"Darling, You Get Lovelier Every Day"

Margaret Ferrand Thorp's 1939 book America at the Movies includes one of earliest (perhaps the earliest) examinations of Hollywood glamour. What did predominately female Depression-era audience find at the movies? Why did they keep coming back? Movie glamour wasn't just about luxury and sex appeal, suggests Thorp. There was another attraction as well.

What the typical adult American female chiefly asks of the movies is the opportunity to escape by reverie from an existence which she finds insufficiently interesting. Better ways of enriching her life, society has not yet taught her. She sees the quickest release from a drab, monotonous, unsatisfying environment in dreaming of an existence which is rich, romantic, glamorous. But dreaming, though a pleasant occupation, is not altogether easy. The making of a really good reverie demands considerable effort both of energy and of imagination. How can the American woman who buys her bread sliced and her peas shelled be expected to concoct her own reveries? At the movies she gets them ready-made, put up in neat two-hour cans.

One of the things she wants most is to be appreciated, not just by implication but right out loud. There is social and psychological significance in the fact that 70 per cent of Gary Cooper’s fan mail comes from women who write that their husbands do not appreciate them. Their ideal is still the ideal husband of the Victorian era who told his wife at breakfast every morning how much she meant to him, but that husband is not a type which the postwar American man has any interest in emulating. He prefers to conceal his deeper emotions at breakfast, and during the rest of the day as well. His wife, consequently, has to spend her afternoons at the movies.

In the movies a wife finds it quite worth while to get into a new evening frock for a tête-à-tête dinner at home because her husband is sure, by dessert time at least, to take her hand across the intimately small and inconvenient table and say, “Darling, you get lovelier every day.”

This account is interesting for two reasons. The scene Thorp describes is, first of all, a composite. It doesn't advance a plot point about specific characters in a specific film. Rather, it's an emotion-laden but generic snapshot, a scene whose meaning lingers in the memory to be enhanced by each new version of the scene. We experience glamour not as a narrative but as a moment.

Second, Thorp is describing something that today's moviegoers would find unremarkable. This scene doesn't depict penthouse living or satin and furs. It seems like a stylized version of pretty ordinary life.  The language is old-fashioned, of course, but the idea of a vocally affectionate husband is hardly exotic. It's been the norm since "the postwar American man" of the 1920s and 1930s was superseded by the "postwar American man" of the 1950s. 

But, I have to wonder, Where are the movies that include these portrayals of expressive, married love? Maybe I have too many Garbo DVDs, but married love doesn't seem that central to pre-1939 movies. Yet I can't imagine that Thorp simply made up this resonant scene. Was it a trope of forgettable films that kept housewives happy but never made it to Turner Classic Movies, let alone DVDs? Film students, please help me out. What movies is Thorp talking about? Or is she wrong?

[Still courtesy of Getty Images, which cannot identify the movie from which it was taken. The actor is Neil Hamilton, who decades later played Commissioner Gordon on Batman.]