BEFORE: OK, I admit I saw parts of this film when I was a kid, but I decided that movies I saw way back when that I don't remember very much about also needed to be included in this project - because if I don't remember all the details, then I haven't really SEEN it, have I? Besides, when I was a child I thought like a child, and that means I may not have had the experience necessary to understand a film like this. Paul Newman carries over from "Slap Shot", so it's an excellent opportunity to redress a wrong and put things right.
THE PLOT: A woman discusses her four marriages, in which all of her husbands became incredibly rich and died prematurely.
AFTER: OK, it's tough to make something like sense out of this one, even though I'm an adult now. At first this comes off like a romance pic, but it soon turns into dark comedy. See, as a kid I didn't understand how a woman could get married or 5 times - I didn't even know if I'd grow up and get married once. And what did it mean to be married? And what was all that "til death do us part" stuff about, anyway?
Then I grew up, of course, and got married, divorced, and married again. And with each change came a little bit more self-awareness, or so I'd like to think anyway, and now suddenly I've got old stories to tell. I've been in touch this past year with a couple of people who I haven't seen since college, and that inevitable question comes up - what have you been doing for the last two decades? So I tell my story and listen to theirs, and I try not to judge (myself, that is) - because it's easy to become one's own harshest critic. I made THIS choice, and boy, that turned out to be a good (or bad) one. But, at the time, it might have felt like the opposite - or had no feeling attached to it at all, it was just a choice.
It's a great time to be alive, because we do enjoy so many personal freedoms. People can get married, or choose not to, or have kids, or not have kids. People can strive for success, or maybe try not so hard. People can stay at one job, or bounce from company to company. These are all choices to be made, and hopefully when you look back 20 or 30 years later, you can be proud of, or at least comfortable with, those choices.
That said, I have to place this film in its proper historical context - released in 1964, which may or may not have been a great time to be alive, I wouldn't know. But it's clear that women were enjoying some measure of personal freedom - they could get married and raise kids, or get married and be frustrated in a career. (I think later in the 1970's, women got to say, "Wait a minute, there should be a few more choices...")
The main character here just longs for a simple life with a husband, but each time she thinks she's found it, her husband gets a sudden urge to strive and succeed, which means more time away from her, and then their jobs end up killing them, in one way or another. What's the overall message here? That men who try to provide for their loved ones end up spending too much time away from those very same people? People should try to be successful, but not TOO successful? That fame and fortune are elusive, because after all, you can't take it with you?
It's a muddled message, at best. But just like those choices everyone makes, it's better to not assign too much meaning to the events which have taken place. Our heroine here does just that, and comes to the conclusion that she's a jinx, that it's somehow her fault that her husbands overworked themselves, and perhaps she should have done things differently. Hindsight is 20/20, but no one should beat themselves up over choices made with good intent.
It's also a radical notion of what constitutes success, or at least I'm guessing the idea was radical at the time - was this seen as some kind of hippie socialist message film? Did the notion that a janitor could be more happy than, say, a billionaire executive even make sense to anyone at the time? Does it even make sense now? Can someone even be "doomed to success"?
I'm probably overthinking this. Perhaps whoever put this together just wanted to do crazy send-ups of different movie genres. Each marriage is compared to a different style of film, like silent comedies, dance musicals, big-budget epics, or stylized foreign films. Maybe it's just one big in-joke, using the language of film to parody the history of film. Yeah, let's go with that.
The blog will be dark for a couple of days, since we have to go to Philadelphia for a friend's wedding. That makes the scheduling of this film seem really timely, doesn't it?
Also starring Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "Ocean's Eleven"), Dean Martin (last seen in "Robin and the 7 Hoods"), Dick Van Dyke (last seen in "Fitzwilly"), Robert Mitchum (last seen in "The Night of the Hunter"), Gene Kelly (last seen in "An American in Paris"), Bob Cummings, Margaret Dumont.
RATING: 4 out of 10 charging elephants
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