Divorce American Style is something of a cinematic landmark. It exemplifies an ugliness that comes to pervade much American popular culture by the late 1960s. This is not an ugliness of appearance although, as seen in the movie, a good deal of the fashion and décor of the time were hideous. It is an ugliness of spirit. Films of the 1930s and 40s could be arch, subversive, ruthless, but in the 1960s we get a kind of satire that is constantly grinning yet joyless, an emotional landscape as brightly colored yet crushingly monotonous as the backgrounds of Road Runner and Wylie E. Coyote cartoons. Films of the 1950s and early 60s treat sex and compulsion, but Divorce American Style serves up appetite without humanity, a vision of human beings as infantile, stunted fools. Social and political issues are wielded like heavy clubs, without intelligence or investment. The overall effect is bleak and dispiriting, especially when the intention is to be comic and hip.[1]
The movie features Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds as a married couple with two boys. We gather that they grew up in working class families (“My dad was a plasterer,” Van Dyke says, “Her father was a postman.”) and for many years worked hard and struggled. Now that they are materially successful, living in an expensive house with state-of-the-art appliances and a maid, their marriage is hollowing out from the inside. They lack ordinary affection, sexual chemistry, shared meaning, goals to strive toward. Their friends are uniformly horrible, a tangle of cigarette smoke, women with ugly bobs and beehives, characterless men in suits and horn-rimmed glasses.
Reynolds, unhappy, has been seeing a marriage counselor, alone. Dr. Zenwinn, in tune with the culture at large, believes all problems are about sex and not having enough of it. Husband and wife quarrel, Van Dyke blames Reynolds for being ungrateful for the material comforts he provides, she complains that he offers such things in place of intimacy and passion. When their friends catch wind of their marital troubles, the implacable locomotive of divorce chugs fast along the rails, stoked by financial paranoia, lawyers, and suburban know-it-alls. They are quickly separated, divorce pending.
Van Dyke is reduced to living in a dingy studio apartment and driving a beater, all his money going to Reynolds’s upkeep because of woman-friendly California divorce laws. Van Dyke is adopted by another divorced man (Jason Robards) who pimps out his ex-wife (Jean Simmons) to various men in hopes of her remarrying someone wealthy enough to ease his alimony payments. To ensure that Van Dyke and Reynolds are not tempted to reconcile, Robards and Simmons also fix up Reynolds with a smarmy car salesman.
That the film wants to be of social import is announced at the beginning, a scene in which a conductor, on a bluff overlooking a development of California suburban homes, waves his baton which sets in motion a chorus of petty, bitter marital squabbles in the houses below (including that of Van Dyke and Reynolds). The conductor’s briefcase and robe indicate he is a judge, but the meaning of the device isn’t clear. Does the law cause the marital problems? The effect of the scene is to suggest, first, the sinister inevitability of marital misery and, second, the filmmakers’ sense of their own superiority over the human beings in the film.
One of the film’s running “jokes” is that the children of divorce are entirely unaffected by it, and possess much more emotional stability than the adults. When the parents argue, we see the boys keeping a kind of bingo-game tally of their different complaints and accusations. When the parents separate, the boys are as chipper as ever. Reynolds says to them: “I thought kids were positively traumatized by this kind of thing.” “Mom,” her older son responds, “do you want us to be traumatized?” The younger says: “A lot of kids at school come from broken homes! [….] Anyway, it’s no big deal.” Later, in a line that is profound, the younger boy will observe that he gets to spend more time with his father since the separation. “You always had this list of things to do,” he says. “And now we’re on it.”
A further powerful episode gives us a couple of dozen children scattered across a suburban lawn, the various parents sorting out which child belongs to which parent, stepparent, ex-parent that particular day. It’s gut-wrenching, yet doesn’t dare to register the impact on the children themselves, all happily playing, even if one child with a security blanket is momentarily left behind in the confusion of departing station wagons.
There are moments of art here. A long scene of Reynolds and Van Dyke getting ready for bed ruthlessly breaks down the two actors’ glamor with a physical comedy of sliding closet doors and bathroom sinks reminiscent of Tati. Reynolds removes her hair extension, applies face cream, puts her hair in curlers, attacks her gums with a Waterpik. Dick Van Dyke goes shirtless and clips his toenails in his wife’s direction.
At times the stunning cinematography of Conrad Hall lifts the film out of its mire. The scene in which husband and wife empty their joint accounts gives us a bank with the lines and light of confident international modernist style that is so beautiful as to seem utopian. (As the cinematographer of American Beauty, Hall similarly assisted another movie three decades later with the same sour, lazy clichés about suburban materialism and America being a land of moral hypocrites.) The footage of long, tail-finned cars, the interior sets of gleaming kitchens and paneled living rooms, the locations of California malls and bowling alleys, are like thumbing through the ads of glossy magazines from the time.
But this material abundance is both craved and detested, and the film does not want to leave its mire. Rather it seeks to drag as much as it can into it. There is a palpable desire throughout the film to degrade middle-class America, at least the Southern Californian part. Impressively, in a way, Van Dyke somehow emerges untouched: whatever he does in the film, he is Dick Van Dyke, mugging so pleasantly that none of the mud of the film seems to stick to him. Even when he stumbles drunk into the home of a prostitute, or a quietly shattered Jean Simmons casually invites him to have sex, or a suicidal Jason Robards asks him to slit his throat, Van Dyke still seems like he’s in Mary Poppins.
Reynolds, by contrast, delivers a superb performance that depends precisely on her willingness to be vulnerable and humiliated, especially at the end when she is hypnotized by a nightclub entertainer to dance like a stripper for the crowd. It’s sleaze presented as romantic comedy, but Reynolds is committed to this further demolition of her erstwhile sweetheart image. Reynolds, of course, knew a few things about divorce. There was no bigger celebrity divorce scandal in its time than her husband Eddie Fisher leaving her for her close friend Elizabeth Taylor, and Reynolds would divorce twice more in her life (a paltry number compared with Taylor’s seven).
The director, Bud Yorkin, is mainly notable as a television producer, from 1950s variety shows and specials with Tony Martin, Fred Astaire, and Jack Benny, to the 1970s sitcoms Sanford and Son, All in the Family, and What’s Happening. He would direct a mediocre divorce film in 1985, Twice in a Lifetime, with Gene Hackman, that I will write on at some point since its flaws have some connection with Divorce American Style.
The screenplay for Divorce American Style, which was nominated for an Academy Award, was the work of Norman Lear, who also produced the film and is the figure most responsible for its vision and tone. The centenarian Lear has been a massively influential force in American popular culture over the last half-century and more. He created All in the Family and created or developed other major 1970s television shows such as Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Maude, Good Times, One Day at a Time, and The Jeffersons.
Lear also helped foster a left-wing Hollywood-and-New York media and entertainment culture that would decisively shape the policies and institutional power of the Democratic Party, helping position American entertainment as oppositional to the Christian Right and the Republican Party more generally. (At one point in Divorce American Style we hear a radio evangelist as drawling counterpoint to the California divorce comedy underway.) The phenomenon of the party of working class concerns becoming the party of wealthy Hollywood liberals’ self-interested constructions of working class concerns is very much reflected in Lear’s career.[2]
Lear grew up in Brooklyn and Connecticut in a rough-and-tumble family of Jewish nutjobs. His mother was (in his description) “a world-class narcissist” who “could suck the juice out of joy.” His uncle served time in Leavenworth for robbery. His father, whose oddly charismatic crassness made him a model for Lear’s Archie Bunker, was a scam artist sentenced to three years in jail for selling phony bonds.
In his memoirs Lear notes that the scene in Divorce American Style in which the boys keep a tally of the recriminations in their parents’ arguments was based on his own childhood experiences “sitting at the kitchen table in our Brooklyn apartment, scoring any number of my parents’ fiercest arguments.” Indeed, even with its decidedly non-Jewish leads, Divorce American Style is very much part of a 1967 wavelet of movies by Jewish directors, writers, and/or actors, all marked by ambivalence regarding postwar affluence and middle-class norms, especially marriage: The Producers, The Graduate, Luv, and Barefoot in the Park. More like these would follow.
Lear based the movie on his own experience of divorce from his first wife Charlotte. (He would divorce his second wife as well.) The presentation of alimony as a financial deathtrap from which the Robards character seeks to escape by marrying off his wife, reflects Lear’s own divorce arrangement, in which he agreed to pay his first wife a large amount of alimony until such time as she remarried for more than two years. At one point, when Lear learned that Charlotte was not working but staying at home and living on his alimony, and therefore less likely to meet a new husband at the workplace, he incentivized her working by matching every dollar she earned on top of the alimony she already received. After some time she did remarry, but did not reach the two-year mark. A subsequent marriage lasted, finally releasing Lear from further payments.
Given how structurally familiar Divorce American Style is—formally speaking, it is a comedy of remarriage, a la The Awful Truth—it is striking how different it is from the psychic universe of those great 1930s screwball comedies. If The Awful Truth offers a serious proposition about how a couple can be happy, the moral proposition of Divorce American Style is that such happiness is impossible, that one ought to hope for, at best, a partner with whom one can endlessly bicker. (Lear’s combative second marriage seems to be the model here, as well as his childhood ringside seat to his parents.)
The spirit throughout is one of easy contempt. At the end of the film, Van Dyke and Reynolds are back together, and immediately recommence their pointless, petty squabbling. We again see the conductor above it all, waving his baton. The transition from married to separated to married has, we learn, financial import, but no human meaning.
If less than edifying for viewers, the film must have been something of a therapeutic process for Lear. He writes in his memoir that the first draft of the screenplay was over two hundred pages. He sent a shorter rewrite to Anne Bancroft—she and her husband Mel Brooks were friends of Lear—hoping she might play the role that eventually went to Debbie Reynolds. Bancroft told him: “Norman, I’m reading your script and it’s good, but I have to ask you not to make me finish it. It’s just too painful.”
[1] Reviewing the film in the New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote that Divorce American Style is “not as funny or as trenchant as it tries very hard to be. Indeed, it is rather depressing, saddening, and annoying, largely because it does labor to turn a solemn subject into a great big American-boob joke.”
[2] It has become fashionable to hold up 1970s television shows as cultural treasures. This tends to include a good amount of overpraise and boomer self-congratulation, with less critical attention. To be sure, All in the Family was superbly written and has memorably stellar comic performances, especially by Caroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton. It also participated in, rather than only bravely and sagely commenting upon, trends in American culture that were not all benign, the results of which consume us today. The recent recreations of episodes of Norman Lear products All In The Family, The Jeffersons, and The Facts of Life, with A-list Hollywood actors playing the parts, under the auspices of the Jimmy Kimmel show, demonstrate the ongoing intertwining of politics and popular culture, and a characteristically strategic slipperiness regarding what is satire and what is earnest.