The movies of the 1950s turned against the 1930s focus on the wealthy and glamorous as the proper subject of cinematic portrayals of marriage and divorce. Marital troubles in the 1930s were usually problems of the leisured class, their temptations and stumbles and reconciliations a matter of choice. By contrast, the best divorce movies of the early 1950s are focused on working class people entering or aspiring to the middle class. This shift was anticipated by WWII wartime marriage and homecoming movies, and their focus on the ordinary GI and homefront wife. In the early 1950s, these people are anxious, no longer about war but about marriage itself. They do not take stable marriages for granted, nor do they see divorce as a casual option. While the postwar economic boom may have been chugging along, they are as concerned about their financial welfare as their psychic fulfillment. At times they seem lost, uncertain and adrift, like the noir characters of the time.
Clash By Night (1952)
Barbara Stanwyck played sublimely comic or dangerous avatars of womanhood in The Lady Eve (1941) and Double Indemnity (1944), but in Fritz Lang’s 1952 Clash By Night, an adaptation of a play by Clifford Odets, her character returns to the cannery town she grew up in, and which she had left ten years before to chase dreams of an adventurous and fulfilling life.
Those dreams have failed. Now, her character is trying to accept her disappointment and find solace in a stable marriage. She marries an intellectually limited but dependable sardine fisherman played by Paul Douglas. They have a baby.
Soon, though, she is drawn to a restless ne’er-do-well, played by Robert Ryan (who had a different role in the Odets play when it was directed on Broadway by Lee Strasberg a decade prior). Ryan’s character in the film still hungers for passion, yearns for the wife who has left him and whom he pines over. “Divorce is like the other person died,” he says early on, though he will urge Stanwyck to divorce her own husband and run away with him. Stanwyck struggles with the tension between Ryan’s promises of romance and authenticity, and her married life of ordinary commitment and resignation to a considerable sense of emptiness.
Marilyn Monroe plays the factory girl fiancée of Stanwyck’s younger brother. She gives expression to the audience’s uncertainty about marriage and commitment, admiring Stanwyck’s decision to leave husband and infant and sardine canning town in pursuit of her own fulfillment.
The movie registers the still-present but diminishing role of physical violence as a means for working-class husbands to remind straying wives of their duties, but Monroe’s identification with Stanwyck’s seeming independence breaks down when her husband-to-be (Keith Andes) delivers, not a beating but a speech:
Monroe: She has a right to do what she wants to if she’s in love!
Andes: “In love.” Listen to me, blondie. The woman I marry, she don’t take me on a wait-and-see basis. I ain’t a dress she brings home from the store to see if it fits and if it don’t, back it goes. In my book marriage is a two-way proposition, you’re just as much responsible as I am. So, that little eye is gonna roam. If what you think is, “Joe’s alright until something better comes along,” honey, you better take another streetcar. (Pause) Now what’s it gonna be?
Monroe listens to this ultimatum and its clear recognition of the seriousness of marital commitment and the hard work it requires. For a long moment she stands with fallen face, then steps forward and clings to her fiancé. This is the lesson that the audience is expected to need and learn: whatever the possibilities of erotic adventures and romantic upgrades—not least those suggested by Hollywood movies—the honoring of one’s commitments, resisting that roaming eye, is the key to survival, and to any lasting happiness that ordinary people might achieve.
The Odets play is an indictment of capitalist culture, particularly its entertainment industry that seduces working class people with paradisiacal images of romance that erode their sense of responsibility. “Paradise begins in responsibility,” says the fiancé character in the play, bringing up Nazi Germany as an example of the danger of utopian dreams.
It is not surprising that the movie excises the play’s criticism of Hollywood movies as an opiate of the masses, as well as dropping the play’s political resonance. The “responsibility” encouraged by the film is personal and family oriented. Pressuring Stanwyck to leave her husband and child, Robert Ryan articulates his selfishness explicitly. “Responsibility?” he tells her. “I’ll spell it for you: T-R-A-P.” And he again makes the point: “It isn’t a question of the kid’s happiness, it’s a question of yours.”
In the Odets play, the cuckolded husband murders his wife’s lover, who works as a projectionist; the dialogue from a treacly Hollywood romance is heard while he strangles his rival. The film changes this tragic ending. Stanwyck has a realization: “You’re someone’s wife when you belong to them. I never belonged to anybody.” Her insistence on independence and personal authenticity was, she says, the real trap: “a trick to avoid the responsibility of belonging to someone.” She goes back to her husband, who forgives her, and returns to care for her baby.
Will life with a well-meaning but dull husband in a town that smells of sardines and cheap beer satisfy her soul going forward? Yes, the movie suggests, at least moreso than running away.
The Marrying Kind (1952)
Clash By Night was not much regarded by the critics. The Marrying Kind on the other hand was hailed as a cinematic milestone, both for what some film reviewers took as its lower middle class realism, and for the talent on display in its two leads. The film was the first starring role for Aldo Ray, while his co-star Judy Holliday was coming off accolades for her first two major film roles in Adam’s Rib and Born Yesterday.
The Marrying Kind begins in a divorce court, where the judge asks the divorcing couple—Ray and Holliday as regular white Noo Yawkuhs trying to keep an uncertain perch in the postwar middle class—to explain how they met, and why, after ups and downs and two kids, they now seek to end their marriage. We get a composite history of their marriage: a first meeting in Central Park, dealings with each other’s families, financial disappointments, the tragic death of their son.
In recounting their history, they come to an appreciation of the hardships they have gone through. They recommit to each other despite what now seems the everpresent possibility of divorce in American society. “I’m too scared” to try again to make the marriage work, says Holliday at first. “I mean, when we got together finally the first time I never imagined it could be different and we could bust up or anything. Now, I’d always be thinking about it.” But Ray says: “Maybe it’s a good thing to know it’s possible.” Film scholar Jeanine Basinger writes:
The Marrying Kind is a particularly intelligent depiction of a married couple who are shattered by an unexpected blow, but who have enough commitment to keep going. What is not stated, but can be inferred, is that a couple like Ray and Holliday, with limited means and limited futures, really need to hold on to each other, because this is all they have and all they will have in life. Viewers are asked to get the little things into perspective, because this couple, who faced something terrible, have now survived.[1]
This is a George Cukor production: the director who gave us The Philadelphia Story leaving the Main Line for Fishtown. The screenplay was written by married couple Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. The latter wrote to Cukor that the screenplay’s “aim is realism, its tone documentary rather than arty, its medium is photography rather than caricature. I think it is the closest we have ever come to ‘holding the mirror up to nature.’”[2]
In truth, I found the film mildly patronizing—a tone embodied in the figure of the judge (former silent film actress Madge Kennedy) who gently guides the couple through their story as if they were children kept after school for fighting at recess. There are some superb scenes—especially the ones shot in the New York post office where Ray’s character works—but the characters themselves, Holliday’s with her high pitched Queens patter and Ray’s with his raspy growl, grow monotonous. At some point it hit me that, in two decades, this couple will be Archie and Edith Bunker.
Trouble Along the Way (1953)
If The Marrying Kind seems to me less engaging today than it did in its time, Trouble Along the Way, while a far less ambitious film, is more interesting. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the movie stars John Wayne as a divorced dad whose custody of his daughter is threatened by a zealous social worker (Donna Reed). Wayne is a brawler, gambler, and skirt-chaser, a once successful football coach who now spends too much time hustling in the local pool hall. Yet he loves and cares ably for his daughter—a great performance by ten year old Sherry Jackson. Wayne’s unfaithful and manipulative ex-wife (Marie Windsor) has no interest in their child, but is now seeking sole custody as a means of revenge on Wayne for leaving her. The sinuous ex-wife, who is usually drinking cocktails with a tuxedoed and pencil-mustached cad, represents precisely the upper-class 1930s cinematic milieu that these 1950s movies now reframe as decadent and immoral.
Wayne must get a respectable job, quickly, and so he agrees to coach the hapless football team of a local Catholic college. St. Anthony’s is closing for lack of funds, and so its head—Charles Coburn as a priest in his usual avuncular role—has fixed on quickly building a winning football team to raise money for the school. Wayne does so, albeit by bending the rules. Trouble Along The Way is, then, a sports movie in part and, sentimental as it is, it brings up ethical problems about college sports (exploitation of athletes, shady money deals, corruption of academics) that are very much with us today.
But the core of the movie is not about sports, but about parenting and gender roles and class. Wayne is a great dad: Sherry Jackson is well cared for, loved, and devoted to her father. But Donna Reed warns us that it is not healthy for a girl to be without a mother, and that when she soon hits adolescence she will need a model of femininity to emulate or she will become miserable and maladjusted. “Maybe it’s been easy so far,” Reed tells Wayne, “but what happens in a few years when she stops being a little girl and becomes a young woman?”
The best scene in the movie is when Wayne, forced by court order to deliver his daughter to his ex-wife for the day, gives Jackson a frilly dress and Sunday hat. Jackson puts on the hat and looks in the mirror. She bursts out laughing at the sight and then, realizing that these clothes are intended to separate her from her father and his male world, she bursts into tears.
Wayne mistakenly thinks that Reed is sabotaging his parental custody and his job—by revealing that he has recruited football players without academic credentials—because she hates men and is a class snob. He shows up after hours, drunk, at her social welfare office and berates her, then physically overpowering her and repeatedly forcing kisses on her, in order to elicit the genuine womanly response he knows is hidden under her cold exterior. The assault here is, of course, not censured, but we learn that Wayne is also wrong about what he assumes to be Reed’s class background. She is no finishing school product, but is a neighborhood girl who attended night school at city college.
Moreover, she reveals that, far from hating men, she was raised without a mother and is merely trying to protect Wayne’s daughter from experiencing her own unhappiness. “I had a wonderful father too, real pals we were, man to man about everything,” she says ruefully. “I hardly ever realized I was a girl. By the time I was ten I was a misfit. And when I was twelve I hated every boy who ever laughed at me.”
The court does take Wayne’s daughter away from him, but the ending indicates that she will be returned to a new family formed when Wayne and Reed marry. As she walks away with temporary state custody of his daughter, Wayne calls after Reed: “Hey! Ya got nice legs too—for a copper!” His daughter gives Wayne an “OK” sign.
[1] Jeanine Basinger, I Do And I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies (New York: Vintage, 2012), 62-63.
[2] Qtd. in Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor: A Double Life (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 207.