear that her father was “liquidated” because “he stood up for what he believed in.”
She not only dreads being sent back to Europe, she has also fallen in love with America. “You don’t ask somebody in heaven if they like the place,” she responds to the immigration officer when he asks if she likes it here. He suggests a loophole: she can remain in the United States if she gets married.
In this improbable plot, Lamarr is already the lover of a wealthy New York book publisher—who is in a rather sympathetically portrayed open marriage. This is quite something for 1941, and the movie opens with the publisher and his wife getting dressed to go out for the evening—on separate dates. The publisher plans to divorce his wife and marry Lamarr but, pressed for time, Lamarr contracts a marriage of convenience with a struggling novelist (James Stewart).
Naturally, Lamarr and Stewart fall in love. Stewart refuses to give her the divorce she requests until she visits the farm he grew up on, where his grandmother (Adeline Reynolds, in her movie debut at age 78) is the representative of wholesome, rural American values, in contrast to the confused and louche city. Grandma gives Hedy her seal of approval, the publisher recommits to his wife, and the wife champions the publication of Stewart’s novel. God bless America.
Bedtime Story (1941)
Alexander Hall directed This Thing Called Love, one of 1941’s lame divorce-themed movies. Here he directs Frederic March and Loretta Young as a husband playwright-director and a leading actress wife. The supporting cast includes Eve Arden, Joyce Compton, and occasional actor Robert Benchley. This farce may be formulaic, but the script is smart and, with the cast’s competence and energy, it works.
March promised Young that they would retire from the theater and go live on a farm in Connecticut—neighbors, presumably, of James Stewart and Hedy Lamarr in Come Live With Me. But he has written his latest, greatest play and breaks his promise, selling the farm without telling her, and insisting she star in the new play. She goes to Reno and gets a divorce, remarries, and all the while March concocts increasingly comic schemes to disrupt her new marriage and get her back on the boards.
The movie includes a momentous line of dialogue; at least one that I have not seen in an earlier film: “I’m sorry, I haven’t any cash. Here’s my credit card.”