BURT & LINDA PUGACH, CRAZY LOVE (2007)
If you never saw this documentary by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens (or the talk show promotional tour by its subjects prior to its release), here’s the set-up: already-married New York City attorney Burt Pugach had an affair with a younger woman named Linda Riss, and when she broke it off, he contracted goons to blind her by throwing lye in her face. But wait, it gets even more romantic! After serving 14 years in prison for his crime, Pugach hooked up with Riss again, and eventually the two kooky lovebirds got married. Now here’s the depressing part: if you didn’t know their history, the kvetchy, passive-aggressive old couple portrayed in the film's contemporary interview segments could be ANY miserable old couple stuck in the comfortable rut of a relatively loveless marriage. So for all you dudes out there who think passion equals love and all you ladies with a thing for the bad boys, Crazy Love is a grimly humorous corrective.
MAE & JIMMY DOYLE, VIRTUE (1932)
Far from DVD but recently restored in a pristine new print by Sony (it's a start), Virtue is a stellar script by frequent Capra collaborator Robert Riskin with a premise that hasn't dated one bit: if a woman comes to a relationship with way more sexual experience than a man and it makes him insecure, paranoid and jealous, is there any way for him to get over that and save the relationship? Mae (Carole Lombard) is a former streetwalker who falls in love with cabdriver Jimmy Doyle (Pat O'Brien) while working behind the drivers' lunch-counter; Doyle's a tough-talking he-man woman-hater, but Mae wins him over. When they get back from their honeymoon day at Coney Island, the cops are there to arrest her for coming back to NYC after her last arrest; Jimmy vouches for her, but after the cops leave, the real test begins. Jimmy's ridiculously suspicious and obviously the walking wounded, his pride and suspicion a relationship toxin. Unfortunately, there's only so far a Pre-Code movie can go, and rather than having Jimmy and Mae work their problems out in open dialogue, Riskin has to resort to a tricksy but stupid melodramatic murder plot to clear the air. Still, Virtue is superior to, say, Chasing Amy, because being a former streetwalker is a much better metaphor for sexual inequality in a relationship than converting a freakin' lesbian. I mean c'mon. There's no clips online, so enjoy the creepy home footage above of Lombard and Clark Gable doing nothing much in particular.
ANN DARROW & KONG, KING KONG (1933)
When Peter Jackson remade Kong, he beefed up the sympathetic vibes between ape and woman, even including an Edward Scissorhands-ish ice-rink moment at the end; it wasn't beauty killed the beast, but society. Not the case in the original, where a shrieking Fay Wray doesn't realize (as someone once pointed out, and I can't remember how) that Kong is, all things considered, far from the worst thing that could happen to her: he keeps her safe on the island and would never, ever drop her from the Empire State Building. But no: she shrills and is generally totally ungrateful. Naomi Watts and Kong are actually kind of a cute couple; Wray and Kong, forget about it. Someone thought the archaic and perfectly-preserved, unreconstructed attitudes of the original weren't enlightening enough and edited a really bad "modern trailer" for it; it's above.
ALGY LONGWORTH & GWEN, BULLDOG DRUMMOND STRIKES BACK (1934)
An immensely amusing movie 20th Century Fox apparently never bought the permanent rights to the source material for — hence insanely hard to see — Bulldog Drummond is embodied for an encore by Ronald Colman, who'd already embodied H.C. 'Sapper' McNeile's emblem of British charm and resourcefulness in 1929. But his companion Algy was being played by Charles Butterworth for the first time. As the movie opens, it's Algy's wedding day to Gwen (Una Merkel), but their honeymoon night keeps getting interrupted by Bulldog's murder investigations and tanglings with generic sinister Oriental Prince Achmed (Warner Oland). Bulldog seems like a man of the world (because he's been out of Britain), but everyone else is asexual and stiff-upper-lip; Algy seems either fatalistically resigned to his wedding night being interrupted or actively looking for excuses to get out of it. (His bride is American, hence presumably experienced, which implicitly adds to the panic.) His final line at the film's final interruption — the relationship is never so much as close to consummation — is astonishing: "Perhaps you and I will be happy in our Platonic little way." They're the most sexually trapped married couple ever.
ED & LOU AVERY, BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956)
The mismatch between Ed (James Mason) and Lou Avery (Barbara Rush) is a geographical one set up in casting: even if you don't know that Mason's British (and not terribly good at concealing his accent) and Rush is a corn-fed Coloradan, you can sense a mismatch from the opening moments, when Ed announces everyone they had over for their suburban party was "dull" and failed to say anything witty, surprising or interesting. When Ed starts binging on cortisone and turns into a raving psychotic with delusions of grandeur, it merely confirms that there's no way he should be in the same suburban house as the rest of America. He needs to get back to where he belongs. Nicholas Ray's movie was a flop when it came out, and now it's a kind of overrated cult classic, but it's still compellingly sardonic stuff.
DAVE HIRSH & GINNIE MOOREHEAD, SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)
When Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) wakes up on a bus back in his hometown, he's got a wicked hangover and a girl he doesn't remember having picked up, Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). He sends her packing, but she keeps hanging around, and eventually they're a couple, out of intertia as much as anything: Hirsh wants to do the Right Thing, and Ginnie is so pathologically needy she's hurt by the slightest rejection. What Dave doesn't realize is that doing the right thing is the wrong thing for both of them; [MAJOR SPOILER] Ginnie ends up dead, and Dave ends up with more guilt than he knows what to do with. Ironically, in reality Sinatra made sure MacLaine would get her big death scene so she could have her big star breakthrough ("Look, I want the kid to get killed, she'll get an Oscar nomination," he reportedly said. "I don't care about my role."), and she got it. But on-screen, they're a couple trapped together by both of their faults: her needs, his unwillingness to be a bastard when it has to be done. Short-term kindness is long-term cruelty.
ROSEMARY & GUY WOODHOUSE, ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)
This one's a literal from-hell: what could be worse than having a husband who'll trade you in to a Satanic coven in exchange for a boost for his acting career? I've long maintained Rosemary's Baby is actually a black comedy — it has more nervous laughs than most real comedies — but there's no denying that anyone married to John Cassavetes is in for the long haul in general. Mia Farrow just gets an especially bad break.
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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov