The Marrying Kind

Number two in my Judy Holliday viewing is The Marrying Kind, another film by George Cukor. This was the follow-up to her Oscar-winning role in Born Yesterday, but she is not a ditzy dame in this movie. She and her husband, played by Aldo Ray, are ordinary folks with ordinary lives. As they recount their married lives to the judge who is hearing their divorce case, we see how their voice-over narration contrasts with  the events-- they whine about how awful things were, but we see them laughing and enjoying life. However, we also see how marriage is a trap for her, in the man's idea that he has the last word in his wife's life--when her former boss leaves her some money, he reacts as if she had cheated on him, yelling, blustering, storming out, and generally treating her as if she were dishonest and unfaithful. Earlier we'd seen how he'd gotten drunk at a party and flirted with another woman, then yelled at her. It's the double standard that gets in their way: he doesn't want her to work; he doesn't listen to her; he's doesn't recognize her autonomy. She isn't very effective at countering his behavior, and that's where both the comedy and the realism come in. I wish they'd gotten that divorce but the Hayes Code had them in separate beds and with a happy ending. I really wish that someone had posted a clip of the dream sequence where Aldo Ray, whose character is a postal worker, dreams that he is hauled out of bed by a conveyor belt that shunts him through the postal warehouse like a package.