In suggesting that an Emersonian moral outlook was in ascendancy in Hollywood from 1934 to the eve of America’s entrance into the Second World War, I don’t mean to oversimplify the complex ideological currents that were then swirling around, and within, Hollywood. There are tensions or contradictions within many late-1930s Hollywood films. Not even all prewar comedies of remarriage are as consistently Emersonian as the films Cavell studies. And by 1938 a campaign could be mounted with some effectiveness that charged Katharine Hepburn with being “box-office poison.” Bringing Up Baby, so beloved today, was a commercial flop. The Philadelphia Story, a box-office success for MGM, was made starring Katharine Hepburn and directed by George Cukor (whom David Selznick had fired from Gone with the Wind [1939] the year before) only because Hepburn (for whom Philip Barry, a student of George Pierce Baker, had written the Broadway hit) had bought the rights to the play and thus had leverage to force the studio to produce the film on her terms.
In any case, by 1940, the year Hitchcock made his first film in America, the period when Emersonian perfectionism was in ascendancy in Hollywood was ending. And the Second World War fundamentally changed American cinema. The Hitchcock thriller was a crucial catalyst—Citizen Kane (1941) and the rise of Billy Wilder were others—of the sea change that was to make most postwar Hollywood movies—Hitchcock’s own films are among the exceptions that prove the rule—so much less rich, so much more strange, and so much more stereotyped with regard to gender roles, than those of the 1930s.
Had Hitchcock arrived in America after making Rich and Strange and been handed Robert Riskin’s script for It Happened One Night, he could not have made a Hitchcock thriller from it. (Where is the villain? Where is the stand-in for the film’s author? Where is the protagonist who has to prove that he or she is not a murderer?) By the end of the decade, however, Selznick could lure Hitchcock with a hot property—Daphne Du Maurier’s best seller Rebecca—from which the director could make (after an epic war of memos, to be sure) a Hollywood film that was also a Hitchcock thriller. Hollywood and Hitchcock could not have met each other halfway if both had not already changed, were not already changing, in ways that Rebecca at once reflected and helped provoke.
I am aware that the ending of Rebecca has been interpreted as the restoration, and affirmation, of patriarchal marriage. Yet in the end Manderley, symbol of patriarchal values, is burned to the ground, never to rise again—except in the Joan Fontaine character’s dream, a dream represented, rhetorically, by Hitchcock’s film. And that film ends with the explicit declaration that Manderley is gone. The burning of Manderley confirms that the protagonist’s marriage can no longer be characterized as patriarchal. Once the cloud of suspicion that Maxim (Laurence Olivier) had murdered his first wife is lifted—in no small part because the “new Mrs. De Winter” keeps a level head during his trial—the film’s ending asserts that the couple’s marriage has been transformed into a relationship of equals in the spirit of remarriage comedies. Then again, as Hitchcock’s camera moves from a long shot of the burning Manderley into Rebecca’s room, to her bed, then to the R embroidered on her pillowcase, that R, even as it is being consumed by flames, fills the frame—like the “TONIGHT GOLDEN CURLS” sign at the end of The Lodger—casts doubt over this affirmative conclusion.
In their battles over Rebecca, Hitchcock was not simply the subverter, nor Selznick the upholder, of the Emersonian outlook the producer had once championed. After all, Selznick had recently removed the great George Cukor, Hollywood’s renowned “woman’s director,” from the set of Gone with the Wind, and replaced him with Clark Gable’s favorite director, Victor Fleming (who was, in all fairness, extraordinarily accomplished in his own right). Indeed, Gone with the Wind, whose phenomenal commercial success eclipsed even that of It Happened One Night, definitively signaled the turning of the tide.
Rhett Butler’s refusal to forgive Scarlett O’Hara at the end of Gone with the Wind is based only on a misunderstanding. He believes that when she was delirious with fever, she never called for him and that this proves she didn’t—and doesn’t—love him. Since she was delirious at the time, even Scarlett doesn’t realize that she did call for him but at an inopportune moment, when no one happened to be within earshot. For us, in any case, whether or not she called for him is a moot question, since we have no doubt that she really loves him now. Rhett’s refusal to forgive Scarlett reflects an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge the truth about her—and about himself.
By the Emersonian moral standard of comedies of remarriage, Scarlett should only want to take Rhett back—we should only want her to want him back—if he changes, if he opens his eyes, awakens to the truth, as she has. The film’s ending is a perfect example of having one’s cake and eating it, too. Scarlett famously embraces the principle that “tomorrow is another day,” that she can have faith in herself even if the man she loves has no faith in her, that his walking out on her doesn’t mean that she can no longer walk in the direction of the unattained but attainable self. But what precipitates this realization is hearing the voice of her dead father, as Max Steiner’s romantic “Tara” theme swells in the background, declaring that the land she owns, in its permanence, means more to her, and should mean more to her, than any mere human being, including Rhett—and including herself. This is a piece of claptrap that would have been anathema to Emerson, as it must have been to Cukor.
A year before It Happened One Night, Cukor, who had directed his first film in 1930 after earning a strong reputation as a stage director, directed Katharine Hepburn as Jo in Selznick’s production of Little Women (1933). Arguably, it was in this film—whose narrative, anchored by Jo’s uncompromising commitment to growing as a human being, concludes with her achieving a marriage to a man who desires to facilitate her education—that the Emersonian worldview exemplified by comedies of remarriage first emerged full-blown in the American cinema. Always respectful of literary texts, Cukor worked with the several screenwriters who had a hand in the adaptation to assure that Little Women’s screenplay was true to the spirit of Louisa May Alcott’s enduringly popular and thoroughly Emersonian novel. Bronson Alcott, the novelist’s father, was a member of the Concord circle of transcendentalists, and Emerson’s way of thinking about morality, and about human relationships in general, infuses every scene of Cukor’s film, as it infuses every page of Alcott’s novel.
“Every art, every worthwhile human enterprise, has its poetry,” Cavell writes, “ways of doing things that perfect the possibilities of the enterprise itself, make it the one it is.”1 (Or, as Emerson puts it, “There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg.”)2 Film is a worthwhile human enterprise that achieves its particular poetry when it achieves the perception of what Cavell calls the “poetry of the ordinary”—the perception that “every motion and station, in particular every human posture and gesture, however glancing, has its poetry, or you may say its lucidity.”3 Few directors were Cukor’s peers in achieving such poetry or lucidity. Every moment Katharine Hepburn is on the screen in a Cukor film—or Greta Garbo, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Spencer Tracy, Judy Holliday, Judy Garland, or so many other stars he directed—the good of humanity, what Cukor called the “grace of dignity,” shines through.4
Cukor understood such grace to be a function of respecting one’s own humanity, and the humanity of others, by doing one’s best to avoid committing those slights of others—ordinary ones, as well as extraordinary ones—by which we risk suffering, or dealing, “little deaths” every day. And yet Selznick had come to doubt the ability of the director—who remained true to his Emersonian faith throughout his illustrious Hollywood career—to create characters with whom the contemporary American viewers the producer was aiming to reach could identify.
After he read Hitchcock’s initial treatment for Rebecca, Selznick began to doubt the ability of his highly regarded British import, too, to reach the audience the producer had taken to characterizing, patronizingly, as “shop girls.” Selznick had become an apostle of a new Hollywood that was beating a hasty retreat from the Emersonian principle that “the time to make up one’s mind about people is never.” To pigeonhole women as “shop girls” is to make up one’s mind that their identities are already known and fixed. Nothing could be more un-Emersonian. And nothing could be more un-Hitchcockian. Hitchcock does not look down on the women in his films. Nor does he look down on his films’ viewers.
To be sure, even the definitive remarriage comedies Cavell singles out have moments that are difficult to align with the genre’s Emersonian world-view. I am thinking, for example, of the moment in The Philadelphia Story when Seth (John Halliday), Tracy’s father, says to his wife (Mary Nash), “That’s very wise of you, Margaret,” after she agrees that his dalliance with a young dancer is not really her concern. We can question whether she is wise to accept her husband’s relationship with the dancer, especially because his tone is so paternalistic when he claims the authority to judge his wife’s wisdom, taking his own wisdom for granted. Two points, though, mitigate the film’s evident approval of Seth’s position. One is that Dexter, the Cary Grant character, is accepting of the mutual attraction between his ex-wife, Tracy (Katharine Hepburn), and Connor (James Stewart) and even the possibility that they had sex after the party. This suggests a line of defense against the charge that the film condones a double standard. Nonetheless, perhaps to appease the Hays Office, the screenwriter found it necessary—I wish he hadn’t—to incorporate unchallenged assertions that both Tracy’s fling with Connor and Seth’s relationship with the dancer were chaste, or, at least, that both pairs stopped short of having sex. In Tracy’s case this was not because she and Connor lacked the desire to make love but because she was under the influence of all those glasses of champagne she kept downing, and, as Connor puts it, “There are rules about such things.” (Whether or not this is a line in Barry’s play, in the film I hear it as incorporating a sly allusion to the Production Code.)
At a decisive moment in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), we are as disappointed as Christine is when André appeals to rules when she hoped he would run off with her, rules be damned. In Hollywood comedies of remarriage, Cavell argues, it is a “law of the genre” that the man must claim the woman, as Dexter does when he punches Connor in the jaw. When Connor later proposes to Tracy, however, Dexter is silent, acknowledging that it is up to her to decide whether to accept this proposal. To be sure, he knows that Tracy will turn Connor down if she has changed in the way he believes she has. If she accepts the proposal, Dexter will know that she is not the woman for him after all. This, too, is a “law of the genre.” Such “laws” reflect the fact that in our culture marriage, unlike friendship, is an exclusive relationship. One can only be married to one person, a person to whom one vows fidelity. But what constitutes fidelity, given the genre’s view that it is no concern of Dexter’s whether Tracy and Connor had sex and that Seth’s “philandering” is not a betrayal of his wife’s trust?
This is a central question in The Awful Truth, a question Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith expands upon. Mr. and Mrs. Smith provides another fascinating glimpse into the intricacies of Hitchcock’s efforts to find common ground with a changing Hollywood. Generally dismissed as a failed venture into alien romantic comedy territory, it was, for all its weaknesses, a plausible, challenging experiment for Hitchcock to make a film that is explicitly a comedy of remarriage, not a Hitchcock thriller.
Norman Krasna’s screenplay for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, closely modeled on The Awful Truth, revises Leo McCarey’s classic remarriage comedy in ways that shrewdly provide opportunities for Hitchcock’s camera to take an active role, as in the nightclub sequence that mimics the one in The Awful Truth, and in the bedroom sequence that opens the film, which establishes that Ann and David Smith (Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery) already have a marriage they define in terms explicitly drawn from remarriage comedies.
“Respect for each other as a person, that’s our trick,” Ann says as she is shaving her husband’s throat with a straight razor. “I think we’d be friends if we were man or woman, don’t you? Respect for each other as individuals, that’s what counts. Always tell the truth no matter what the consequences.…If we told each other just one lie, we’d have to admit that we’d failed, wouldn’t we?” “Uh huh,” David answers dully, the first intimation that he has come to regard such a principle as a drag. “And what would we have left?” she goes on. “Marriage like other people’s. Doubt. Distress. Going on with each other just because it’s the easiest way.”
Citing Rule Seven, and overriding his reluctance to follow this rule by saying, “If we give up one [rule], we’re giving up that much of our wonderful relationship,” she asks him, point blank: “If you had it all to do over again, would you have married me?” He responds: “Honestly? No. Not that I’d want to be married to anyone else, but I think when a man marries, he gives up a certain amount of freedom and independence. If I had it to do all over again, I think I would stay single. Forgive me. Say you forgive me. Now can I go to work?”
The Emersonian perfectionist moral outlook the couple embraces at the end of The Awful Truth, when they both claim to be—and are—different, and claim to be—and are—committed this time to a different kind of marriage, deserves to be mocked, Mr. and Mrs. Smith implies, when marriage is reduced to conforming to a set of rules. Why should a man give up his freedom, his power, only to be bound by rules?
Later that day, David learns that owing to a technicality he and his wife are not legally married. In the definitive remarriage comedies Cavell studies, the couple breaks up not because of a mere technicality but because both the man and the woman believe that a principle has been violated—a principle so important that even though they are married according to the laws of the state, their relationship does not constitute a true marriage. And they get back together when they begin to think in a new way about each other, about themselves, and about marriage. At stake is a way of thinking about marriage and about human relationships in general to which these films are committed. Is this true of Mr. and Mrs. Smith as well?
When Ann discovers that David had learned they weren’t legally married without telling her what he had come to know, she doesn’t tell him what she has come to know. Rather, she waits hopefully—or passive aggressively—for him to propose to her again that evening. As it becomes clear that he intends not to tell her they aren’t legally married so he can enjoy the thrill of illicit sex with his own wife, she explodes, and they separate. Now that she is available, Jeff (Gene Raymond), David’s office colleague, begins courting Ann, and David becomes jealous. When this rival for Ann’s affections, to whom she is at first drawn because he has the manners of a gentleman, refuses to fight David to claim her, she rejects him.
A man who won’t fight is not a real man, Ann and David agree, hence is unworthy of a real woman, which Carole Lombard certainly is. Yet being willing to fight, even loving a good fight, is as much in Ann’s (and Lombard’s) nature as in David’s. It is not conversing together, as in The Awful Truth, but fighting together that makes the Smiths feel, in the end, that their relationship is a true marriage. They do not learn to forgo lies and deception. What they learn is to forgo making “Thou shalt not lie” a rule. Hence the final image of the film—Hitchcock gives his camera the last word—captures Ann’s crossed skis suggestively rubbing together as the lovers engage in hanky-panky below the frame line. But they also form a cross, as if she were crossing her fingers to indicate that the real truth of their marriage is that it is based on lying.
In its nightclub sequence, closely modeled on the one in The Awful Truth, Mr. and Mrs. Smith commits a serious error, however, judged from the moral standpoint of the remarriage comedy genre. In The Awful Truth, Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne), separated from her husband, Jerry (Cary Grant), observes that Dixie Belle Lee (Joyce Compton), with whom Jerry has been keeping company, “seems like a nice girl.” (She seems nice to us, too.) Both Lucy and Jerry recognize that by society’s standards it is embarrassing for him to be seen with a nightclub singer who specializes in a racy “wind effect.” But Lucy and Jerry have never judged people that way. When Lucy later does her own comical rendition of Dixie Belle’s signature number, she is acknowledging their kinship, not mocking her. She is mocking Jerry’s intolerant fiancée and her family, the very personifications of puritanical, hypocritical society, and Jerry himself for imagining that this snobbish society woman is his equal, spiritually or morally.
In the corresponding scene in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, David himself feels embarrassed to be seen in the company of the blind date with whom his friend has fixed him up. He feels embarrassed not only because he believes that Ann would look down on such a woman but because he looks down on her. David’s attitude reveals a streak in his character that makes him—unlike Jerry in The Awful Truth—unworthy of our full sympathy. It is internal to the moral outlook of the remarriage comedy genre that in every social class there are good people and bad. Amusing as this passage in Mr. and Mrs. Smith is, it strikes a jarring note. Nor is this an isolated moment. Throughout the film Robert Montgomery’s David, like many characters this prolific and gifted but not especially appealing actor played in the 1930s, is unlikably smug; he is more than satisfied with himself as he is and has no wish to change. Nor do we particularly like Ann, his screwball wife, as Carole Lombard plays her.
Figure 4.1
I find Robert Taylor in the generally weak Remember? (Norman Z. McLeod, 1939) and Melvyn Douglas in the superior Theodora Goes Wild (Richard Boleslawski, 1936) to be unpleasantly smug as well. In truth, very few male actors of the period had what it takes to be a convincing remarriage comedy lead. Cary Grant was ideal. Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, and Clark Gable, too, proved capable. To this group I would add Herbert Marshall, Joel McCrea, and, of course, William Powell, that nonpareil among male stars of the 1930s. By contrast, virtually all the major female stars of the 1930s—even Greta Garbo—seemed to take naturally to their roles in such comedies. (Joan Crawford is a notable exception.) Among these women Carole Lombard is universally considered the quintessential “screwball comedy” heroine. It was, indeed, the great commercial and critical success of My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936) that brought the term screwball comedy into common parlance. In retrospect, however, the wholesale adoption of this term was a harbinger of the impending decline in Hollywood of the Emersonian worldview.
Screwballs are like curve balls, except they break in the opposite direction. Insofar as the term is applied in a way that suggests that screwball comedies are themselves screwballs, figuratively speaking, I have no problem with it. Typically, though, the implication is that screwball comedies revolve around at least one character who is a screwball, such as Susan, the Katharine Hepburn character in Bringing Up Baby. Screwballs are not merely eccentric; they have a “screwy” way of thinking. Chico Marx would be an exemplary screwball, except that the word is exclusively reserved for women. The implication is that women are incapable of rational thought; their inscrutable minds have their own illogical logic, but it is not to be confused with rationality. On the positive side, screwballs, like Shakespeare’s Fools, are unrestricted by what men call “reason.” Thus they can feel more deeply and intuit more clearly, not about matters of fact but about matters of the heart.
I admire Carole Lombard—who doesn’t? Hitchcock surely did—but I find her screwball roles troubling. For one thing, I cannot believe it when this obviously highly intelligent—I mean, rational—woman speaks and acts in the “screwy” way she does in My Man Godfrey. Irene (the Lombard character) belongs to a dysfunctional family of wealthy misfits. Unlike the family of lovable eccentrics in Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You (1938), the Bullock family appears to be so wealthy it is unaffected by the Depression. (The father knows that the family’s finances are precarious, but he keeps this a secret from his wife and daughters.) Like Ellie in It Happened One Night, Irene can seem “spoiled.” Yet, as Ellie asks, how can she be spoiled if she never gets what she really wants? Irene is genuinely spoiled, though. Eventually, she gets her way and gives Godfrey no choice but to marry her. But will their marriage be a relationship worth having? It is obvious why Lily loves Godfrey; he is William Powell. But although Lily is kindhearted and is graced with Carole Lombard’s cheekbones and sparkling eyes, it is not believable that a character incarnated by William Powell would—or could, or should—fall in love with a woman so “screwy” she cannot possibly hold her own in the kind of conversation the couples in remarriage comedies enjoy, a conversation of equals with the moral purpose of furthering mutual acknowledgment and self-knowledge.
Although Gracie Allen generally played herself (when I was growing up, I might easily have imagined that she was rather channeling my Aunt Ida), we never mistake the real Gracie Allen for the screwball she played so cleverly in movies, as well as on radio and television. Nor do we mistake the real Katharine Hepburn for Susan in Bringing Up Baby. Or, rather, insofar as we do recognize that Susan is Kate, we recognize as well that Susan is a performer, just as the actress who incarnates her is (and, we might add, we also recognize that Kate has a sense of the absurd, just as Susan does). The film’s few close-ups of Susan (that is, of Hepburn) reveal that she is not really, or simply, the screwball she appears to be. Playing a screwball is internal to Susan’s perfectly rational plan to keep David close by her side until he realizes that he has fallen in love with her.
When Carole Lombard plays screwballs, however, these characters really are “screwy.” Ann, in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, all but entirely lacks the intelligence and depth revealed in the star’s glamorous studio portraits, which project an unfathomable innerness, an unknownness, that rivals that of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
Garbo and Dietrich project those same qualities in their films, as well as their still photographs, but only rarely is Lombard in her screwball roles empowered to acknowledge the innerness that shines through in her still photographs. One such moment occurs in Twentieth Century, when Lily, in the throes of a heated argument with Oscar, pulls back and, framed in close-up, simply marvels at his—Oscar’s, John Barrymore’s—stupendous theatricality. In the delicious smile that she is trying her best to suppress, we glimpse in Lily Garland the “real” Carole Lombard, glimpse what Oscar/Barrymore and director Howard Hawks saw in her.
At this moment we recognize that Lily, like Susan in Bringing Up Baby, is not really “screwy”; she possesses a self-awareness she only pretends to lack. My Man Godfrey, however, and the equally famous Nothing Sacred (William Wellman, 1937)—and, sadly, Mr. and Mrs. Smith—fail to grant Lombard a single moment of such innerness. Undermining the principle that the medium of talking pictures is best served when stars speak in their own ordinary voices, these films deny who this star really is. They give Lombard no choice but to lend herself to a pernicious view of women that clashes with the Emersonian outlook that underwrites the remarriage comedy genre.
This is precisely the view of women that Peter in It Happened One Night pretends is his own when he answers Ellie’s “What are you thinking?” by all but spitting out the words, “I was wondering what makes dames like you so screwy!” Of course, at that moment it is Peter, not Ellie, whose thinking the film judges to be “screwy.” The radiant close-up that follows, of Ellie pondering what underlies Peter’s screwball logic, is It Happened One Night’s ultimate rebuttal to the view that women are incapable of rational thought. All the films Cavell considers to be definitive remarriage comedies similarly rebuke that view of women. So do the thrillers in which Hitchcock speaks fully in his own voice. Mr. and Mrs. Smith does not.
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1935) has a different word for “screwy” thinking. That word is pixilated. Crucially, the film contests the idea that some people are pixilated and others not. The film’s point is that all people are pixilated; each is eccentric, individual, different from others in his or her own way. To be a human being is to be pixilated. To think is to be pixilated. The term screwball comedy suggests, patronizingly, that screwballs are aberrant (even if, like Native Americans when they are viewed as “noble savages,” they are taken in certain limited respects to be superior, not inferior, to “normal” people). The term does not acknowledge the philosophical depth of the best romantic comedies of the 1930s, the radicalness of their Emersonian aspiration to “unsettle all things.”
Saddled with such unlikable protagonists, Mr. and Mrs. Smith falls flat as a romantic comedy. Lacking magic, it fails to put us in a festive mood, as the best comedies of remarriage do. Does this mean that the film is an inferior comedy of remarriage? Or does it mean that the film does not earn, or does not seek, membership in the genre at all?
During the wartime and postwar years, the films Kathrina Glitre calls “career woman comedies”—for example, Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942), Take a Letter, Darling (Mitchell Leisen, 1942), She Wouldn’t Say Yes (Alexander Hall, 1945), and Without Reservations (Mervyn LeRoy, 1946)—effectively supplanted comedies of remarriage on American movie screens.5 Although the genres share many features, there is a glaring ideological difference between them. The “career woman,” in learning to accept herself as a woman, embraces domesticity and motherhood as well. Woman of the Year, in many ways a wonderful film, genuinely seems to set out to humiliate its leading woman—she is Katharine Hepburn no less—and to do so not, as in The Philadelphia Story, in order to help her to awaken in the Emersonian sense, to open her eyes to her own wish to become more fully human, but, rather, to make her conform to an essentialist view as to which forms of life are, and which are not, appropriate for women—as if for a woman to pursue a career, cultivate herself by learning nine languages, and appreciate her accomplished stepmother is for her to repress her feminine nature, to deny what makes a woman a woman. A woman’s nature is best reflected, these films assert, by loving a man and by embracing the life of domesticity—literally in the kitchen—and motherhood that “naturally” follows marriage. In comedies of remarriage the narrative revolves around the creation of the woman, her quest to walk in the direction of the unattained but attainable self. In the career woman comedies of the wartime and postwar years, the woman’s rebirth is aborted.
The Philadelphia Story may seem ideologically akin to such films, in that it revolves around Tracy’s coming to acknowledge her sexuality, the fact that she is a fiesh-and-blood woman and not a chaste goddess or a cold, unyielding statue. But Tracy is not tamed or broken when she learns to stop passing judgment on others for their frailties and learns to acknowledge her humanity and the humanity of others. There is no implication that Tracy comes to accept roles that are proper only to women. Her goal, and that of the men who lecture her (other than her fiancé, George Kittredge (John Howard), that is), is not to make her fit for domesticity and motherhood. It is her nature as a human being, not her special nature as a woman, that they want her to stop denying. Part of what she thereby acknowledges is what might be called the feminine side of her nature, but that does not set her apart from men. In comedies of remarriage, men as well as women, in their quest to become more fully human, find it necessary to acknowledge the feminine side, as well as the masculine side, of their natures.
The difference between a remarriage comedy and a 1940s career woman comedy is not like the difference between a comedy of remarriage and an unknown woman melodrama. The latter two genres share an Emersonian moral outlook. But career woman comedies fail to achieve—indeed, they reject or repress—that philosophical perspective. It is a mark of achievement for Adam’s Rib that, uniquely among career woman comedies, it finds a way to affirm, in the uncongenial climate of the late 1940s, the Emersonian perspective that had been in ascendancy in prewar Hollywood.
As Cavell observes, in a comedy of remarriage the action characteristically moves, at a point when the couple’s conflicts seem irreconcilable, to the place, or no place—in A Midsummer Night’s Dream it is a moonlit forest outside Athens; in romantic comedies of the 1930s it is usually called “Connecticut”—where magic is real. In Adam’s Rib, when the couple pays off the mortgage on their summer home in Connecticut, making their shared dream come true, this ratifies their aspiration to make the Shakespearean “Green World” an everyday part of their lives. Postwar America spawned the growth of suburbia, as if by moving to the real Connecticut Americans could fulfill the Utopian aspirations that underwrote, and were underwritten by, prewar Hollywood movies. But suburbia was a trap, as film noirs and Douglas Sirk melodramas were not alone in recognizing. Suburbia proved a cunning instrument not for marrying urban and smalltown or rural America, day and night, men and women, as remarriage comedies envisioned, but dividing them. Rather than joining men and women in marriages that acknowledge their equality without denying their differences, suburbia locked women into the domestic realm while it accorded men—but not women—public identities. In these ways and more the reality of suburbia stood in opposition to Hollywood’s Emersonian aspirations of the 1930s, which it precisely denied, that is, repressed.
Insofar as it is concerned with demonstrating that rules—vows, promises, moral laws—do not a true marriage make, Mr. and Mrs. Smith does align itself with the Emersonian outlook of the comedy of remarriage. Unlike the mismatched couple in Rich and Strange, Ann and David are worthy of each other. And they are walking together in the direction of the unattained but attainable self, although they are fighting every step of the way. Unlike career woman comedies, which retreated from, and repressed, the remarriage comedy’s moral outlook, Mr. and Mrs. Smith respects the genre’s Emersonian spirit by fighting it every step of the way.
Yet Mr. and Mrs. Smith is also ironic. The straight razor Ann holds poised at her husband’s throat is one of the ways the film acknowledges, however jokingly, that their failures of trust aren’t really funny. A slip of the hand, a sudden impulse, or an unexpected provocation can be all it would take to turn inflicting a “little death” into murder—all it would take to turn this comedy of remarriage—perhaps any comedy of remarriage—into a Hitchcock thriller. Suspicion takes this idea a step further by posing the question, which it ultimately leaves unanswered, of whether the film is a comedy of remarriage or a Hitchcock thriller.
Earlier, I observed that women like Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn already projected in their pre-Code films the self-reliant spirit that equipped them to incarnate the heroines of remarriage comedies but that male stars like Clark Gable had to change. Cary Grant was exceptional in that he did not have to change his onscreen persona the way Gable did. Already in Blonde Venus (1932), in which he costarred with Marlene Dietrich under the inspired direction of Josef von Sternberg, Grant projected the distinctive kind of nonmacho masculinity that was to enable him to incarnate a man capable of being both a romantic hero and an “Emersonian sage,” as Cavell describes Dexter, Grant’s character, in The Philadelphia Story. He was that Cary Grant in She Done Him Wrong (1933) and I’m No Angel (1933) as well. That’s what makes it so convincing when his costar, Mae West, expresses her desire for him to “come up and see” her sometime. This brave and brilliant woman from Brooklyn had made herself a star by re-creating herself as the “Statue of Libido” the public loved but the censors hated. No doubt she appreciated the fact that her costar, né Archibald Leach, a lower-middle-class English lad from Bristol, had re-created himself, just as she had. He had quite consciously endeavored to create “Cary Grant” out of the “stuff” of his own cockney self. Of course, Archie Leach could not have become Cary Grant, in his everyday life as well as in his films, had he not possessed matinee-idol looks. But neither could he have become Cary Grant had he not aspired to walk in the direction of the unattained but attainable self.
In Pursuits of Happiness Cavell demonstrates compellingly and in the old-fashioned way, that is, by exemplary acts of serious criticism, that a comedy of remarriage like The Philadelphia Story is, on one level, an allegory of the creation of a “new woman”—a woman worthy of marriage to a man like Cary Grant; on another level such a film is an allegory of the medium’s own powers of creation, the camera’s capacity to transform its subjects, to transform ordinary people into stars, and to reveal these stars to be representative human beings, such that beholding them we might be heartened, might find or refind the courage to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again.
In Cavell’s view The Philadelphia Story pointedly makes us recognize that the character Tracy is incarnated by a flesh-and-blood woman who really exists in the world; we see her do her own diving, for example. If the film is an allegory about Tracy’s creation—about her metamorphosis from a statue or goddess into “a human, a human being,” as she joyfully puts it at the end of the film—it is also an allegory about Katharine Hepburn’s creation as a star, the metamorphosis effected by the camera.
Cavell does not understand The Philadelphia Story to be in the same way an allegory of the man’s creation, which the film presents as happening offscreen, not accomplished by the camera. In comedies of remarriage there remains a mystery about such a man—about who he is, about how he comes to be who he is, about his creation. Was Archie Leach already a man who “holds the holiday in his eye” and is “fit to stand the gaze of millions”—when he consciously set out to transform himself into Cary Grant? Did he ever stop being Archie Leach when he became the Cary Grant we know—or think we know—from his films? And do we really know Cary Grant? Do we know, for example, whether he is capable of murder? Suspicion is designed to pose, not to answer, these questions.
Does Suspicion “really” end with a murder, or does it end with a remarriage? Ultimately, the film is designed to leave this question pointedly unanswerable. Since it is a defining feature of the Hitchcock thriller that there is a murderer in its world, this means that Hitchcock also designs Suspicion to pose the question, which it likewise leaves unanswerable, whether the film itself is a Hitchcock thriller or a comedy of remarriage. Suspicion nurtures the doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Smith planted or unearthed within the comedy of remarriage, the suspicion that every member of the genre is, as it were, a closeted Hitchcock thriller. At the same time, Suspicion plants or unearths within the Hitchcock thriller the suspicion that within each member of that genre there is a remarriage comedy yearning to breathe free.
That it is impossible to decide whether Suspicion is a Hitchcock thriller or a comedy of remarriage does not mean there is no difference between the genres. Within the world of Suspicion, after all, Lina’s life hinges on their difference. What real difference, if any, does that difference make? For Hitchcock, what hinges on this question is whether, in his role as author, he is fated always to kill the things he loves.
