The Myth of the 1950s (I)
Teenage Rebel, Hilda Crane, and Phfft!--plus a couple of trips to Europe.
One of the most pervasive myths of American culture is that the 1950s was the time of a true or original America, before the upheavals of the 1960s swept it away. The right would try to get us back to it, as a time of traditional morality and social cohesion. The left is forever warning that it is returning, a time of conformity, repression, and intolerance that should be reviled and mocked. Both sides suppose that a reset to the 1950s would restore a kind of trad-America, the nation as it was before mass media, birth control, drugs, and whatever other roster of change agents are blamed for what is thought to be an impassable moral and societal chasm between us and those men in their gray flannel suits and those women with their Doris Day smiles.
This is not the place to rehearse how politics, Boomer self-regard, and the ideological agendas of our culture industries helped to create, and continue to cement, this retrojected fantasy. But before we look at films from the mid-1950s on, it is worth stating that these films indicate that, at the very least, a 1950s “reset” would hardly restore an age of shared norms and placid certainties.
The cultural markers and styles change considerably but, fundamentally, the 1950s are already after the flood. A pane of glass webbed with fissures and pressure lines is already broken, even if it hasn’t yet collapsed into shards.
Teenage Rebel (1956)
Adapted from a Broadway play by Edith Sommer, this modest, black and white melodrama may not seem to be very significant. Yet it is probably the film of its time that most boldly affirms the legitimacy of divorce in pursuit of middle-class happiness, without stigma, and even in the face of the impact divorce has on children.
Ginger Rogers, divorced and happily remarried, has not seen her daughter Dodie in eight years. Rogers’s ex-husband, still resentful of his wife’s having left him, has gotten around the already punitive court decree allowing Rogers custody of her daughter for three weeks each year by living overseas. As Rogers explains to the sympathetic maid: “My marriage to my first husband was a very unhappy one. Two people living in the same house, disliking each other intensely. And then I met [second husband] Mr. Fallon. We fell in love. We weren’t sneaky about it. I had no idea that Dodie’s father would use the little girl that I adored to punish me. And it did punish me.”
At last, the ex-husband returns to the US, and Rogers will get to host her daughter. She hopes to begin healing the long and traumatic separation. But Dodie is now a bitter and prickly fifteen year old, long poisoned by her father’s animus toward her mother, and determined to stick the emotional knife in whenever she finds opportunity. While Rogers and her new husband do all they can to welcome Dodie, she is adept at sabotaging their efforts to get close. What Dodie doesn’t know, however, is that the reason her father has finally allowed her to spend time with her mother is that he is getting remarried and hopes to dump his daughter off with her mother.
Rogers clearly feels a tremendous amount of guilt over her daughter, even before Dodie begins to play upon it. Yet we are also shown a second marriage that is loving and decent, with a rowdy little half-brother to Dodie. Rogers accepts and validates Dodie’s anger at her, but also corrects her daughter when accused of running away from her first marriage: “No, Dodie, I didn’t run away. I fled. It was a flight from an unhappiness that poisoned the very air I breathed.”
As her daughter continues to spurn her love, even to the point of damaging her own possibilities for happiness, Rogers articulates, not merely guilt or penitence, but a demand for recognition and acceptance:
I just want you to remember something. No one is ever quite the way we want them to be. No one. Most of all, we ourselves are not. But you can’t go through life resenting people. The life you want you will have to make yourself. The mother you wanted you will have to be yourself, for your own children.
This stance and tone seem to me a milestone in American divorce films. This is not the libertinism of the silent and pre-code films, or the louche and casual attitude of a 1930s or 1940s cinematic upper-class, but a very middle-class, Californian insistence on personal fulfillment and happiness. Roger’s new husband is an architect, and they live in a spacious suburban ranch house, anticipating the blended family home in The Brady Bunch.
Rogers proves her love as a parent; the challenge of the movie is for Dodie to learn to accept this love, forgive her mother, and become a happy teen. Which she does, partly with the help of Dick and Jane, the teenaged brother and sister living next door, who introduce Dodie to jitterbugging (which she masters in 30 seconds—those Ginger Rogers genes?) and hot rod races. (I laughed, mentally comparing the 1956 race scene with its grandchild in The Fast and the Furious.) By the end of the film, Dodie realizes that her father, who wants to pack her off to boarding school, was always a petty jerk, and decides to stay permanently with Rogers.
Rogers and Michael Rennie (who plays her second husband) are quite good in the film. Betty Lou Keim as Dodie (she also had the Broadway role) and the other teen characters are more stiff and stagey in their delivery, which is a shame as some lines that probably worked in a Broadway theater lose their Wes Andersonesque quirkiness here. For instance, Dick’s mother asks him to take Dodie out, even though he has a girlfriend named Madelyn. “What Madelyn doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” says Dick’s mom before exiting. Dick turns indignantly to his sister Jane.
DICK: And I thought she admired my loyalty to Madelyn.
JANE: You know mother. She changes.
DICK: That’s so corrupt.
This is a film that presents divorce as ordinary and moral. Early on in the movie, when Dodie is under her mother’s roof for the first time in eight years, an emotional and grateful Rogers tells her husband: “You know, I feel as if God has forgiven us.” He responds: “I don’t think God was ever angry with you, darling.”
Hilda Crane (1956)
This underrated film is an often powerful reflection of the pressures, expectations, and contradictions besetting women before (and after) the dawn of second-wave feminism. Jean Simmons is superb as Hilda, a still young woman who, after two divorces, returns from New York City to the sleepy college town she grew up in. She is courted by the dependable local Russell (Guy Madison), who runs a housing construction company. Russell has always loved Hilda, and she accepts his proposal of marriage. He begins to build them a beautiful home, overtly symbolic of the life they want to build together. Yet Hilda is still drawn to the raffish college professor Jacques (Jean-Pierre Aumont), with whom she had a dalliance when she was his student.
Stability versus passion, traditionalism versus freedom, the nice guy versus the bad boy—these are familiar chick flick plot structures. Yet Hilda Crane seeks a psychological depth and social incisiveness in its protagonist’s story that lifts the film above its own melodrama and cliché. Hilda wants to know how to live as a modern woman. In one scene she recalls her deceased father beaming at her when she was a teen, promising her that she could have it all, as the feminist slogan would insist two decades later.
“Is that the way it should be, father?” she imagines asking him. “Live like a man, and still be a woman? Get job, pay your own way, and lick the world? And he says, ‘Why not? The future belongs to you, Hilda.’” This is where she interrupts her imagined conversation. “That’s where I’d like to stop it and change it right there,” she says, turning to the disappointments of her two marriages, which are really just symptoms of her deeper sense of being torn between domestic and professional expectations.
Fired from her latest job, stumbling from one failed marriage to the next, her attempt to live independently has not given her either financial or domestic stability “Father never told me what it was really like,” she tells her mother. “I thought I could be independent but I ended up being more dependent than ever. Dependent on a series of men.” And then, shockingly, she asks her mother if she has ever wanted to kill herself: “just empty a bottle of pills and say goodnight?”
Yet the movie’s target is not the patriarchy. Neither the demands of men nor the social and economic obstacles to women’s careers are presented as Hilda’s real antagonist. Instead, the villains of the film are mothers. Russell’s mother tries to stop his marriage to Hilda. She investigates Hilda’s past and learns that she had a drunken college escapade at the age of 19, that she lived with her first husband before marriage, and that she has a sexual history between her first and second marriages.
Hilda at first articulates a feminist justification for her less than virginal behavior. “You see,” she tells Russell’s mother, “we believed that women could live their lives with the same freedom that men do.” Yet the truth is that she is ashamed of her behavior, and has not told Russell; this threat is only neutralized when Russell reveals that his mother told him about Hilda’s past and he doesn’t care. “The past, it never happened,” he tells her. “Do you understand? It never happened!” This is hardly an affirmation of women’s sexual freedom, but rather a prudent tolerance for changing mores, especially when it comes to college graduates like Hilda.
Russell’s mother isn’t done, however. On the day of her son’s wedding, she offers Hilda fifty thousand dollars to skip town, calls her a “dirty tramp,” fakes a heart attack, and threatens to kill her. The wedding goes ahead, but immediately afterwards the mother-in-law “wins” by actually dying.
Russell blames himself for defying his mother’s wishes. Hilda feels powerless to rekindle her husband’s love and affection, and she takes to drinking heavily. We jump forward five months, and Hilda and Russell are still living in Russell’s mother’s home, an enormous oil portrait of the spiteful woman presiding like a Freudian demiurge over their dismal marriage. They have had no honeymoon, and the home that Russell promised to build them is still unfinished with no effort to complete it. Hilda’s friend points out the obvious dynamic: “Russell was horrid to mama. Mama died. Now Russell will be a good boy and stay right here, where mama can keep an eye on him.”
Meanwhile, Hilda downs glass after glass of scotch, remarking sarcastically of her husband: “He likes his wife to be bright and vivacious when he comes home from a hard day’s work.”
But even worse than the mother-in-law is the mother (Judith Evelyn), who is revealed as more of an emotional monster though with a smoother façade. Initially, Hilda’s mother seems to articulate a sensible propriety. Hilda asks her with a kind of laughing desperation: “Give me something to believe in. What’s your secret?” “It’s no secret,” her mother says. “Except to people who deliberately blind themselves. […] Among your friends in New York I suppose it’s fashionable to laugh at the solid virtues like decency and respectability and having a home and children.”
This is an answer that Hilda only finds practicable as far as it goes. “Well, suppose you can’t find a man who can give you a happy, respectable home?” she asks. “Or suppose you think you’ve found him and discover you’ve made a mistake? What do you do then?” Her mother’s answer: “You put up a front. You learn to live with the situation gracefully.. . . A good appearance and a well-ordered existence is more important, and in the end it’s more satisfying.”
When the respectable home Hilda sought turns out to be a mausoleum, and the “good appearance” leaves her dying inside and turning to drink, she responds to the seductions of her former professor, popular author and ladies’ man Jacques. Jacques promises her a more authentic existence, free of bourgeois norms and true to her nature. An affair ensues and she sleeps with him.
She recalls that when she was in his history class (at the age of sixteen or seventeen, by the way), she wanted to be a devoted wife and mother, and also to be Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale—to have it all. Jacques waves this away and tells her, intending a historian’s compliment, what he sees her as: “You are a courtesan. In the old tradition.” But this is no solution to her impossible position. Hilda knows that, as she says, “courtesan’s a fancy word for tramp,” for the term her deceased mother-in-law used for her.
Russell learns of Hilda’s affair. Shattered, Hilda seeks a mother’s tenderness—and there is none. She pleads in a small voice: “Mother, do you perhaps love me just a little?” Her mother, aghast at the damage her daughter has done to their family’s respectability, responds icily: “How could anyone love you after what you’ve done?”
The suicide mentioned early in the movie now happens, and we see Hilda go to the medicine cabinet—the camera is placed behind the cabinet—and down a bottle of sleeping pills. Hilda’s mother in law isn’t the only one who knows how to die as a way of trying to exert control. Russell returns home, finds Hilda unresponsive; the emergency medical technicians arrive and pump her stomach, saving her at the last minute.
There is a decisive confrontation now between the good husband and the bad mother. In contrast to Hilda’s mother blaming her daughter, Russell asks, compassionately: “Who caused her to do this to herself?” He finds the answer in to be the mother, telling his mother in law: “You denied her the only thing she asked of anyone: to be loved. For her own sake.. . . She was looking for something. Understanding. Affection.”
Acknowledging that he too is responsible for Hilda’s desperate unhappiness, he says: “I let her down completely, I acted like a hurt kid. I guess it’s time I grew up.” When Hilda is able to leave her bed, she finds the portrait of her mother-in-law has been removed. Russell takes her to the house he had promised to build them—the new American structure that will be free of an older generation’s guilt and Puritanism yet somehow defended against the assaults of European libertinism. There are workmen busy all over, building. Husband and wife laugh and kiss.
If this last part sounds like a tacked-on Hollywood happy ending, it is. In the 1950 play by Samson Raphaelson that the movie is based on, Hilda (played by Jessica Tandy in the Broadway run) dies of the overdose.
New York Times theatre critic Brooks Atkinson called the play “an earnest drama about a neurotic woman” who is, unfortunately, “flat and trivial,” and not interesting enough to justify the play. By contrast, Raphaelson himself, writing in the Times, described his play as “the struggle of today’s woman to be on the one hand true to her proud destiny as wife and mother, and on the other hand true to the demands the twentieth century is making upon her.”
He explained the struggle facing such a woman:
Her sexual freedom has increased the frequency of divorce, has contributed to the insecurity of her children, of her home. Her increased economic opportunities have set her into competition with men and thus introduced into her life the power drive. The normal woman isn’t psychologically patterned to answer that drive, and when she fails it is a painful experience.
Raphaelson clamed that Hilda was based on a real woman he knew, but the language above makes it clear that the largest influence on the play and movie was the 1947 bestseller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, a sociological and psychoanalytical dissection of what authors Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham saw as a civilizational crisis of women’s unhappiness and maladjustment. (I will devote a future post to Farnham, an accomplished psychotherapist who deserves more thoughtful attention than her longtime status as feminist whipping girl permits.)
Bosley Crowther’s Times review of the movie found it “a gaudy CinemaScope soap-opera” and “no picture for men.” This may have been true in 1956, and Raphaelson’s play drew on a series of short fictions he published in Good Housekeeping, so the intended female audience is not in doubt.
But seven decades later, the film is compelling as a pungent elaboration of a profound sense of crisis experienced by women, and how this crisis was dramatized and articulated prior to the rise of second-wave feminism.
Phffft! (1954)
The sound effect is from the Winchell gossip column, signaling the expiration of a celebrity marriage. This comedy obviously does not invent the divorce-and-remarriage plot, which dates back to the silent era. But it does seem to anticipate particular ways in which this plot would become a staple of the 1960s, and since.
The recipe involves a hatchet gleefully taken to norms and institutions, with a grin and indifferent shrug at the end when the reunited couple step out of the societal carnage. Off-kilter lettering in the opening credits signals that divorce is kooky! Marital failure is zany! The couple is pulled apart by meddling friends and suffocating mothers-in-law, as ever, but also by that new marital antagonist: the psychotherapist. Here, the wife goes to a “brilliant analyst,” while the husband thinks it scandalous that anyone gets fifty dollars an hour for “listening to neurotic women discussing their sex lives.”
Also, the new Youth Culture—very much up and running in 1954—attracts husbands in particular with its sexual freedom and cleavage. Here, Kim Novak wows the guys in a college hangout with a come-hither pom-pom version of “Boola Boola.” The men in these movies are horny, undignified lunks, and the women feel obligated to try to match them.
Phffft! will spawn Divorce American Style over a decade later, including an analogously de-idealizing getting-ready-for-bed scene. Which tells us that neither the Pill nor no-fault divorce kick off the hollowing out of American marriage. In many ways, the 1960s started in the 1950s, if not earlier.
Most of the film is dopey and shrill, despite the talent of its two leads, Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday. Holliday transcends the film and its script with her weird, beautiful innocence and comic intensity. She is a belated sister to the Marx Brothers, at once clown and saint. She and Lemmon do align comedically in one fantastic scene in which the divorced couple, each having taken dance lessons as part of their new single lifestyle, meet in a night club and are sucked into a silly, spiteful dance-off. Otherwise, this movie isn’t good, but it is a lot of what we’ve been getting ever since.
Viaggio in Italia (1954)
Robert Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, starring his wife Ingrid Bergman and British actor George Sanders, is not an American production. But it is a distinguished, beautifully filmed showpiece in the history of cinematic portraits of marital unhappiness. Rambling, understated yet finely observed, the movie gives us a husband and wife driving through Italy to Naples, where they must dispense of some inherited real estate. Theirs is a marriage dying from emotional brutality and iciness, jealousies and second guessing about life choices, a tally sheet of small wounds and insecurity.
Their decision to divorce coincides with a visit to the ruins of Pompeii. There they witness the archeological disinterment of a man and a woman buried under volcanic ash. This vision of death and timelessness, of enigmatic devotion or mutual imprisonment, does not bring them back from their decision to separate. Instead, they renew their grasp of each other in the film’s final seconds, after Bergman is nearly swept away by the the crowds at a religious festival.
The brief smiles and a stiff “I love you” extracted from Sanders do not convince us that they will be happy going forward. They have simply chosen mutual interment in the ash of their bond.
Desiree (1954)
In Ridley Scott’s much maligned new film Napoleon, the emperor’s divorce from Josephine (so that he might remarry and produce an heir) involves tears, rueful scowls, and Napoleon shaking and slapping Josephine, all in front of an audience. The pair seem like angsty, self-involved teenagers with extremely poor impulse control.
The 1954 historical biopic Désirée is about Bernardine Eugénie Désirée Clary, at one time Napoleon’s fiancée before he broke off their engagement to marry Josephine. The title role is played by the beautiful Jean Simmons, though not as interesting a character as her Hilda Crane. Marlon Brando is Napoleon here, and Merle Oberon plays Josephine.
Like Scott’s movie, this version of history assumes that private psychodrama is more interesting than geopolitics, but at least in Désirée the characters have some dignity. In the divorce scene, Oberon’s Josephine is clearly heartbroken, but there is pathos in her stateliness and no one gets slapped.