Marriage Is a Private Affair

... 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.

The product of a broken home who has been raised by her cynical, much-married mother, Lana Turner enters into the kind of hasty wartime marriage everyone in 1944 was being warned against. And the man she chooses is stable, romantic and old-fashioned. Uh-oh. This picture shows how 'women's films' and 'soap operas' could sometimes tackle modern life's most important moral and ethical situations. Turner's character wants to commit herself to her marriage but realizes she hasn't the experience or the emotional tools to be a good wife, nor does she have the example of her parents' happy marriage to follow. MARRIAGE IS A PRIVATE AFFAIR explores that dilemma and does it very entertainingly. Too bad Lana didn't take the film's theme to heart!

As the newlyweds, Turner and John Hodiak have a wonderful sensuality and seeming spontaneity together during the scenes that take place on their honeymoon as they are first getting to know each other. And the movie presents a very interesting moral complication when it introduces the threesome that are Hodiak's closest friends from childhood. Consisting of a married couple and their male pal, Hodiak idealizes them but Turner recognizes the sexual tensions that will eventually threaten that marriage. For those who assume that '40s films never dealt with sexual issues, this picture might be a refreshing surprise, especially since it came from MGM, Hollywood's most conservative studio.

And for those who generally think of Lana Turner's late films when you think of her at all, her work in this and other early '40s pictures might surprise you too. Looking ravishingly pretty with a lush but trim body, in these years Turner actually seems to look at and listen to her fellow actors, and speaks her lines with expression and emotion, a real contrast to her sluggish, lazy late work.

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.

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.

this is truly a collectors item. turner is at her most beautiful, all baby doll pout and velvet sincerity. production values are high. its a cult film that merits rediscovery. a big hit in 1944, it grossed 2 million at the box office, in the days when a hit was really a hit. audiences loved lana in her dimpled heyday and this film screens like a valentine to her sensuality. don't miss it. they don't make stars like lana anymore. gore vidal is on record as saying that he saw this film while young and that it had an impact on him. he mentioned it years later in myra breckinridge. tennesse williams worked on an early draft of the screenplay, and privately referred to it as a celluloid brassiere for miss turner!