BEFORE: It's almost Valentine's Day, and the holiday is all about couples, so it seems only appropriate today for a couple of actors (and they are a couple in real life, too) to carry over from "Overboard". Yes, I'm talking about Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. And this also sets me up perfectly for my chosen film for Feb. 14. This aired on TCM a few months back, and I kept it on the DVR all that time, because with the last DVR upgrade, I lost the ability to dub films from TCM to DVD. FML, I guess I'm SOL, not LOL.
TCM was "Taking on the Nazis" yesterday, and I couldn't get to this film until today. Sometimes TCM and I just can't get on the same page. Here's their line-up for tomorrow, February 14, Valentine's Day, maybe we can get our topics to align. Their main theme is "A Good Cry", followed by "Favorite Movie Wedding" in primetime and "Favorite Movie Divorce" in late night:
6:00 am "Love Affair" (1939)
7:45 am "Random Harvest" (1942)
10:00 am "Waterloo Bridge" (1940)
12:00 pm "Dark Victory" (1938)
1:45 pm "Splendor in the Grass" (1961)
4:00 pm "All This and Heaven Too" (1940)
6:30 pm "Brief Encounter" (1945)
8:00 pm "The Philadelphia Story" (1940)
10:00 pm "Father of the Bride" (1945)
12:00 am "Kramer vs. Kramer" (1979)
2:00 am "Dodsworth" (1936)
Thank God the IMDB helps me keep track of what I've seen. I keep all my ratings there, so if a film displays my rating, I can be sure that I've seen it. "Love Affair" sounds familiar, but I haven't seen it. "Dark Victory" for sure, and I don't even need to look up "Splendor in the Grass" and "The Philadelphia Story" to know I've seen them. "Brief Encounter" is a no, but I'm fairly sure I've seen "Father of the Bride" (the Spencer Tracy one, not the Steve Martin one) before starting this project. And "Kramer vs. Kramer" is checked off my list, too, giving me 5 seen out of 11, not bad. My total is now 69 seen out of 162, still holding at 42.5%.
THE PLOT: A woman finds romance when she takes a job at an aircraft plant to help make ends meet after her husband goes off to war.
AFTER: I think the problem with a lot of Hollywood romance films is that many tend to be too simple - two people meet, they fall in love, they get married, the end. Or maybe there are some problems with the wedding, somebody gives a bad toast, somebody knocks over the wedding cake, ha ha, but they get married anyway, the end. And if the credits roll then, you extrapolate into the future, and those two people are together forever - just don't go looking for examples in the real world of two people who stayed together forever and never had any problems. So when a film comes along and muddies the water a bit, and makes the relationships more complicated, it can sometimes feel more real, like this could happen in the real world. Set it against the backdrop of history, and that can heighten the effect. Hey, World War II happened, so maybe this story happened too.
History is written by the winners, of course, so anything set back then tends to evoke the "Greatest Generation", the people who sacrificed to put an end to fascism in Europe and Japan, meanwhile the folks at home were rationing butter and running scrap metal drives and running blackout drills so that the war could be won faster. That's how we choose to remember it, anyway, even if we weren't there. But what about the sacrifices of the wives who watched their husbands go off to Europe or the Pacific, not knowing if they were going to come back, or if they'd get that telegram delivered by a soldier with horrible news. What effect did that have on thousands of relationships?
Meanwhile, all the men shipping out for military service left the workforce undermanned, so women were added to the workforce en masse, for menial jobs like riveting, because who knew more about doing menial jobs than women? Who knew more about working long hours for little pay? The situation was considered temporary, of course, since the men who survived the war were going to need their jobs back later, but progress on some level was made with the gender-based integration of the workforce. If you stop and think about it, Adolf Hitler doesn't get enough credit for all the things he did for women's rights. (Yes, I'm kidding here.)
A step in the right direction, overall, but like many things in history, it was simultaneously both good and bad. For example, having woman and men working side by side just opened the door for sexual harassment in the workplace. Men who were already feeling inadequate because they weren't fit for military service probably felt MORE inadequate when surrounded by women doing the same tasks. Yes, of course they could have just sucked it up and kept their egos in check, but come on - you know that instead many of them took it too hard and lashed out to cover up their hurt feelings.
Then there's the freedom that came along with being in new territory, new positions - and in the case of the lead character in this film, a new relationship with a male co-worker, while her husband was on a destroyer somewhere in the Pacific. How long was a woman expected to remain faithful during a long war, and was it even considered appropriate to have a good time while one's spouse was off in the military? These are complex questions, and perhaps when we romanticize the past, we don't hear enough stories about the people who did what they had to do to survive and maintain a positive attitude during tough times.
And so we have this love triangle, the wife with the absent husband and the work boyfriend, which gets more complicated when the husband returns on leave, and the work boyfriend turns to the wife's best friend, so I guess it's sort of a love quadrangle at that point. (Then her ex-boyfriend comes back, so for a brief moment it's a love pentangle, only that kind of geometry just can't be maintained for any length of time.).
According to Wikipedia, there was a huge conflict on the production of this film between the stars (Hawn & Russell) and director Jonathan Demme - the actors wanted a more lighthearted film about infidelity during wartime, and the director thought it was a more serious topic. Yeah, I guess I can see the problem - the director won out and this plays out more like a drama then a comedy - how could you possibly make this topic more comedic, I wonder? It's sort of like Shakespeare, the comedies are the ones where love conquers all and everyone lives, and the dramas are the ones where the lovers part or everyone dies.
I didn't even pick up on the double meaning of the title until the movie was over - and of course I think the contributions made by women on the homefront were important, but I also can't help but feel that this feels like a back-up story to that of the war. OK, we're getting some perspective here, but maybe just a little bit too much? Like we're focusing on the background players, and not the main characters of World War II, do you know what I mean?
Also starring Christine Lahti (last seen in "Smart People"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Mother!"), Fred Ward (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Holly Hunter (last heard in "Incredibles 2"), Belita Moreno, Sudie Bond, Patty Maloney, Lisa Pelikan (last seen in "Julia"), Penny Johnson Jerald, Charles Napier (last seen in "Melvin and Howard"), Roger Corman, Chris Lemmon, Stephen Tobolowsky (last seen in "Love Liza"), Susan Peretz, Joey Aresco, Alana Stewart, with a cameo from Belinda Carlisle (last seen in "Whitney: Can I Be Me").
RATING: 4 out of 10 taxi dancers
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