The Marrying Kind (1952)

Q: What's not to love about Judy Holliday?
A: Nothing!
She's the best part of this picture, I'd say, and she gets to play a lighthearted but not lightheaded blonde. She's not too ambitious for herself, but she believes in things like her husband's crazy invention and radio contests and bright possibilities for her future.

Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray portray a couple who are divorcing. The story of their marriage told in flashbacks is comic and dramatic in turns and probably plays better with a married audience.
The voice over cleverly does not always match the story as the audience can see it so we're lead to understand how both husband and wife are distorting their side of the story as they are telling it to the judge.
It's reminiscent of the Crowd if anyone has seen that silent film - the young couple living the American dream in the city, trying to make ends meet, having a family, eventually encountering hardship.

Through it all there are glimmers of the couple being something a little bit better than they think they can be - enough to make you believe the judge's conclusion that they will not get a divorce after all.
Of course, she's right, they make up and stay together. It IS a romantic comedy after all.
Not a first date movie, though. One to rent to watch with your spouse during a difficult year.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

I read that Katherine Hepburn was meant to have been considered for the part of Scarlett O'Hara. But the studio picked Vivian Leigh instead. And a good thing, too. Katherine's inherent Yankee-ness isn't the only reason that she wasn't right for that part...Hepburn was never petulant. You could see in Bringing Up Baby that some of the lines might have been meant for that...and in Pat and Mike she's supposed to be nervous and rattled by her fiance. Katherine just never seems really helpless, and as much as Scarlett is helpless at times - and petulant - Blanche Dubois is even more so.


I first saw this movie in high school when I was reading Tennessee Williams plays for acting class, and I fell in love. I walked around talking in a soft little southern accent for months afterwards - albeit under my breath so no-one could hear me. There is just something about her character that is captivating. She is useless, vain, selfish, frail and, of course, increasingly crazy as the movie progresses. But you do get the sense that some great wrong was done to her. Some wrong that she couldn't help and that she doesn't know how to incorporate into her view of the world.

She's like a girl who was raised to think the world was all puppies and lollipops and then had a puppy die in her hands, choking on a lollipop. (hm, not my best metaphor, maybe).

Anyhow, you just want her to be happy and get out of Stella's hair, really. Because as much as you hate Stanley, you kind of feel for Stella - it's kind of like Stella and Stanley are Rocky and Adrian, if Rocky hadn't won the fight with Apollo Creed.


Stanley's not a bad guy, or so you think. Then he goes and forcefully messes up Blanche's chance at happiness - or at least a version of happiness.


That is one thing about TW's plays (and the movies made from them): they are beautifully sad portraits of beautifully tragic characters, but there is the sense that no-one is really happy or ever will be. Which I guess makes sense because if you were a gay kid growing up in the south there really was no chance that you were going to be very happy, was there? (I mean, apparently he had a partner and they were pretty happy but at the same time, he died choking to death on a bottle cap, drunk, so that's not a very happy picture, is it?).

So when Blanche loses her shot at semi-happiness, and Stella begins to descend into the third circle of hell that is a fight between your sister and your husband...you really start to hate Stanley. And of course that only makes the fragile Blanche more sympathetic, by comparison.

Like all TW plays, too, in this one there is a veiled sexual encounter that colors the whole play darkly.

There is no other movie that I would describe as "disturbing" "tragic" and yet "wonderful".

Four stars. Nevertheless, won't watch again for a while. It is disturbing and not something that you shake for a few days after watching it.

PS - I have not praised Marlon Brando here because I've simply never found his character that fascinating. He plays Stanley well, but Stanley is like lust and fate and resentment all rolled into one. Sure, Brando is great, but his character existed for me before I ever saw his portrayal.
Blanche was the character that haunted me, the character who was unique: she was a manipulative victim. Everything bad you could say about her was true: snobbish, self-absorbed, deluded, vain, over-sensitive - but she was still somehow precious and beautiful and innocent.
In that way she was something like Scarlett O'Hara if she hadn't been so resilient. It made an interesting character, and one that you can't shake after the movie ends. I'm quite sure Brando is an absurdly good actor and someday if I ever watch another movie with him in it I'll tell you all about it. But I think it's silly to put him on the cover of the DVD. It's not his movie.

A Bill of Divorcement (1932)

My Tivo picked this up for me under my Katharine Hepburn wishlist (I have three wishlists: for KH, Cary Grant and Sandra Dee) on TCM. It's a drama, which normally I don't like (prefer, in this order: romantic comedy, comedy, musical, western - I generally skip horror and drama).



In fact, I was set to watch Little Women, which I've seen before and don't like that much (because I always think Jo should end up with Laurie but that's another post). However, in the introduction to Little Women Robert Osbourne (the TCM host and my TV movie buddy) said that A Bill of Divorcement was KH's first movie, so I thought I ought to at least give it a chance.

Katharine Hepburn plays a young woman whose father is in a mental institution and has been for as long as she can remember. She is recently engaged and very much in love. Her mother has divorced the mental patient and is about to remarry a guy who can buy her a mink (which is supposed to be proof that he's the one who can really make her happy) when suddenly the father arrives at the house.

This is the point where you know it's based on a play because the only setting they ever appear in is this house. There might be several rooms, I'm not really sure because I was baking pies, but it's all in the house. The father has "come to his senses" all of a sudden and walked right out of the mental institution and home - this is strange because he doesn't recognize the house and makes some reference to how it's bigger than the old place - meaning presumably this is a house he's never been to before.

Anyhow, the mother gets married but can't bear to tell the father the truth and KH is caught in the middle of the drama trying to protect both parents. She's supposed to be somewhat temperamental and prone to outbursts - inclined towards insanity, we assume. So right away she takes her father's side, but she still sympathizes with her mother.

In the end, she breaks off her engagement because she's afraid of having crazy babies and sacrifices herself to live with her father so her mother can go, guilt-free, to live with the mink-buying man of her dreams. The ending is really unsatisfactory and strange - it just kind of trails off with a father-daughter piano-playing scene.

At first I was just completely struck by how KH was made up in the 20s style. Her mouth is dark and precise and her face pale and her eyes very dramatic and dark and pointy with slender eyebrows.

This plays her up in a such a different way than in her later movies when she was all mouth and cheekbones and eyebrows with very natural eyes. I was totally fascinated with this for the whole first act.

The whole movie was melodramatic in the extreme and I was left with mixed feelings about the way mental illness was portrayed. (My dad's a psychotherapist and I have several mentally ill family members so I'm fairly sensitive to portrayals of "crazy" people in movies).

The mentally ill father is played by John Barrymore (grandpa of Drew) melodramatically as a weepy, sentimental mess with a temper. Since all the characters are over-played that wasn't really troubling - almost every character was an offensive stereotype so, really, this guy gets fair treatment.

There were two theories advanced in the movie: that the mentally ill father was inherently insane because it was "in his blood" and that he came home from the war with shell-shock. JB makes a great speech about fighting to protect people who then marry other people and all he got was shell-shock - that will make the top ten list of guilt-trip monologues, for sure.

It's not that different from today, really - the causes of mental illness are still linked to both trauma and genetics. But the idea that you would not marry because you couldn't have children (no way!) and not have children because they might possibly have mental illness (huh?) seem completely dated.

Also, since these days we wouldn't put the guy away for what seems like a mild case of depression or PTSD, she'd never have got the Bill of Divorcement in the first place, and the whole movie would be blown.

Would NOT watch again. Definitely wouldn't have finished if I wasn't baking pie.

Two stars.