Romance – Here’s Looking At You, Kid !
There is a moment at the end of Queen Christina when Garbo, queen no longer, steps up into the prow of the ship bound for Spain. This is the last we see of her, and she stands expressionless, gazing out over the water, behind her a kingdom and a lover lost, in front who knows? It is one of the cinema’s supreme romantic images and it works because into that sweet vacancy we pour all our own griefs and hopes of renewal. Why? Well, the theme’s a cinch of course – all for love has been slaying them for generations. But it’s the star too. Garbo seems to have realized instinctively that understatement extended rather than limited a performance. The enigmatic quality in all her mature work invites audience identification and it’s right there that the subtle alchemy of wish-fulfilment begins. The romantic movie is not interested in life as it is but in life as its audiences dream it might be.
That doesn’t mean it has to be roses all the way. Most of the great romantic themes are tragic, but it’s tragedy rounded out, made smooth. People suffer but they do it beautifully. They exult; they don’t moan and bitch and refuse to pass the marmalade. ‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ says Bogart to Ingrid Bergman at the end of Casablanca (1942). Duty and husband have won out ; love and happiness are renounced in a laconic farewell. Love denied is also the theme of Camille (1936), with dying courtesan Garbo rejecting young lover Robert Taylor lest she ruin his promising career; of The Dark Angel (1925), in which Ronald Colman, blinded in the First World War, conceals his plight and lets Vilma Banky find happiness with their best friend; and of Possessed (193 1), where Clark Gable turns the tables when he comes after mistress Joan Crawford having found out she’s left him because she believes their affair may wreck his hopes of becoming governor.
The noble sacrifice of mother love has been another constant theme in the romantic cinema. Madame X, Stella Dallas, and Imitation of Life are archetypal, each having been made several times (Madame X holds the record with five re-makes), but the also-rans include Hwnoresque (1920), The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931), Millie (1931), The Strange Case of Clara Deane (1932), Call Her Savage (1932), Wicked Woman (1935), and Primrose Path (1940). Mother would murder to protect her children from scandal or from a brutal husband, and even (oh, fate worse than death!) she walked the streets to keep them from starvation. Sometimes she was separated from them in early childhood due to some misdemeanour and found them again at the last; ‘Let me hold you for a moment as if you were my son,’ says Madame X and dies unrecognized.
Of course there are lovers too who think the world well lost for love: Queen Christina (1933), renouncing her kingdom; nightclub singer Marlene Dietrich, barefoot and eveninggowned, stalking off into the deserts of Morocco (1930); Anna Karenina (Garbo in 1927 and 1935, Vivien Leigh in 1948), played against Tolstoy’s text in a full-blown celebration of romantic love; Charles Boyer as Crown Prince Rudolph and Danielle Darrieux as mistress Maria Vetsera, choosing suicide in the hunting lodge at Mayerling (1936); Irene Dunne (1932), Margaret Sullavan (1941), and Susan Hayward (1961), all forsaking hopes of marriage and children to live as the Back Street mistress of a married man. Sullavan suffered rather well and she’d already sacrificed all for a brief whirl with John Boles in Only Yesterday (1933) and then, as the tubercular wife in Three Comrades (1938), she’d laid down her life so that husband Robert Taylor could make a fresh start. Others trade position for just a brief respite from life and then return regretfully to the old ways. Elinor Glyn’s legendary Three Weeks (1924) are spent on tiger skins and beds of immaculate roses, she (Aileen Pringle) queen of some Ruritanian kingdom and he (Conrad Nagel) a young Britisher of noble birth. Almost thirty years later princess Audrey Hepburn’s on the same kick when she meets up with American journalist Gregory Peck on an incognito Roman Holiday (1953)- Society being what it is, men seem to have their cake and eat it rather more effectively. Viz Nelson’s grand passion: just the thing for a succession of ‘great hero and grande amoHretise’ dramas which began in 1 92 1 with Lady Hamilton and continued right down to the cynical old 1970s with The Divine Lady (1928), That Hamilton Woman (1941), Emma Hamilton (1969), and A Bequest to the Nation (1973).
But parting being such sweet sorrow, it tends to get higher coverage. Exquisite was the agony amongst the teacups and the sticky buns as CeHa Johnson and Trevor Howard gave passion the go-by in Brief Encounter (1945). And Garbo spent a sizeable part of her early career being rejected by men who’d found out about her lurid past; in Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1931) she goes to the bad in a really big way but still she keeps on loving Clark Gable. With Lillian Gish unfulfilled love sometimes had more Freudian undertones. As The White Sister {1^22,) she takes the veil thinking
her sweetheart has died in battle, and it’s a flood that snatches her away from some awkward decision-making when he turns up again. Death intervenes in Visconti’s elegiac Death in Venice (197 1) too, but the beautiful boy who haunts the dying composer represents not just love but the whole area of ecstatic experience which as artist and man he has denied.
The fatal relationship is another hardy annual. There’s Theda Bara crying, ‘Kiss me, fool’, as she completes her lover’s degradation in A Fool There ll^ai- (1914); the mysterious Garance (Arletty) of Les Enfants du Paradis (1944), for whom Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) abandons wife and career; Charles Boyer as big-time gangster Pepe le Moko in Algiers (1938), falling for society-girl Hedy Lamarr and getting shot up when he tries to follow her to France; and Gene Tierney playing poor mad Ellen Berent in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), so obsessed with her husband that she kills her brother-in-law, aborts her own child, and makes her suicide look like the work of her half-sister. The terrible face of love indeed! But there’s an equally healthy subgenre intent on convincing us that love is the great redeemer. In the shape of Robert Browning it rescues a minor Victorian poetess from life as a semiinvalid in The Barrens of Wimpole Street (1937 and 1957), and when a cynical playboy goes religious after accidentally blinding a young widow, what more likely than that he should turn surgeon and restore her sight? Magnificent Obsession (1935 and 1954) was the name, and the incumbents Robert Taylor and Rock Hudson. In Unfinished Business (1941) Irene Dunne’s husband kicks alcoholism under her influence, and some inspired casting in The African Queen (1951) has prissy missionary Katharine Hepbum and drunken boatman Humphrey Bogart succumbing to the old black magic. Amnesia is the problem in Random Harvest (1942), but Greer Garson’s devoted nursing brings husband Ronald Colman back to health again and she marries him a jecond time-without him realizing it!
Sometimes love’s power transcends even death. Kay Francis and William Powell meet and fall in love on a One Way Passage to New York (1932); they agree to meet again in six months’ time though it can never be for she is dying and he sentenced to death. The six months pass, and come midnight on the appointed day in the bar where they would have met two champagne glasses shatter and the stems are found crossed . . . it’s their sign of course. Love beyond the grave is also the theme of Portrait of Jenny (1948), which has artist Joseph Gotten falling in love with Jennifer Jones, his ghostly young sitter, and of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1950), where Ava Gardner sails away with James Mason, the man condemned to search down the centuries for a woman prepared to die for him.
Most of the movies described here were deplored by the critics. They were ‘the women’s weepies’. One subgenre that had built-in man appeal was the romantic adventure film. The swashbucklers of the costume dramas might love – though honour or devilment were equally likely to be their motive – but it was the swordplay and the acrobatics that were their raisoti d’etre. Douglas Fairbanks confounding eight men with his dazzling swordsmanship in The Black Pirate (1926), Ronald Colmanas Rudolph Rassendyll coming face to face with the villainous Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Errol Flynn playing Captain Blood (1935), the physician cum slave cum pirate who ends up governor of Jamaica, Tyrone Power preserving the family honour in The Mark of Zorro (1940), and Burt Lancaster, the last of the breed, swinging through the rigging in The Crimson Pirate (1952): it was bravura athletics which brought the audiences in, and kept them there -to dream.
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