Three Hearts For Julia (1943)
The impact of World War Two on the home front: its upending of marital life and domestic plans, the entry of women into the workforce, the arrival of refugees from Europe. All of this can be found in this Ann Sothern vehicle, in which she splits with her husband, played by Melvyn Douglas. He’s a newspaperman who has been overseas for two years in order to cover the international crises of the time, and Sothern is fed up with his absence and his delays. “But there are stories in America worth telling, aren’t there?” she complains. When he returns home she has made up her mind, and serves him with divorce papers.
Sothern is the concert master and violinist in an all-female orchestra, a sign of the times since so many men are in uniform. Their new conductor, however, is a man, and a newly arrived refugee from Europe. One of the world’s greatest conductors, he is surprised at having to conduct women. In one scene he is increasingly frustrated when a French horn player uses a four-bar rest to powder her nose, another woman’s snood gets caught on a violin bow, and the percussionist is absent: “She had to take her baby to the doctor.” He weighs his options to himself: “Over there you have Gestapo, concentration camp. Here you have a women orchestra.” He realizes how fortunate he is. Moreover, the women produce a robust and virile sound.
Most of the movie is a strained and sloppy attempt at drawing-room farce, as Sothern has two suitors and Douglas is trying to sabotage both, while his home is taken over by the orchestra players—shapely lady musicians in all the guest rooms. At one point Douglas kidnaps Sothern and takes her to an isolated cabin on an island—believing that, in forced solitude and away from her music career, she will recover her passion for their marriage. And it is true that when he forces a kiss on her, she gets woozy. But it doesn’t last. Eventually, Douglas simply accepts her wish to be divorced and hopes that she will find happiness.
But one night the conductor enters a bar in which Douglas is drowning his sorrows and playing an instrument the European musician has never before seen: the musical saw. The conductor is fascinated with the plaintive American instrument, and the two men bond in their cups. The conductor realizes that Sothern belongs with her ex-husband, and he, er, orchestrates their reunion. Not that Sothern and Douglas get to embrace at the end: he is in uniform and about to head off on a military mission. They gaze at each other from a distance, and must defer any remarriage to when he returns, if he does. It’s not a good movie, but there is much of the times in it.
A word about Melvyn Douglas—is there a contemporary parallel to this kind of leading man? Jewish on his father’s side, Tennessee Mayflower on his mother’s, in some ways he, more than Jimmy Stewart, is the American everyman. Douglas doesn’t project farm, but city—but the middle-class city, not high society decadence or gutter menace. He has a receding hairline and moustache, round and pleasant features, not chiseled ones. His manliness is unquestionable, but a domestic sort, never overpowering. Though in his movies he often enough asserts control over the leading lady, and tends to come alive when he is thwarted, you get the sense that he would prefer to just get along. In Three Hearts for Julia, when he cooks dinner for Ann Sothern it seems like the sort of thing he is comfortable doing. An accomplished stage actor who won Academy Awards late in his career, he is the male lead who makes room for the goddesses he stars with: Garbo in Ninotchka, Dunne in Theodora Goes Wild. He seems nice, and no less manly for the niceness.
Maisie Goes To Reno (1944)
A more enjoyable Sothern movie is this entry in her popular Maisie series. Pure B-movie, it would be entirely forgettable but for the sparkling, spunky lead. Sothern is a factory girl—Maisie the riveter—and daycare volunteer. Wartime overwork has given her a facial tic, a wink that sets up a few moments of mildly comic confusion in the movie. Her doctor orders her to take a two week paid vacation, and the band she used to sing with has a gig in Reno, so off she goes on a working vacation to the biggest little city in the world.
She has a romance with a casino worker (John Hodiak), helps a swell young soldier and his wife (Tom Drake and Ava Gardner) stave off a Reno divorce, and helps the wife thwart a group of crooks after her money. None of it—even Ava Gardner—is particularly interesting, but watching Sothern, the regular American cutie—sexy and tough, but never too sexy or too tough—makes it an easy ninety minutes. She is not an actress, she is an entertainer, and a damn good one. Her “Panhandle Pete” number is nifty.
Marriage Is a Private Affair (1944)
This was the first Hollywood movie to have its premiere overseas for the troops, which may partly explain the focus on Lana Turner’s tush. After her character gives birth, she is required by the nurse to lie with her butt in the air in order to help restore her figure.
It’s more interesting than her acting, but that goes for most of the indifferent performances here. Nevertheless, this is a significant film, as film scholar Jeanine Basinger explains:
Marriage Is a Private Affair was designed for two things: to show Lana Turner in a spectacular wardrobe, and to recognize that young couples were marrying on short acquaintance. However glamorized by Turner’s presence, it tells the story of wartime pressure. A baby is born, troubles arise, and everything goes wrong. . . .What the film accomplished for audiences was reassurance.
This reassurance is a long time coming. Turner’s character marries John Hodiak just before he is supposed to ship out in war, but (as her periodic voiceovers tells us) she isn’t sure she can make a marriage last. Part of this is because she is the child of a much-divorced mother. Part of this is because she looks like Lana Turner, and has been a party girl and always had her pick of men. She is still tempted by her ex-boyfriends, one in particular, and her nervousness increases when she discovers that trusted friends are having an extramarital affair. Most importantly, she is simply not sure that her husband is “the one,” and does not see any way for her to figure this out for certain.
None of these quite honest relationship struggles have anything directly to do with the war, and I am not sure that the novel the film was based on even references the war—except that in this case the possibility that her soldier husband might not return is actually (perversely?) reassuring to Turner. It is when he is unexpectedly ordered to remain on the home front to run a factory, that she starts to worry that she is not cut out for domesticity. And in fact she and her husband separate, and soon she is about to ship off herself—to Reno.
Then there is a weird scene toward the end in which she is visited by the ghost of boyfriends past. But the point that comes out of it is her rather existential sense that marital choice is random. She might have married a different man. Her husband might have shipped out earlier and been killed. How can she know if her marriage is meant to be, when nothing really is?
Her father tries to reassure that one day she will meet someone who gives her that feeling of certainty. And if that never happens, he says, the fault is not hers, but his and her mother’s for divorcing: “We tore the certainty out of you.”
But it is Turner, finally, who arrives at a new kind of certainty by accepting the randomness. In marriage, she realizes, “the sureness doesn’t come all at once. It grows, and keeps on growing.” She has been looking for a surefire model, and been let down by her parents and her friends. Now, she arrives at the conviction that each marriage must work on its own terms, because of the couple’s own decision to commit. “Just because everyone gets married doesn’t mean that it’s an institution,” she says. “It’s you. It’s your own private affair.” Who needs Camus and Sartre when you have Lana Turner?
She never goes to Reno, and her husband, now in uniform, gets a telephone message, relayed through a forbearing officer, that she loves him and will stay married. A happy ending, if he comes back alive.
The movie is based on a novel that I have not read, by a writer named Judith Kelly who won a publication contest with the book, her second. Kelly died before the age of 50, after a third novel that was a Cold War spy thriller. In a New York Times article on the contest, Kelly explains that she turned to writing because she didn’t enjoy housekeeping, and thought she might make enough money through writing to pay for a maid.