The Marrying Kind (1952)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) According to contemporary accounts, audiences didn’t quite know what to make of The Marrying Kind’s blend of comedy and drama, as it worked its way backward in flashbacks from the divorce court to show the strains of an ordinary marriage. Helmed by George Cukor, the film showcased funny scenes in between more dramatic ones, and I can understand how unpleasant it must have felt for critics and audiences back then to sit through what feels like ninety minutes of arguments between husband and wife. But there’s been a critical re-evaluation of the film by later generations, helped along by a growing familiarity with movies blending comedy and drama—we can draw parallels with 2019’s Marriage Story as a sombre film with darkly comic moments, and quite a few romantic comedies willing to showcase more serious moments on their way to a happy conclusion. It’s not a stretch to say that modern audiences are more sophisticated about their movies—or at least that they’ve seen many kinds of tones and moods. As a result, The Marrying Kind does work relatively well today: The unusual flashback-filled structure is more interesting than most similar films of the time, Cukor makes good use of ironic visuals to counterpoint spoken narration, and there’s an attempt to depict an unglamorous reality at work here. Far from the idealized portrait of marriage and archetypical characters, here we have two people struggling to make it work, suffering humbling setbacks and yet building something together. Judy Holliday does well as the wife, while Aldo Ray is sometimes a bit caricatural as the husband. Still, their work does find a happy compromise between the attempt at realism and the glossiness of studio pictures at the time. It’s a bit too dark to be fully enjoyable, but it will be interesting for those looking for evidence that the studios knew about real life even at the beginning of the glossy glam 1950s.