by Douglas
Messerli
Norman
Krasna (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Mr. & Mrs. Smith / 1941
Early in Alfred Hitchcock’s only “pure” comedy, we learn of
a strange mix-up, a not totally explicable error, wherein a small town on the
Nevada-Idaho border which has mistakenly married several individuals whose
license was from the wrong state. The nearly always arguing couple, Mr. and
Mrs. Smith, accordingly, were illegally married, and their current
license—despite their three years of having lived together—is invalid.
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Of course, in
1941, when this film was made, living together without being married meant a
great many other things than it does today, and it sets into motion a series of
comic crises in the Smiths—or now Mr. Smith’s and Miss Krausheimer’s—household,
particularly since Mr. Smith does not immediately announce the situation to his
“wife,” and has just that morning answered her question honestly:
Ann: If you had it all to do over again, would you still have
married
me?
David: Honestly, no.
In part, in a
scene where he have seen the relationship at work, his feelings surely arise
from his wife’s imperious imposition on their marriage a series of rules and
regulations, one demanding that neither of them can leave the bedroom after a
fight until they make up, a dictate that has, more than once, meant that David
(Robert Montgomery) has missed several days of work—in part because of his
wife’s stubborn refusal to make up.
When David does
not immediately tell her of the news, nor rushes to remarry his wife,
accordingly, we know we will witness an hour or more of a bumpy marital comedy
that, metaphorically speaking, crosses several “borders.” Despite the movie’s
success at the box office, critics of the day did not know what to make of
Hitchcock’s “only” comedy. But then Hitchcock, I would argue, has always been,
even at his most suspenseful, a comedian at heart. If a man can make you laugh
at death and horror, then surely he can direct a “normal” screwball comedy,
I think the
great director achieved his goal splendidly, but this work has fewer of the
superficial romantic tropes than do most of the works in this genre. Like a
great comedy such as Bringing Up Baby,
Krasna’s work crosses the boundaries of sexual preference several times, but
the handsome, but more menacing psychic of Montgomery cannot match the openly
dashing profile of Cary Grant; and in this film, moreover, Lombard seems far
more “lucid” and head-strung than—as she was in My Man, Godfrey—dizzily confused. Throwing former husband David out
of his house, Ann seems determined to allow him to return to his bachelor days
and ways, which, just under the surface, is what he may have wanted all along.
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Despite his
constant attempts to return and even forcefully re-impose himself upon the
woman he claims to love, there is something, in Hitchcock’s direction, that is
half-hearted about the attempt; and even if he seems slightly at odds living on
his own, David also keeps meeting up with an old friend, Chuck Benson (Jack
Carson) in the Turkish bath of his local club.
When Ann takes
up, professionally and socially, with
David’s partner-in-law and former college friend, Jefferson Custer (Gene
Raymond), we can only further wonder about David’s sexual preferences,
particularly since, as Ann herself puts it, Jefferson is everything that David
is not: instead of leaning toward, he leans away. A mama’s boy, prone to colds
and fevers, he has smartly decorated his apartment on his own. After a comic
rainstorm (wherein the two suffer the weather in a broken-down parachute ride),
when he excuses himself to change into something
For all these
years, however, David and Jefferson have very nicely worked together in what seems to be a lucrative
partnership. It becomes harder and harder, accordingly, for us to truly
perceive that David is actively pursuing his wife, even though, in the plot, he
temporarily hires a taxi, pretending to be a detective. The only being we do
truly detect in David’s travels about the city is Hitchcock himself briskly
walking down the street.
Hitchcock
doesn’t quite seem to have his heart into the chase, forcing Lombard to
continue to up-the-ante. At a dinner club, when David finds himself with two
course women, he pretends, as Ann is watching, to talk to the lovely women next
to him, only to have his own date wrestle him to the floor with a knife to his
nose, in order, presumably to stop him from bleeding. David has attempted to
used that effect several times so that he might escape the evening, but usually
without success. In short, he is displeased by most of the women he encounters.
Not for him are the rough characters to whom his sauna bath friend, Charles
Benson, introduces him, who order up pheasants while describing them as
overcooked chicken. If Jefferson Custer is a slightly prissy human being, so
too is our “hero.”
Only near the end of the film—as the story takes a strange twist by leaping into a ski vacation at Lake Placid—does David become determined to deceive Ann into admitting her love for him. Pretending to fall into a drunken-induced coma, he depends on her nursing instincts to, so to speak, “bring back him back to life and into the picture.” But even here, the comic sexual gags appear to point into the wrong direction: as Jefferson undresses him, David commenting on his feminine apparel (“I’ll never forget you in the little blue dress.”), and, as Ann shaves him, and he holds his hand out for what Ann interprets is a desire for a manicure. Ann encourages Jefferson to hold his hand, which David not only accepts but holds in a deep grip.
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We all know, of
course, that sexual order must be restored! But even when it is, as the couple
are trapped miles from the main lodge with no transportation or communication
available until morning, she is held in place by pair of upright skis, which
would seem to make it nearly impossible for the couple of have “normal” sex.
And Hitchcock closes his tale with no truly authoritative reconfirmation of
sexual order. The couple will, at least, remain unmarried for another night.
I think it is
precisely Hitchcock’s lack of definite borders, however, that makes this work
so brilliant—and so different from most of the screwball comedies of the era.
Once more, Hitchcock has ended his story less with the marital restrictions
with which it began than with a strong dose of sexual suspense. What will
happen to this obviously loving but persistently “border crossing” pair?
Obviously, like the crossed skis in which Ann is trapped, their desires are at
crossed purposes. And unlike those hundreds of the normalized endings of
American comedies, Hitchcock and Krasna have let them merrily get away with it!
Homophobic Robert Montgomery would, of course, be shocked by such a
reading! But so too would have Charlton Heston been outraged if he had know that
in one of his very best scenes in Ben Hur, he was actually expressing his love of
a man.
Los Angeles,
September 30, 2013
Reprinted from International
Cinema Review (September 2013).
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