Finishing the Forties
Wartime marriage and its fortunes after homecoming, with Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Gene Kelly, and Ronald Reagan.
The 1940s end with divorce and the unprecedentedly high American divorce rate as prominent cinematic plot elements, yet without much certainty about how to treat them effectively. Wartime marriage and its fortunes on homecoming continue to be a theme, but without the accomplishment or freshness of earlier films. There are some outright misfires and flops in the divorce movies of the late 1940s, if occasional inventiveness about how to reheat the already established themes.
In Suddenly It’s Spring (1947), Paulette Goddard returns from service in the WAC, where she has been dubbed “Captain Lonelyhearts” for her success at marriage counseling. Her brand is threatened as her husband, played by Fred MacMurray, is seeking a divorce and already has an enjoyably bitchy new fiancée. Goddard must undermine MacMurray’s new relationship, while attending to the marital problems of returning servicemen and their wives. This is not especially difficult, since MacMurray soon enough realizes he wants to remain with his wife. A strained comedy.
A much bigger failure is Gregory La Cava’s Living in a Big Way (1947). Gene Kelly is the returning GI, who finds that his hastily married wife is now extremely wealthy and wants nothing to do with him. The movie’s attempt to treat serious issues of wartime marriage and the financial struggles of returning servicemen and their families is undercut by a reheated 1930s screwball comedy approach that lacks the previous decade’s sharp wit. Kelly’s dance numbers come across as odd since he is the only member of the cast who dances in the movie, except when he is matched with a dog or some children as partners. Otherwise, Kelly is called upon to do screwball comedy and serious acting, and he is unable to do either—just the placid, smooth Kelly face or its exaggerated dance expressions. This comes across as so artificial that even his co-star Marie McDonald, who was mainly known for a supporting role in the history of Debbie Reynolds’s many marriages, seems humane by comparison. Then add quite good, almost method-style performances by supporting players Phyllis Thaxter and William Philips, and the decision to film in black and white, and you end up with a weird mess of mismatched ingredients.
Ronald Reagan is the GI returning to his fiancée Patricia Neal in the comedy John Loves Mary (1949). An army buddy saved Reagan’s life, and so when Reagan meets his buddy’s British girlfriend, thought dead in the Blitz but very much alive, he marries her—assuming there will be a quick Reno divorce—so that she can come to America and be united with her beau. But when Reagan gets back to the US, he learns that his buddy got married in the interim and is even expecting a child. The comedy is hokey all around, and the best things about the movie are Virginia Field as the Cockney war bride, and the end credits that have the grinning actors come through a set door with their names superimposed.
Vastly more watchable than any of these is The Unfaithful (1947), a noir-ish melodrama that grapples more seriously with the effects of wartime marriage and separation, and particularly the consequences for wives on the home front. Ann Sheridan got married to her husband just before he shipped out for two years of wartime military service. After he returns, Sheridan is stalked and assaulted by a man she met while her husband was away. Defending herself, she kills her assailant, and is arrested for murder.
As the courtroom case and the responses of her husband and the women in her social circle make clear, Sheridan is really on trial for her brief slip into the mildest of infidelities while her husband was away, and which we understand was an almost inevitable outcome of a two-week marital courtship followed by a two-year absence when she had no friends or family nearby to alleviate her solitude. “You were six thousand miles away and I was alone,” she tries to tell her indignant husband. “You won’t understand. No man could. But ask any woman who sat and waited. Who tried desperately to hang onto something real when there seemed to be nothing real.”
Sheridan is acquitted of murder, but her reputation is shredded in court by the prosecuting attorney, who will make no excuses for an affluent woman whose husband was risking his life in war: “So while you were being supported in comparative luxury, and he was fighting to protect you and his country, you were deceiving him,” the lawyer charges. A more sympathetic take is offered later by one of the women who had been quick to gossip about Sheridan, but now comes to her defense when Sheridan’s husband still plans to divorce her. “You wanted a beautiful woman waiting for you,” the woman tells Sheridan’s husband, “and you didn’t want anyone making time with her while you were away, so you hung up a no trespassing sign like you’d stake a gold claim.”
There is a lot going on in this melodrama, including some consideration of rape and the recognition that it is not the victim’s fault, or a crime only committed by strangers. There is also a clear awareness of the new American anxiety about the fragility of marriage. The opening voiceover tells us that what follows is “an American story,” not particular to one locale. The friend who ultimately defends Sheridan (Eve Arden) early on throws a party to celebrate her own divorce, and we hear the comments of the partygoers: “More divorces?” “What’s American marriage coming to?” “You should know.” Lew Ayres plays the divorce lawyer—and Sheridan’s defense attorney. When Sheridan has been made to suffer enough, and her husband decides not to divorce her, Ayres paternalistically blesses their decision: “Three thousand people a month in this city run out on their marriages because they haven’t the courage to make them work.”
Vincent Sherman directed, and the score is by Max Steiner. The screenplay is by James Gunn and David Goodis, the latter especially recognized as one of the great hardboiled crime fiction writers. Goodis can also be paired with P. J. Wolfson, the screenwriter of Suddenly It’s Spring, as notable Jewish writers of noir fiction. Meanwhile, the screenplay for John Loves Mary was by the husband-and-wife team of Henry and Phoebe Ephron. We will have occasion to treat their daughter Nora when we get to divorce movies of the 1980s.
A curiosity is Never Say Goodbye (1946), in which Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker play a divorced couple with a seven year old daughter. The movie is chock-full of winking in-jokes, especially concerning Flynn, the scandalous lothario and swashbuckler film hero, who here entertains his daughter by pretending to be Sir Lancelot and Robin Hood, roles Flynn famously played in other movies. His daughter (Patti Brady) notes that to imagine him in those roles requires a lot of imagination: “Oh, Daddy, don’t be silly. Nobody’d ever believe you’re a tough guy!” The movie references Flynn’s publicity troubles for not doing military service during the war—he is even roughed up by a returning marine—as well as his playboy lifestyle. “Oh, Daddy, you’re such a flirt!” his daughter observes. Flynn also knocks over a Christmas tree in what is a very edgy spoof of the 1945 war hero biopic Pride of the Marines, which starred Parker.
By the time Flynn does a Humphrey Bogart impression and Bogart’s actual voice is dubbed in, you start to realize that this could have been a great movie if it had only pushed its gonzo and self-referential aspects even further. Unfortunately, despite these sometimes daring winks it is still very yoked to convention, including the cute kid who just wants to see her parents reunited, and the divorced parents who have no discernable reason for being divorced except to give the movie a flimsy reason for existing. One of the screenwriters, I. A. L. Diamond, would go on to write the screenplays for a number of screwball comedies, including Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and One, Two, Three.
Eleanor Parker is heart-meltingly beautiful here, looking a little like Amber Heard if the latter’s trashiness were replaced with intelligence and the looks turned up twice as bright. Despite Parker’s later Oscar nods, though, she isn’t given much to do here.
“Divorce is bad enough but children certainly complicate things, don’t they?” says a shopgirl in Never Say Goodbye. While Flynn and Parker’s daughter does alright, things are harder for the kids in two other divorce movies of the time. One is Child of Divorce (1946), a remake of the 1934 movie Wednesday’s Child. As noted in another post, the earlier movie tacks a happy ending onto the play it is based on. That doesn’t happen here, and the child in the 1946 version is a girl (Sharyn Moffett), not a boy. Packed off to boarding school, she yearns for her parents, and if there is a glimmer of hope at the end it is that she vows that one day she will get married and raise her child in an intact family. Her roommate has a different focus on her own future:
“Are you going to college?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m not. Men don’t like girls that are too educated.”
The other movie is The Decision of Christopher Blake (1948), adapted from a play by Moss Hart, about a boy who must decide which parent he will live with following their divorce. The movie leans on its daydream sequences, in which the boy of the title fantasizes about scenarios in which he is heroic and powerful and can effect his parents’ reconciliation. But despite the surreal set designs, the movie is listless, and the ending insultingly contrived. This was the first feature film of director Richard Fleischer who would helm future films such as Doctor Dolittle, Soylent Green, and Conan the Destroyer.
The Perfect Marriage (1947) is another movie adapted from a play (by Samson Raphaelson). Loretta Young looks stylized as usual, a slender Brancusi. David Niven, a rather stylized sculpture himself, plays the husband. Contemporary reviews in both the New York Times and New Yorker found it underwhelming, cliché. It belongs in the “why are they getting divorced?” category of strained comedy. The answer is: routine, careers, meddling in-laws, busybody friends—but, really, so that there is a conflict to build the movie around. Their daughter is sad, but not devastated, and says that about half of her friends have divorced parents. She needn’t worry, as her parents reconcile, predictably. This is a negligible movie except for Niven’s beautiful plea to his wife: “I don’t know whether I’m in love with you or whether I just plain like you, but I do know I shall hate not rubbing your back.”
There really isn’t a movie to single out for great praise in this jumble, but it seems significant that the two most engaging are both either noir-ish at points (The Unfaithful) or straight up noir: Born to Kill (1947). Based on a novel by James Gunn (who co-wrote The Unfaithful), Born to Kill gives us Claire Trevor as a newly divorced socialite who, drawn by the erotic thrill of evil, has an affair with a sociopath played by Laurence Tierney, known for being something of a sociopath in real life.
It’s not a great movie, and not even a divorce movie, really—except that it begins in Reno, where the first two murders of the movie take place, and where the first fifteen minutes of the movie provide the bulk of its glowering pleasure. This is due above all to cinematographer Robert de Grasse. Even his establishing shot of the usual Reno “Biggest Little City” sign looks clean and glittering as a killer’s knife.
Now, on to the 1950s!