We continue with the theme of divorce in movies of the World War Two era. As the alarming spike in the chart below shows, divorce was a pressing issue in America. Wartime marriages often happened hurriedly, with little time for man and wife to become acquainted before the husband was shipped off to fight. When he returned, if he returned, gulfs of experience separated the pair. How to acknowledge these trials yet show couples reuniting and living happily together was the challenge of a number of movies at this time.
The Impatient Years (1944)
The most well-known of these movies is, of course, The Best Years of Our Lives. By contrast, The Impatient Years is not a three-hour drama, but a romantic comedy half the length. Yet Lee Bowman as the returning soldier and Jean Arthur as the wife who has known him for only four days deliver moments of real poignancy.
The film opens in court, where the pair are petitioning for a divorce, and in fact have a witness to Bowman physically striking Arthur. But the witness, Arthur’s father (Charles Coburn in his usual paternal role), argues that the couple should not be granted a divorce. “This isn’t just one divorce case,” Coburn tells the judge. “It’s about a million.” He means all the couples who are being and will be reunited after short and dizzyingly high-pressure courtships, and who may be too quick to shy away from the stranger each now seems to the other.
Bowman and Arthur have been apart for a year and a half, living a very different lives. Bowman’s son was born while he was away and Arthur has been raising him as a single mother. The awkwardness at Bowman’s first return, told in flashback during the court scene, is intense. He and Arthur shake hands rather than embrace, uncertain how to relate to each other and scanning each other’s faces for something corresponding to their limited memories of each other. Attempting to make conversation, Coburn remarks to his son-in-law with soft-spoken deadpan: “Don’t suppose you’ve ever seen your son.”
Stirring the domestic pot is Henry, an incredibly creepy boarder who considers himself more Arthur’s husband than her newly returned soldier. Arthur isn’t used to sharing the household decision making, and Bowman isn’t used to sleeping on a nice mattress. Insecurities spill out, tempers rise, and we get to the grounds for divorce, the scene of domestic “violence.”
This turns out to be Arthur pulling a brassiere off the laundry line and swatting Bowman with it, after which he marches offscreen after her, twirling the bra in his hand, in order to return the favor.
Persuaded by Coburn, the judge rules that he will only grant the couple a divorce if they return to San Francisco where they met and reenact the entire four days of their courtship and marriage, step by step. Preposterous, yet off they go, explaining to the confused clerk in the San Francisco office of marriage licenses that they already have one and are now there to get a divorce.
As we suspect, they recall their initial love for each other and come to a realization that it is better to work out their problems, embarking on the new, postwar, “real world” chapter of marriage. What is surprising is how much we sympathize with the two people in their confusion, and how much we hope they will rise to the occasion.
I Love a Soldier (1944)
The opening of I Love a Soldier has Paulette Goddard in a photo booth with a GI. They are at the train station, and kiss farewell as he takes off to fight in the war. Before he gets on the train, Goddard suddenly remembers to ask: “Oh, what’s your name?”
This movie isn’t about the strains on wartime marriage, but rather about the difficulty in choosing marriage in a time of such chaos and uncertainty. Goddard works full days as a home front welder, and then long nights as a dance hostess, providing pretty companionship, plus autographed photos, and kisses, for lonely soldiers. She commiserates with fellow female welder-hostesses, whose feet ache after days on their feet and nights in heels, and whose hearts are bruised as they put on brave faces for the men in uniform moving like ghosts through their lives. But they are patriotic Americans, and the men going off to fight deserve a dance or three.
Goddard is about to grab a few hours of sleep before her next welding shift, when a pair of soldiers show up at her boarding house. She assumes they want to go out dancing and tries to rally, but they frostily tell her that they are there to inform her that a young soldier, Richie, was killed in battle. They think that she is Richie’s fiancée, as he had told the men in his troop that they were engaged. Goddard explains to the soldiers that, far from being his fiancée, she barely recalls Richie and they only met once.
A hesitant romance commences between Goddard and one of Richie’s comrades (Sonny Tufts). The bulk of the movie is about Goddard’s reluctance to marry before the war is over, as she does not want to risk a war widow’s agony, and about Tufts’s efforts to secure a divorce from his wife. Marriage Is A Private Affair, from our previous post, is about the uncertainty of quick wartime courtship and marriage, with a focus on choices already made—how Lana Turner can know whether she has made the right decision or not. I Love a Soldier is about risk and death, whether to choose to love and make commitments during wartime, and what the costs of doing so—and not doing so—are.
It’s not a satisfying movie, feeling too long and lacking forward momentum. This may be because it so often plays a tough realism against its sentimental plot, unable to decide which it wants. The Variety review of the time is damning:
“Soldier” deals with a timely and topical problem, that of wartime marriages, but fails to do complete justice to its subject. It will disappoint the GIs, their girl-friends and their parents, to whom its theme has a close and personal appeal, and it will similarly disappoint at the boxoffice.
Yet I Love a Soldier also seems strikingly honest and gritty for a Hollywood home front movie intended to convince Americans to love, marry, and have babies during wartime. Of course there are comic characters and set pieces, sentimental plotlines and convenient coincidences. Yet esteemed cinematographer Charles Lang has filmed the picture with noir murk and shadow, not stylized but rather in almost documentary fashion at times. We believe in the stink of cabbage in the cheap walkup apartment, the ache of female feet at the dance canteen. There are prostitutes and seamy taverns. Goddard’s tough and tinny voice seems authentic here.
Vacation From Marriage (1945)
But the true cinematic gem among these movies is a British film directed by Alexander Korda. (The British release title is Perfect Strangers.) Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr portray a married couple separated for three years during the war. Before he joins the navy, Donat is a timid pencil-pusher, afraid to demand a raise from his boss. Before she joins the Women’s Royal Naval Service, Kerr is a mousy creature with a perpetual cold, afraid to try on lipstick. During their three years apart, each blooms, discovering bravery, romance, self-respect. When their ten-day leaves from service finally coincide, they steel themselves for the job of divorce, since neither can imagine returning to the life—or self—they had before the war. As Kerr says, with complete justification: “I’m not a meek child wife. I’ve run myself for the last three years with complete efficiency.”
This is a magnificent, beautiful, and humane movie, suggestively spare as a Grecian urn. Kerr is wonderful, as is Glynis Johns who plays her fetching friend in the WRNS. The photography (Georges Périnal) is luminous.
The reconciliation at the end has husband and wife drawing on their past love and loyalty, but also acknowledging their former limitations and mutual misunderstandings. Recommitting to each other, Donat and Kerr both embrace the changes that have taken place in themselves and their spouse, while recognizing the sweet continuities too.
Kerr: A woman’s place may be be the home—
Donat: —Oh, I’m not so sure it is.
Kerr: Oh, yes it is. It always will be. Only not our sort of home.
The bombing of London has demolished the nearby walls that used to block the light from their apartment, and now they can look out on the battered city that awaits reconstruction. It is a parable for their marriage, and their marriage is a parable for an England emerging from the war into a new era.
The Courtship of Andy Hardy (1942)
Of course not every 1940s movie with divorce or marital bumps in it had to do with the war. B-pictures made use of divorce as a plot element in the usual ways, and some less than usual. In The Courtship of Andy Hardy, one in the long-running series starring Mickey Rooney, Andy’s father, a judge overseeing the rancorous divorce case of the Nesbits, feels bad for their unpopular teenaged daughter. We know that she is unhappy because, we are told, she reads books and listens to opera! The judge therefore orders his son Andy to take her out to dances and pretend he likes her.
The ugly duckling in question is Donna Reed, radiantly beautiful both before and after her “transformation,” when, in her last scene, she shows up with a new, hep hairstyle (a girl’s pompadour bun) and gauze-back dress.
The movie is another reminder that teen culture preceded the 1950s, let alone the 1960s, as Rooney’s Andy sports a whoopee cap and uses slang his parents can’t decipher. Not only that, but his older sister is causing a family scandal with her skirts that barely cover the knee, and at one point attempts to leave the house in a dress with a flesh-colored slip visible underneath. In retaliation, her family all show up at dinner in their pajamas.
More seriously, her date, who annoys the neighborhood with a loud car microphone, drives drunk that night and smashes his car, though he gets off with a mere dressing-down by the judge.
The Night Before the Divorce (1942)
Another B-picture from that year is The Night Before the Divorce. The film’s husband can’t stand how accomplished his wife is. Her golf game is better than his, she’s a better shot with a hunting rifle, and when the movie opens she is calmly training a handgun on a very cowed home burglar, waiting for the police to arrive, not feeling it was necessary to wake her husband.
A friend tells him: “You should be tickled to death you’ve got a wife that’s more than a domestic ornament. It’s unique!” But he feels like an ornament himself, and switches off the car radio in exasperation when a speaker reports that “seventy per cent of the nation’s private wealth is in the hands of women.” Husband and wife separate, and the husband takes up with golddigger Lola Mae. She is, he says to his friend, “pretty, not too accomplished, simple, totally dependent, and not too bright. I adore her.”
Their divorce goes through but of course they are brought back together at the end and will remarry, even if the wife is still a better shot. The most interesting thing about this B-picture is one scene in which we see a newfangled device that elicits the comment from a party guest: “I’ve never seen television.”
Old Acquaintance (1943)
This is another pairing of director Victor Turner and leading actress Bette Davis, who really enjoys playing young and mature versions of the same character, as we saw in the following year’s Mr. Skeffington. Old Acquaintance follows the friendship between Davis and her difficult, lifelong friend, a spoiled and hysterical Miriam Hopkins, who seems to be having fun chewing the furniture. Hopkins drives her husband to divorce because of her monstrous egotism. Wartime marriage comes up when Davis’s much-younger beau gets his commission and proposes to her. But this is not a wartime marriage movie and, with regrets, she puts him off, remarking in another scene: “It’s late, and I’m very, very tired of youth and love and self-sacrifice.”
The movie ends with a sly wink at the audience and itself, as Davis and Hopkins toast to the absurd idea of a movie ending with two single women and no happy marriage.
Casanova Brown (1944)
The cinematic case that fathers are as important to their children as mothers, yet suffer from legal and societal discrimination in this regard, is today most associated with Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer. So it is a bit surprising to see the case made in 1944 by Gary Cooper.
Cooper is engaged to be married, but an impetuous fling he had nine months earlier with a college student (Teresa Wright) during a trip to New York City turns out, unbeknownst to him, to have resulted in a pregnancy and now the birth of a baby girl. (Cooper’s quickie marriage to the baby’s mother was annulled by her parents, so this is technically not a divorce film but an annulment film.) When Cooper is informed of the birth of his daughter, he abandons his imminent wedding plans and rushes to the hospital. He is aghast to learn that Wright is planning to put their baby up for adoption. “I’m under no obligation to account to you,” she tells him. “What I choose to do with my baby is my own affair, not yours.”
Realizing he has not a leg to stand on, Cooper complains ruefully:
A man’s not capable of taking care of a child, not according to the courts. He can build bridges, he can fly around the world, he can be President and run the whole United States. But taking care of a child’s too much for him. For that you’ve got to be a woman. Any woman.
He then kidnaps his baby, embarking on a comic sequence about his male approach—ultra-hygienic, scientific, and generally panicked—to infant care. Fortunately for all concerned, the planned adoption was just a ploy by Wright to bring Cooper back to her. He breaks off his engagement to Louise and remarries his baby mama
The movie is based on a 1927 novel and then highly successful Broadway play by Floyd Dell. Dell was a playwright, novelist, editor at The Masses, and author of essays including the 1914 collection Feminism for Men. Two earlier film versions were made in 1930 and 1939, the first with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., neither one very watchable. Frank Morgan as Cooper’s prospective father-in-law adds some zest to this picture, and the baby girl is cute—and actually a boy, who would also appear as the baby in the Lana Turner movie Marriage Is a Private Affair (mentioned above) and, later on, as the boy in Night of the Hunter.