Not Rated | 1 h 32 min | Drama, Comedy | 1939
Director John Cromwell’s film may be old hat for long-married couples, but it can be a welcome insight for those just married or about to be. Opening credits overlay a pair of hands signing the names of his characters into a marriage register, picking out a ring, bearing a bouquet, and opening a book of matrimony service rites. By starting rather than ending with such imagery, Cromwell inverts the typical romance, implying that marriage should mark the growth rather than the death of romance.
A young couple meet and promptly marry. But the husband, John Mason (James Stewart), isn’t able to earn or save enough despite his success at lawyering. His wife, Jane (Carole Lombard), can’t seem to run a household, at least not well enough to please her widowed mother-in-law, Harriet (Lucile Watson). The couple run through more than a dozen maids—each new one more fed up than the last, with Harriet’s hectoring. As bills pile up, their baby son falls critically ill, testing their marital resolve to the breaking point.
Screenwriter Jo Swerling begins this tale with a warning as John tells his boss, Judge Doolittle (Charles Coburn), that he’s just married and deserves a honeymoon. Before the judge grudgingly grants him leave, Doolittle says that the country has just recorded half a million divorces. Doolittle’s backhanded congratulations tell John that becoming happily married is easy, but staying happily married is hard.
Stewart and Lombard are brilliant as an idealistic couple who, at first, can’t stop talking about their future but can now barely get through the day without complaining about their present.
Harriet’s running her household like a company, much like Doolittle runs his partnership firm. To her, marriage is like a business that expects each “partner” to fulfill his or her terms and conditions.
Love Tested
Once when Jane’s out, secretly hunting for a job in hopes of supplementing their income, kindly maid Lily comforts her, saying that the seeds shouldn’t stop someone from enjoying watermelon.Jane can’t help a little smirk: “That’s all right if you’ve got a watermelon.”
Lily persists, saying that she’s got a watermelon, but she chokes on all the little seeds. “All I say is, ‘Spit ’em out … before they spoil your taste for the melon.'”
Jane realizes that if seeds feel to her as large as the melon, she’ll have a hard time ignoring them. It’s only when John and Jane dwell on what they have (each other, a beautiful baby, a home, a job) that they’re able to make light of what they don’t or won’t have: a fancy ring, a fur coat, a larger apartment, more furniture, swell holidays.
A lovely one-minute sequence of Jane preparing to announce her pregnancy to John demonstrates how this perspective can work wonders. She steps out of the doctor’s office, humming to herself, smiling widely, her head high at the prospect of giving birth. Except, this scene is after a disastrous dinner that she and John hosted, at which they’re told that Doolittle’s stooge has been chosen over John as new partner at the law firm. Jane rises above that disappointment, bathed in the pure joy of being a mother.
Later, in a moment of shared anxiety, Harriet tells Jane that loneliness strikes only when you have no one to share things with, “not even a loss.” It’s her reminder that sharing is the point of marriage—not only a sharing of the good, the healthy, and the joyful, but also a sharing even of a lack of all that.
Some melodramatic sequences don’t quite fit the characters or the story. Still, Cromwell successfully pits the popcorn-style, fairy-tale idea of marriage that requires no change, no sacrifice, no loss, and not much love, against the reality that requires love (church vows or not) to be refreshed and renewed every day.
Cromwell’s point is that love is real only when it’s tested: severely, consistently, differently. Infatuation barely tests love, even in separation. Marriage tests love severely, even in togetherness.
