When Marriage Meant Something

 Last night Jessica (aka Ginger) and I continued our annual tradition of watching our favorite holiday movie, Christmas in Connecticut (1945) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan. Every year that we watch it, my understanding and appreciation of the story deepens. We both have large parts of it memorized at this point. We always watch out for the scene with the cow that forces itself into the plot in order to bring the lovers together. It's one of my favorite cow scenes in Hollywood movies.

Each we notice new subtleties and details. Jessica noticed the that the box containing the mink coat that Barbara Stanwyck wears at the beginning of the story says "Sherwood Furs" on it. These are the kinds of things you notice when you have the seen the movie so many times. The mink coast is a simple of the kind of life that Stanwyck's character (Elizabeth Lane) thinks she wants at the beginning of the story, but which she happily discards once she has found true love.

So much of the joyous lightness in the movie comes from the character of Uncle Felix played by S.Z. Szakall (pictured above, trying to teach Barbara Stanwyck's character how to cook). He is the life force in the movie.  He literally stops the "bad wedding" for happening simply by insisting that music must be played (foreshadowed by the fact that we are introduced to him in his restaurant with no dialog but only live music, like a silent movie).

We have almost his entire dialog memorized at this point, and we wait for him to say certain lines. Even so, we still notice new ones. By the way, even Felix has a character arc in the story. He goes from having a poor relationship with cows to a good one. He reconciliation with the bovine force of happiness is parallel to the lovers coming together. One shadows the other.

The tightness of the story is impeccable. There is almost nothing wasted in the entire movie as far as spoken lines or visual shots. Everything seems to reference something else, an support the characters in the roles they have. 

As I watched the movie this time, I felt a kind of distance from it that I had never felt. Perhaps it is the fact that I have lost the last members of my family who lived through World War II as adults. That generation is gone, and with them, the whole era portrayed in the movie seems disconnected from our world. So many of the subtleties of the interactions of the characters would be lost on modern audiences. We have a whole generation of young people who have grown up without experiencing anything resembling courtship as it used to be. Moreover, even outside of the romantic drama in the story, there are many assumptions characters make in regard to behavior of each other which would be invisible to many young folk today. 

I believe this is more than "changing times." It is the fact that people in 1945 experienced nearly all their interaction with other human beings in person, or at most, over a land-line analog phone. The expectations of mutual behavior were generated by these in person, physical, interactions.  For a great many of us, and perhaps the majority of young people, now experience most of our meaningful interactions with each other digitally over the Internet.  We no longer have the vessel of expectations that people in the past assumed to exist, and assume would always exist.

It makes the experience of watching the movie much less rich and detailed for young people today perhaps, unless they specifically are interested in discovering how people in the past behaved in each other's presence---not just because they are young but because they have never experienced a world in which physical in-person interactions were how one negotiated one's expectations of the world.

One of the things Jessica noticed was the sympathetic treatment of the rejected male suitor in the romantic drama of the movie. He is not portrayed as a cad or a villain. His flaw was his blindness to the fact that he and Barbara Stanwyck's character are not suited to each other, and that she doesn't love him. He doesn't see this only because he himself has not experienced true love. He remains a gentleman in the movie right up the last scene in which appears, graciously escorted another married woman off to find her breakfast.

Another thing I noticed this year was that what I thought was a plot hole is not indeed a plot hole. When Stanwyck and Morgan (the lovers) are in the sleigh together, why can't she tell him that she is playing a ruse regarding the dinner she is hosting for all of them? The answer is because we don't want her to do that, as an audience. For one thing, she has indeed promised to marry another man, even though we know it is a sham marriage. We don't want to her break that promise and start plotting with another man, whom she really loves. She has to resolve that issue publicly and honorably by breaking it off with her fiancé (even though as a woman, according to traditional rules she has the feminine privilege to change her mind during an engagement, up to the last moment). Also, as Jessica pointed out to me, it would mean destroying the experience of the weekend for Dennis Morgan's character, who is a war hero. So I get why she has to silent there.

Eventually she will speak up, and all the issues will come out, and the force of love is restored. The movie works like a giant cosmic story machine to bring out the result. It is a fantasy of course, but one that captures, through art, the messy complexities of real life and courtship, which is never so tidy as to fit into a movie.