I Do and I Don't by Jeanine Basinger

Author:Jeanine Basinger [Basinger, Jeanine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-96222-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

When Jimmy Stewart goes to New York City, he finds a fabulous bride (Ginger Rogers, in a nightclub), but bringing her back to his college classroom isn’t as easy as he thought it would be. With Phyllis Kennedy and Grady Sutton. (Photo Credit 2.69)

Jimmy Stewart wasn’t the only small-town brother asked to retrieve an erring sibling from the clutches of a big-city gal. In The Shining Hour, Robert Young travels from the family dairy farm (a pretty palatial place) to New York to knock some sense into Melvyn Douglas before it’s too late. Actually, it is too late: he’s already proposed to the famous nightclub dancer played by Joan Crawford, who has herself warned him it’s not going to work. “The difference between the Wisconsin Lincolns and the Tenth Avenue Rileys is more than just a thousand miles,” she’s told him in one of her many class-motivated refusals to his proposals. Just before Young arrives, Crawford finally gives in. Not only does Young himself end up madly in love with Crawford’s character, “Olivia” (real name Maggie), but the third sibling, a very irate Fay Bainter, burns their honeymoon house down. Unfortunately, all that does is trap Young’s own wife, the patient and forgiving Margaret Sullavan. Crawford has to run into the conflagration and rescue her while the men stand around.

Movies such as Vivacious Lady and The Shining Hour, the first a comedy and the second a drama, illustrate the same fundamental lesson about class in marriage. If you marry outside your tribe, something is likely to destroy you, your home, your career, and certainly your ill-considered marriage. These movie lessons are tribal—they remind audiences of the basics the elders want enforced. Your own ways are the best, the safest, and the most reliable. One of the great achievements of the Hollywood movie was its ability to reinforce the tribe’s rules while offering a glamorous glimpse of the other: the bride from the nightclubs of New York City. Overall, there’s a fundamental endorsement of the American concept of democracy in such stories. The bride, despite her adoring audiences, her furs and gowns, her tiny feet that fly over the parquet dance floor, is at heart someone who wants what Wisconsin (or the audience) has: a home, a family, and love.

If one is going to marry outside one’s class, the direction to go is for the most part downward. To be happy, a rich man or woman should marry someone from the lower classes, an energetic opposite, full of life and good old American know-how. For instance, in One More Tomorrow (1946), rich boy Dennis Morgan tries to marry working girl Ann Sheridan, but she initially spurns him. The conniving Alexis Smith catches him on the rebound and marries him solely for his money, although promising faithfully to be a happy homebody and have lots of children. (Earlier, a friend tells Smith that “there’s more to marriage than a shopping trip,” and she cynically replies, “Like what, for instance?”) Smith turns Morgan’s life into a false hell of socializing, political correctness, and lack of love (and children).

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