Marriage Is a Private Affair

I liked it. I thought it portrayed the struggles which many of us have. Lana Turner's character is undecided in life about quite a few issues, particularly marriage, though she also seems to have certain ideal views of these subjects. The last half of the movie I thought had the plot thicken so that her ambivalence would indeed make her character get stretched to the testing point. Actually quite a few testing points occur: with longtime boyfriend, husband, girlfriend, etc. After seeing the wreckage in her life and those around her, she does reach some mature decisions.

While we each may not have the same marriage commitment problem this movie showed, we can nonetheless use it as metaphor for our other personal struggles.

Lana Turner, in one of her earliest movies where she takes center stage and top billing, stars in this comedy-drama about marriage being nobody's business but the couple's. James Craig loves her, even though she marries John Hodiak. This does start off talking silly, as John proposes to her and on their honeymoon, but it's to the movie's credit and intelligence that it plays out very well in its treatment of its characters and make them very relate-able to the audience, the other characters being John's friends Sissy and Ted, a married couple, and Joe, played by Hugh Marlowe. Lana's mother (played by Natalie Shafer, who was Mrs. Howell from Gilligan's Island) was in and out of marriages all the time and did not provide Lana with a good role model. But, the viewer is left with the message that you should work in your own garden, before tending to someone else's, that you should go into it, knowing who you are and that all decisions have consequences. "Marriage is a Private Affair" is one of Lana's best unknown movies and needs to be discovered by more people today.

The makers of this film had a premise: a woman whose childhood makes her a rather flakey person, a bit unsure of herself, picks one of her many suitors just to see if she can. But from there, the movie forgets drama. Why should she come to embrace marriage? It's not the birth of her son. It's not any one thing that happens to her. There's no plot catalyst in this movie, no psychological edge. It's more like a soap opera, where the characters change for no particular reason.

... in that it is not that much about how the war impacts the homefront but just shows domestic situations as they exist during the war.

Theo (Lana Turner) is a popular girl who hangs out at an officer's club in New York. She meets Lieutenant Tom West (John Hodiak), and picks him from the pack of suitors that she has to marry. The sweetest part of the film is when they are on their honeymoon, getting to know each other since they hastily married. They have very different backgrounds - He's Boston born and bred, with parents who have been married 30 years. Her parents were divorced when she was an infant and mom (Natalie Schafer) has been a serial monogamist ever since.

There are a couple of unexpected turns from the beginning. Ted's father dies suddenly, and the War Dept. Cancels Ted's commission because he is an expert in lens design and his business partner, Joe (Hugh Marlowe), is an unreliable drunk - He's needed at home to work on lens designs for army equipment. The end result is the post-war post-Honeymoon part of their marriage starts sooner than originally planned.

Ted spends long hours at work, and it seems that you can take the girl out of the party but you can't take the party out of the girl. Now that's not such an unusual thing, not even in films going back to the silent era. What's different is that Turner and the script make this more of a three-dimensional situation than it usually is in movies of this era. It's part a product of the couple's hasty marriage, part Theo's upbringing where she witnessed marriage to be a transient thing that makes it hard for her to commit or be sure of anything, and partly her unrealistic expectations of just how long the honeymoon will last. Throw in a couple of iconoclastic situations involving people she looked up to and Theo is one confused girl.

This is a wartime film where the conflicts are completely emotional and not grounded in action at all. If you can deal with that you will probably enjoy it.

Just a note - Even though Natalie Schafer looks very young here, she actually was old enough to be Lana Turner's mother.

First let me say that Lana Turner certainly looks beautiful in her role as a woman who has no idea what she wants. Well, she does like to be pursued. And occasionally she likes the idea of marriage.

This film is listed under the comedy genre. The few forays into the realm of comedy do not make this a comedy any more than her hallucinatory scenes of past lovers makes this a science fiction film. Actually, the film cannot decide what it wants to be. The swing from lighthearted banter to life-altering urgency and back prevents the viewer from fully investing emotionally in the perils of Theo (Ms. Turner).

The only thing to recommend this film are the beautiful people who populate it. And the photography and fashion that frame them.

The script must have been worked and reworked a hundred times by numerous scribes. It is so disjointed that in the end it leaves you wondering what it was all about. Yes, there is the neat "there's no place like home"-type attempt to put a neat ribbon on it all, but it rings hollow. Just look at the pretty people and smile.