La ciudad de Trinidad, Patrimonio de la Humanidad

In this chapter, I focus my attention upon parents, daughters and the home. Before presenting my case studies, I shall briefly consider an archetype that links these issues with those of my previous two chapters: the girl detective.

At the conclusion of a high-speed car chase, a father turns to his daughter and says, ‘This is getting too dangerous for you. We’re going home and you’re going to keep out of the whole affair while you’re still in one piece.’ The irony of the moment is that she is behind the wheel, and she drives off protesting this parental decree, just as she has resisted all previous attempts to trammel or restrict her. Our understanding of the film, and the character, is that ‘home’ is entirely the wrong place for this young woman – the scene is from Nancy Drew Detective (William Clemens, 1938, Warner Bros.).

In the previous chapter, I have contrasted Nick Jr. and Boy as two examples of pre-sexual masculinity, one cloistered in domesticity, the other defined by intrepid excursions into the wilderness. It is noteworthy then that their female counterparts in film, the girls who leave matriarchy behind and venture into the traditionally male world of adventure, are similarly pre-sexual. There are numerous examples from popular literature; Craig and Cadogan list various early twentieth-century schoolgirl detectives who ‘stood out in girls’ fiction as symbols of emancipation and

adventurousness’.359

359

Craig, Patricia, and Cadogan, Mary, The Lady Investigates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 113.

Writing of screwball heroines, Cavell observes a pattern of absent mothers, which he takes to be at once a convention of comedy, an acknowledgement of the myth that ‘the creation of the woman is the business of man’ and a disinclination to depict the suffragette generation.360 Craig and Cadogan note a similar trend in their schoolgirl heroines, suggesting that the diminished mother figure permits distance from a prescriptive home. Given that its plot concerns the search for a beneficent older woman, it is striking that Nancy Drew Detective makes no reference to Nancy’s absent (presumably deceased) mother, leaving Nancy to bring her father his slippers. In this chapter, I look at films about parents and their daughters, asking how marriage accommodates the female child.

Discussing Nancy Drew and her contemporary Sylvia Silence, Craig and Cadogan write,

Both girls started their careers by helping their investigator fathers, who were quickly relegated to off-stage roles. Almost all the young female investigators were followers in their fathers’ footsteps rather than police-trained professionals. Mothers were either non-existent or merely psychological wallpaper. In this respect girl-detective stories resembled the boarding-school fiction that had been popular since the first decade of the twentieth century, when Angela Brazil neatly swept away domestic restrictions by transporting her heroines from hearth to hockey pitch and throwing in plenty of communal high-jinks.361 In manoeuvring their heroines away from that position, then, these stories

acknowledge a domestic destiny as the gendered norm. In Nancy Drew Detective, the gap between our heroine’s expectations and society’s is frequently the subject of humour. ‘I think every intelligent woman should have a career,’ Nancy (Bonita Granville) informs her middle-aged female teacher, who, we may assume, has fought that battle herself. Yet this naivety is presented positively, especially when held up to ridicule by less enlightened characters. Nancy’s antagonistic relationship with police

360

Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness, pp. 57-58.

361

chief Captain Tweedy (Frank Orth) is a case in point. When he derides her with the words, ‘Now little girl, you’d better go back to the kindergarten and play with your dolly,’ we share Nancy’s outrage; it is therefore a triumph when, at the end of the film, Tweedy admits that Nancy is ‘a pretty brave girl’.

That he does so to Nancy’s father, while Nancy sleeps, is significant. The film ends with Nancy and her sidekick Ted (Frankie Thomas) snoozing in the back of the car. After adventures that have seen Nancy driving after villains, hiring a light

aircraft and firing off a gun, this final scene restores her to childhood. It also ends the film on an image of Nancy and Ted as a couple, albeit an entirely chaste one.

Ted is a capable and steady small-town lad, not girl-crazy like Andy Hardy, but resignedly falling in with Nancy’s schemes so that she doesn’t get into too much trouble. Most of the rough stuff in the series falls to Ted, and he usually creates solutions, as in Nancy Drew Detective when he fashions a ham radio from discarded equipment in a cellar. Their friendship is one of mutual affection and frustration, perhaps the best indication that one day they might be sweethearts, or even husband and wife (though Nancy would surely be breadwinner in that family). The series’ coyness over the subject of teenage sexuality leads Basinger to dismiss its depiction of womanhood:

Two examples of the female detective on-screen are the characters of Nancy Drew and Hildegarde Withers. The first is a teenager, played by Bonita Granville, and the second is an old-maid schoolteacher, played by Edna May Oliver. Both are brilliant, determined, intrepid, self-confident, bossy, and more than able to solve a crime and survive a roughing-up. Significantly, however, neither is really in a position to fall in love and have her detecting ability ruined, called into question, or sacrificed for marriage. One is too young, and the other is too old. In other words, these movies off-set the fact that a woman is doing a man’s job by having the woman in both cases be sexless, or not really a woman.362

362

Basinger, Jeanine, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 450.

It is an odd assertion: that to be a woman, one must be sexually active. In fact, these films seem to insist upon the opposite: that womanhood is not dependent upon sexual interest. In Nancy, we see a character positively associated with both home and the outdoors, enjoying a healthily antagonistic relationship with both father and

boyfriend. Writing of the source novels, Linda K. Christian-Smith advances a more positive view of Nancy’s relationship to femininity and domesticity:

Economically dependent and manager of the household, Nancy

occupies the traditional position of a white middle-class woman of her time: the domestic discourse frames the gendered and economic dimensions of Nancy Drew as hero. Where traditional male heroes are free from domestic obligations, these novels are clear that domesticity is compatible with heroism, especially when women’s domestic involvement is voluntary and managerial.363

In this chapter, I challenge the assumption that home must be a restrictive space for daughters. In Penny Serenade and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, the representation of parents, daughters and domestic space anticipates an imagined, benign future. Both films make the provision of domesticity an accepted duty of marriage, in a manner antithetical to Nick and Nora Charles. In Penny Serenade and

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House the responsibility to create a nurturing environment stands as a metaphor for the success of a marriage, even when it threatens the parents’ happy memories of courtship and first love. As we shall see, parents competitively project their egos onto their daughters in these films. My case studies highlight this depiction of children as a function of marriage.364 In this respect, I posit Penny Serenade and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House as oppositional to Cavell’s comedies of remarriage.

363 _{Christian- Smith, Linda K., ‘More Than Crime on Her Mind: Nancy Drew as Woman Hero’, Jones,}

Dudley and Watkins, Tony (eds.), A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children’s Popular Culture (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 99.

364

Writing of the absence of children in those films, Cavell suggests that making room for a child involves transforming one’s idea of home.365 One might add that if this child is a daughter, then one is also imbuing an idea of home, or laying the grounds for matriarchy and dynasty, as in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, when a mother states that they are building a house for ‘the children, and the children’s children’.

These are films about the creation, or renewal, of a home. Penny Serenade is the story of a couple and their adopted infant daughter; Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House depicts a slightly older family. Both narratives explore locations as imaginative spaces, cradles in which a daughter might blossom and a marriage be reinvigorated.

Recollections of a shared life

Helmer. Can you understand your place in your own home?366

Penny Serenade tells the story of a marriage in retrospect. It begins at a moment of crisis, as Julie (Irene Dunne) prepares to leave the home she has made with Roger (Cary Grant). In this way, the film can begin after the death of the child, and yet still dramatise her arrival. The framing narrative only intimates at the source of Julie’s sadness, showing us her courtship with Roger and the progress of their marriage in flashback as they fight to adopt, and then keep, an infant daughter. The eventual loss of this child to illness divides Julie and Roger, and only the last-minute news that another child is available for adoption reunites them at the film’s

conclusion.

365

Cavell, Stanley, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 59.

366

The setting of the framing narrative, and much of the action in flashback, is Roger and Julie’s meagre home in the town of Rosalia. Its division of space reflects the architecture of the marriage; Roger associated with downstairs (a space of work shared with male employees) and Julie upstairs (the living quarters, adapted to the purpose of raising a child). This expressive mise-en-scene becomes increasingly important as the suitability of the home and the success of Roger’s business are made determining factors in the authorities’ decisions over their family. It is important too that the film’s flashbacks show us previous spaces inhabited by Roger and Julie (most prominently, a house in Japan), against which we measure their present existence. This comparison charts a growing seclusion, and perhaps an oppression, resulting from the couple’s marriage – thus, while a long shot of the Japanese house shows us its decorative garden, we only see glimpses of the exterior of the home in Rosalia.

By organising narrative events through the act of remembrance, Penny Serenade not only suggests the past’s impression upon the present, but also foregrounds the mediation of these memories. The mode of narration is explicitly presented as subjective experience, despite the inclusion of ‘memories’ for which Julie is not present. Jeanine Basinger has argued that

The flashback is a perfect cinematic form for a story about a woman, being in and of itself a rigid, entrapping format that says clearly that there are no choices but the one already made. When a woman faces her final dramatic crisis, she begins to relive her life. This becomes a review of how she made the choice that got her where she is, and in true woman’s film attitude, this choice is always, but always the wrong one. A flashback is a passive form of storytelling, in that it visualizes events that are allegedly past, inactive and over with, done. When a woman’s story is told in such a way, it illustrates her restrictive present, in which all that matters is already predetermined.367

Sadly, Basinger only restricts herself with this account of films that deal complexly with female agency. In Penny Serenade, Julie’s perception of domestic space changes

367

through the act of recollection, disrupting any sense of predetermination and

discouraging us from assigning fixed meanings to souvenirs of a narrated past. The film does not employ expressionistic visual effects to these ends, nor does it provide enough evidence of first-person narration for us to advance a coherent subjective reading (there is, for example, no voiceover from Julie). Rather, by stressing the pathetic impact of these objects and spaces upon Julie, the film opens up the possibility that material reminders of happiness can, from another perspective, become unbearably poignant.

In one of the few extended pieces on Penny Serenade, Caryl Flinn argues that the film’s soundtrack articulates the utopian possibilities open to Julie. Noting the use of gramophone records to provoke recollection, Flinn argues that this emphasis upon the aural presents marriage ambiguously. Of Penny Serenade’s framing narrative, she

writes,

Its highly mediated “story of a happy marriage” makes it impossible for Julie’s nostalgic reverie to be construed as a real or utterly

reclaimable “truth.” At the same time, since the film’s female subject finds within this past ways in which her role as a mother is also mediated and constructed – and thus reconstructible – the film acknowledges motherhood as a site for potential utopian alternatives.368

The past is not set in stone (or even in wax) but, through the act of replaying, open to reinterpretation. As Julie’s sentimental impulse leads her to selectively order her marriage through the songs of her past, so the film invites us to read that past as malleable.

While this is a film about a married couple, its focus is squarely on Julie. Roger is always kept at a distance, his motivations mysterious to Julie and to us.369 To use Cavell’s phrase, Roger bears ‘the taint of villainy’, a characteristic that it is the

368 _{Flinn, Caryl, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, New}

Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 149.

369

business of marriage to overcome.370 The shading of Grant’s performance makes it difficult to accept Donald Richie’s accusation that the film is ‘male propaganda’.371

Echoing Cavell, Richie suggests that, as a result of George Stevens’ tendency to idealise his heroines, ‘it is the men who indicate to women their ideal state, or else indicate how such a state may be achieved’.372

However, Richie’s example (Julie not knowing how to change her daughter’s diaper) is problematic; he fails to note that Roger is as helpless as his wife and that it is the couple’s friend Applejack (Edgar Buchanan) who steps in with instruction.

In its focus upon female autonomy, Penny Serenade’s framing narrative

strongly evokes A Doll’s House. Like Ibsen’s Nora, Julie sees her life as though for the first time. Both texts use commercial metaphors to describe their couples,

supplementing failures to communicate with largely decorative children, who serve to justify the marriage. However, unlike Ibsen’s heroine, Julie elects not to leave her home, preserving her marriage on the promise of a new child.373

Mementoes and music

Souvenirs are set like clues at the beginning of Penny Serenade, before we can assign them narrative associations. The credits play over a framed photograph of the couple, its place on the mantel suggesting the enshrinement of happiness within the domestic. The actors’ faces pressed cheek-to-cheek resembles a publicity still,

370 _{Cavell, Stanley, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago:}

University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 85.

371 _{Richie, Donald, George Stevens, An American Romantic (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), p.}

32.

372 _Ibid.

373 _{Egil Törnqvist reminds us that many contemporary productions rewrote the ending of the play so}

that Nora remained in the home. Learning of these unauthorised revisions, Ibsen produced his own alternative ending, with the caveat that it contradicted his intention and was ‘a barbaric act of violence’. Ibsen’s revised version ends with Nora staying with Helmer for the sake of the children, exclaiming, ‘Oh, this is a sin against myself, but I cannot leave them.’ Törnqvist, Egil, Ibsen: A Doll’s House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 41-42.

evoking the genealogy of this star couple.374 Thus, while Roger-Julie’s past has yet to be portrayed, the film presents the popular memory of this star couple as a component of their personal history.375 The photograph’s shared look to the right of frame

suggests a consideration of the future, or of the oncoming narrative. With this first image, the film proposes a consideration of how a supposedly fixed past may affect present and future.

The next shot shows a man’s hand reaching for a bound volume, upon which we see the handwritten inscription From Me to You, Xmas 1932. As with the framed photograph, these words enshrine the couple as a unit. However, while the

photograph had allowed us to see the couple together, the intimacy of this autograph, dispensing even with names, suggests introversion and stasis, a stagnation of

subjectivity (Me) and objectivity (You). The legend on the cover, The Story of a Happy Marriage, reads like an epitaph. It is important, then, that the man consulting this volume is not Roger, but Applejack, whose skewed collar and clay pipe mark him out as a bachelor. His rueful examination of the book shows us that he cares about this marriage, and that he remembers it in his own way.

The insistent happiness of the volume’s title is complicated by its contents. The happy marriage’s story is not written down – it is made up of a series of

gramophone records, aural reproductions of the past, and mementoes tied to that past: baby booties and images of Japan. Applejack plays one of the discs, and we hear a male tenor singing the popular ditty ‘You Were Meant for Me’. The lyrics seem to fix ‘You’ and ‘Me’, object and subject, in a narrative of romantic destiny. However, as this line is sung, the camera moves right and down to show us Julie ascending a

374 _{Grant and Dunne had previously starred in the comedies The Awful Truth and My Favourite Wife,}

both discussed in my next chapter.

375

This is particularly evident in Roger and Julie’s first meeting at the record store, and the later scene