I Lost it at the Movies: The Hollywood Remarriage Comedy

As so often happens, I find myself bouncing off what other hoydens have been saying.

This time I’m inspired by what Tracy’s thoughts, in a recent post, about social class and escapist glitter in the Depression-era movie, The Philadelphia Story.

And since others of us have referred to this one as a favorite, for its complex take on the very stuff of romance fiction — men and women; morality, autonomy, and desire — let me share some observations about certain movies of this period, from a remarkable book called Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, by the philosophy professor Stanley Cavell.

Comedy of Remarriage?

Before reading Cavell, I hadn’t even considered that such a category existed. But think of The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib, The Awful Truth, The Lady Eve — all of them about married couples so fabulously, visibly, physically, and verbally right for each other that the screen glows with the black-and-white heat of it.

And in each case the couple is on the brink of divorce or already divorced with the wife on the brink of marrying someone absolutely wrong for her — until a wonderfully talky comic script brings the original couple back together.

For that physical heat: at the beginning of this YouTube clip from His Girl Friday, check out the edgy intimacy with which the divorced couple, Walter and Hildy (Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell), pace around each other in the chaotic space of Walter's office.

And also watch the final scene on the clip (about 6 minutes in), when Walter takes Hildy and Bruce, her sweet-decent-but-wrong-for-her fiance (Ralph Bellamy) out to lunch. Walter’s desperately ironic and angry, Hildy’s embarrassed but rather enjoying it, Bruce is simply struggling to keep up. Cavell gets as close to the heart of my romance-writer sensibility as any philosopher could, when he says that:

…the pair communicate […] in a lingo and tempo, and about events present and past [...]. They simply appreciate each other more than either of them appreciates anyone else, and they would rather be appreciated by one another, more than by anyone else.

They are, as I wrote about Mary and Kit, the couple in my own remarriage comedy, The Slightest Provocation, onto each other, wise to each other's smarts and wit and audacity, and wicked smart about the accompanying need and weaknesses and wounded pride. Every bit as much as the fast-talking lovers in another hoyden favorite, Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.

Fast-talking... boy, do they ever talk fast in these remarriage comedy movies. Cavell points out that this spate of films had its beginnings less than a decade after the movies even got sound; one can almost hear the glee of trying to cram as many words as possible onto the sound-strip on the celluloid.

But the acrobatics of fast talking are also as much a part of the dance of desire and need as the ongoing war for screen space; note (beginning about 3 minutes and 36 seconds into the clip) the wonderful physical byplay between Hildy and Walter about who leads and who follows — and what leading and following might mean — as they walk down (yes) the aisle of the newsroom where Walter is editor.

Cavell’s writing is witty but also weighty (I had to blow off a lot of the sentences that hinge on Kant or Wittgenstein). And they make big claims for the importance of a set of lighter-than-air entertainments — this notion of marriage being not a solution but a problem to be revisited, revised, and gotten right only in struggle is, according to Cavell, the major female cultural achievement of the period between the Suffrage movement and the advent of 1960s second wave feminism.

Fans of Rosie the Riveter may beg to differ.

And yet, as a woman who got so much of my romantic sensibility from the movies (I fell in love with the Regency while breathlessly watching the 1955 Beau Brummell, with Stewart Granger and Elizabeth Taylor), I know how powerful screen images of contested love can be, and I also know how deeply even a nine-year-old can feel the rough strife of love and wit and words and ego (even if the nine-year-old didn't know that no one wore powdered wigs during the Regency). While my husband, who's been onto me from the beginning, sealed the contract between us, we joke, on our first date, when he took me to see the swooningly romantic 1945 French historical drama, Les Enfants du Paradis.

And as a feminist writer in a popular genre that’s consistently, ignorantly, and unfairly maligned as anti-feminist, I can only applaud Cavell for the serious smarts he devotes to another sub-sub entertainment genre, a set of “parables,” as he puts it,

of a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man, a study of the conditions under which this fight for recognition […] is a struggle for mutual freedom, especially of the views each holds of the other. [….] They harbor a vision which they know cannot fully be domesticated, inhabited, in the world we know. They are romances.

We won’t all be able to talk so fast, or move so nimbly.

But we can try. Write on, hoydens all.

And readers, writers and viewers among you, tell me what parts of yourself you’ve found at the movies.