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“Yesterday, that might have meant something… Now it means nothing, nothing at all.”
That’s Gloria Grahame at the end of 1950’s In a Lonely Place. Grahame plays a young woman named Laurel Gray, who fell in love with an alcoholic screenwriter named Dixon “Dix” Steele (Humphrey Bogart) when they were both swept up into the investigation of a coat check girl’s murder. As the police land on Dix as the prime suspect in the case, however, his relationship with Laurel is put under tremendous strain—for Dix is a verifiably suspicious character, with a hair-trigger temper and a rap sheet full of assaults. When Laurel speaks the above lines, the police have just phoned to exonerate Dix, but he’s not around to take the call. In one of his periodic violent trances, rankled by Laurel’s suspicion, he’d just attempted to strangle her, only to get hold of himself at the last moment and pull back, retreating from her bedroom and, as the film closes, shuffling disconsolately across the courtyard of their apartment complex, never to return to her arms.
“Ah, how too, too true,” I thought, with the perfect wisdom that is the gift of all twenty-year-olds, when I encountered that “…Now it means nothing” in a college class on Nicholas Ray. My CD collection at the time betrayed a penchant for what I once heard pejoratively called “sad white boy music,” and if I knew anything about love, it’s that it was by definition fleeting and tragic, fated to die. My professor’s preferred reading, however, was that Dix and Laurel were both closeted homosexuals. His explanation had something to do with Dix’s hobby of punching out pretty young men because he couldn’t bring himself to kiss them, and particularly with the scene where a bulky lady masseuse kneads away at Laurel. Certainly Raymond Nicholas Kienzle’s filmography is rife with moments of confusion about sex and sexual identity, like James Dean almost ducking into the Girls’ room on his first day at a new school in Rebel Without a Cause, or James Mason rolling over to offer up his ass when the doctor demands to give him a shot in the “sternum” in Bigger than Life (“Sorry,” he says by way of explanation, “I spent four years in the Navy.”) This is to say nothing of the fact that Ray was by most accounts an up-for-anything polymorphous pervert, who found his wife at the time of the In a Lonely Place shoot—none other than Ms. Grahame—in bed with his 13-year-old son from a prior marriage. But I could not surrender a movie that I felt so deeply to a reading I did not, and instead thought In a Lonely Place indicative of the universal human condition: Things fall apart! Love withers! Entropy reigns!
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As far back as I can remember, I have been drawn toward movies that flatter and reconfirm an ingrained bias in favor of romantic failure, rather than Happily Ever After. Affecting romantic fatalism is, of course, a neat escape-hatch excuse for fecklessness, as many a lad learns in his oat-sewing days. Or is the appeal something deeper, something to do with being a child of divorce? A psychiatrist would have a field day—is there any other profession in which proverbial “field days” are so common? Frederic March certainly has one in the double-role of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and every time I view it afresh, I’m leveled at the scene of March at his most wrenching, begging his fiancée, played by Rose Hobart, to forget him. (There are, of course, innumerable readings of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s story as a metaphor for the double-life of the Victorian homosexual. Another field day!)
More recently, my byline appeared on a review of Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, in which I referred to “the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience, that we can or will find every quality that we want in a single person.” The triangle of Davies’ film, adapted from Terence Rattigan’s stage play, has a woman torn between a virile working-class lover, with whom she shares sexual chemistry, and an upper-class husband, with whom she shares intellectual and cultural interests. A variation on this same triangle occurs in Maurice Pialat’s 1980 Loulou, with Gérard Depardieu as the title’s brawny café-loafing mec whom Isabelle Huppert’s character, Nelly, runs off with—abandoing Guy Marchand André. Pialat always sticks his endings—see Loulou’s penultimate scene with Nelly, sitting alone in her thoughts and pregnant with Loulou’s child at the rude dinner table of his vulgar family, just before making the decision to abort; or the parental house and hometown seen rapidly receding from the rear of the car in La Gueule ouverte, with a never-to-return finality. None of Pialat’s kickers, however, twist the knife quite like the last shot of 1972’s Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (We Won’t Grow Old Together). The film follows the protracted breakup, in a series of increasingly wounding exchanges, of a couple played by Marlène Jobert and Jean Yanne. After the rupture has become irreparable and bearish Yanne has been abandoned, Jobert reappears a final time, happily plashing in the ocean water in her Missoni swimsuit. This is in the rueful memory of Yanne’s character, who we’ve seen do nothing but drive her away with his belittling, overbearing, and often outright abusive treatment. But even with the knowledge, after a feature-length acquaintance with Yanne’s character, that if had her back he would only repeat his mistakes, it is crushing.
Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble belongs to the suddenly-repentant-asshole-learns-only-too-late-the-error-of-his-ways-and-weeps-crocodile-tears subgenre of romantic tragedy, probably most famously represented by Federico Fellini’s La Strada, with the director’s own long-suffering wife, Giulietta Masina, soaking up brusque mistreatment from Anthony Quinn, who’s left ululating on the beach when he learns that his loyal, much-kicked puppy has finally given up the ghost and died. (Come to think of it, Quinn plays a repentant asshole in Allan Dwan’s The River’s Edge, too.) Woody Allen performs his own Dixieland cover version of La Strada in Sweet and Lowdown (“I made a mistake! I made a mistake!”), though I would recommend above all Mikio Naruse’s 1955 Floating Clouds, in which Masayuki Mori keeps Hideko Takamine, a lover who’s stuck to him after a wartime interlude in French Indochina, at bay with an impenetrable shield of nihilistic disgust, right up to the moment of her expiration.
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To love lost through indifference, let’s add love lost through simple ineffectuality or bad timing—as in Brian de Palma’s films, whose “heroes,” from Blow-Out to Body Double, seem always to be arriving just a hair too late to save the girl. I have been informed that a recent book, Chris Dumas’ Un-American Psycho: Brian de Palma and the Political Invisible, argues that these failures are an extended metaphor for the failure of the political left in America though, given my predilections, I find it more poignant to think that a missed chance at love is just that.
I can rattle off these and more titles, whose common denominator is the impossibility of lasting love, either due to fatal sexual, intellectual, or economic incompatibility, emotional unavailability, intervening death, bad timing, or mad science gone awry. A variation on the High Fidelity Koan springs to mind: “Did I watch romantic tragedy because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I watched romantic tragedy?” The final coupling followed by hasty credits is, of course, still the screen-entertainment rule proven by the above exceptions; I need to think a little longer, though, when it comes to movies about the day-to-day functioning of monogamy and marriage. I understand that Jeanine Basinger has just published a book on the latter subject, I Do and I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies—Bigger Than Life is apparently discussed therein—and I am putting it in my Amazon checkout as we speak because, I tell ya, all this doomy shit is starting to get me down.
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.