“Emotional problems”

From Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), a romantic drama, featuring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray as old lovers, reunited 20 years later. They are both successful in their careers. He has a wife (Joan Bennett) and three children (two teenagers and one pre-teen), while she remains single, for obvious socio-cultural reasons (you can have a career or you can have a personal life: you can’t have both), but also personal ones: MacMurray clearly was the one who “got away”. She never got over it. Her re-appearance in his life comes with no warning and wreaks havoc on his domestic … if not bliss, then complacency. She is not a spider-woman femme fatale (unlike the role Stanwyck played opposite MacMurray in Double Indemnity), come to ruin his life. She seems to be operating under the assumption that it would be good to connect with an old friend, re-live some old times, maybe remember what it was like to be young. She is not there to steal him away, although maybe on some deep down level she wishes he were free. Their “innocent” reunion is sniffed out by his kids, particularly his two older kids, who want this new “friend” to leave immediately, and stop tempting their dad. It’s a wonderful movie. (It’s interesting to see Joan Bennett – the queen of hard-bitten morally ambivalent film noir – as the 1950s wife/mom. And interesting to see Stanwyck – another noir queen, and an icy one at that – move into the more socially acceptable territory of 1950s America. Domestic life was POISON to Stanwyck’s Phyllis (and all the other icy frigid noir ladies). By the 50s, the picket fence had re-established its primacy – and many noir heroines couldn’t make the transition. Stanwyck could. She’s heartbreaking here. Totally believable.

I love the kids. They feel very real. Not sentimentalized. The dialogue is funny too, particularly for young Ellen (Gigi Perreau), in a swirl of massive high school crushes, and preparing herself for when she’s ready to “go steady” with someone, like her older brother Vinnie is already doing. But she’s still just a kid. One of the running jokes of the film is how the home phone line is always tied up, because Vinnie is talking with his girlfriend, or Ellen is talking with her BFF Gloria. When Ellen heads out to sleep over at Gloria’s, she informs her deadpan dad – who has no idea what she’s talking about – that she and Gloria have to “discuss their emotional problems”. Young Frankie (Judy Nugent) is around 10 or 11, too young for all this adolescent nonsense, and also certain she won’t ever go boy-crazy because she is determined to be a dancer, and she needs to focus and not get distracted. Her sister’s mooning around on the phone is gross to her. SHE won’t ever get all mushy like that, no SIR.

This Douglas Sirk rarity is now screening on the Criterion Channel. I’d never seen it before. I loved it.

 
 
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