Two months after the premiere of The Captain’s Paradise (Anthony Kimmins, 1953), a British comedy in which Alec Guinness plays a man with two wives in two separate households, another, much finer American film appeared about a man leading a similar double life. Harry Graham is a traveling salesman whose wife of some time, Eve, has been his business partner, while Phyllis is his newer spouse. Harry and Phyllis have an infant child; the other couple, childless, are in the process of adopting, and it is the routine investigation of the prospective father that unearths the bigamy. The film ends at Harry’s criminal trial with a visual clue as to whether either woman will remain married to Harry.
This is a remarkably sensitive and bold film, one that presents familiar characters in order to contest their stereotypical nature and the neatly packaged morality that was socially and politically promoted at the time in the U.S. More than fifty years later, it has renewed currency because of a similar fearfulness in whose grip the nation finds itself.
The adoption agent conducting the investigation is named Mr. Jordan, the name given God in a popular Hollywood comedy, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall, 1941). He is played (excellently) by Edmund Gwenn, who five years earlier received an Oscar playing Kris Kringle in another popular Hollywood comedy, Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947)—a family classic today, but a film condemned back then by the Catholic Church for its acceptance of divorce as a fact of postwar American life. In The Bigamist Harry likens Mr. Jordan to Santa Claus; this is more than an “in-joke.” Jordan’s Godlike nature confers credibility on his ambivalent response to the moral muddle in which Harry finds himself. Jordan tells Harry, “I despise you, and I pity you. I don’t want to shake your hand, and yet I almost wish you luck.” Because the film shows the entire process by which Harry becomes a bigamist, which involves no malice on his part toward either wife (the judge notes that he likely loves them both), and going even further with the lead given us by Jordan’s well expressed ambivalence, we find ourselves extending Harry even greater sympathy. Our complex reaction to a blatant social taboo nudges us, most surprisingly, in the direction of nonjudgmentalism, and the oddly sympathetic remarks of the judge presiding at trial, not to mention the fact that the film ends before sentence is passed, help to confirm that this is the film’s intent. Lurking beneath the marital meanings, of course, is the political taboo of Leftist affiliation in the McCarthy era. Embracing the metaphor, we have seen how Harry slid into a lifestyle choice that would be roundly condemned outside the movie theater where The Bigamist is being shown.
There are so many layers to this film! Collier Young’s splendid script, from a story by Larry Marcus and Lou Schor, was directed brilliantly by Ida Lupino, who also (beautifully) plays Phyllis, while Joan Fontaine is close to phenomenal in the more challenging role of Eve. Well, as it happens, Young himself was married to both these actresses—although, I hasten to add, at different times: Lupino, 1948-1951; Fontaine, 1952-1961. Fontaine and Young were married, then, at the time of the filming, and the director, who also was playing the other wife, was Young’s immediately previous wife. The mind boggles in its attempt to wrap itself around all this history behind the scenes and, at some level, likely in the scenes.
Lupino, Hollywood’s quintessential hard-luck girl of the forties, flashes pride as Phyllis and eventually gives Harry his walking papers. Her Phyllis contests the stereotype of the “loser” who settles for a vitamin-enriched half a loaf in life. But Fontaine’s Eve breaks the bank in terms of human complexity. She is the cool, aloof, efficient, highly motivated and intelligent spouse who is the driving force of the Grahams’ business partnership/marriage—only, surprisingly committed in her desire to make herself and her husband truly happy, she shifts gears and pursues the adoption without pushing anybody, including herself. We get to see her relax out of her proficiency into her humanity—and I can’t tell you the number of stereotypical female movie characters that her delicate, strong, increasingly warm Eve confronts as a result. On one level, the script seems to saddle Eve with the conventional burden of being the reason that Harry becomes an “absentee husband” who is not quite fulfilled in his marriage. Delightfully, however, Fontaine enacts the role of Eve as though neither of them had read the script! She breathes life into a character whose heart and passion otherwise would be ignored so that the filmmaker might score insidious points at the character’s expense. Lupino’s generosity, as co-star and director, matches the beauty of Fontaine’s performance.
Edmond O’Brien plays Harry beautifully as well. Her generosity again kicking in, Lupino allows us to see the touching degree to which Harry needs to feel needed. She takes his feelings seriously, and so do we.
I enjoyed Martin Scorsese’s praise for Lupino as a filmmaker on the occasion of her passing. I hope that he let her know how wonderful he thought she was sooner than that.
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Dennis Grunes 