The oft-announced decline of Mitchell Leisen would once again contradict his prophets. The same year, 1951, that he released «The Mating Season» [1], the director gave us a delightful film —with a bit of comedy, drama, intrigue… and even mystery—: «Darling, How Could You!» (1951) [2]. And all this being true, we are going to propose a reading that makes us see that there is still much more. We capture in what is presented to us on the screen a refreshing reflection on ‘the relationship between the vision that women can have of themselves in the 20th century and today’ and the ‘right of the family to exist and progress as such’ [3].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOcgcwFWoW4
Some imaginaries that in many ideological discourses are intended to be contrasted (the liberation of women is sought to be correlated with the destruction of the family) when in reality from a cardiac logic[4], from the heart, they are called to walk together (the true happiness of an innumerable number of women for enjoying having founded their family and having made it progress). But, as we saw in the previous contribution, the logic of the heart is linked to the capacity for novelty and surprise, so it is highly advisable to inspect new scenarios that make it possible for us to see that one can be fully a woman enjoying completely giving oneself to a family, which in turn is called to value and enhance it. And few like Mitchell Leisen —we have been proving it— to accept this challenge and develop it successfully.
In Leisen, one can recognize an authorship—his films bear the stamp of his creative seal that allows them to be identified as his own—that does not fall into the excesses of what is sometimes called auteurism, that is, a pretension that the artistic quality of the film comes only from him. “Darling, How Could You!” is favored by the work of the scriptwriters. First of all, Dodie Smith (1896-1990), known for her work on the writing of («One Hundred and One Dalmatians» («101 Dalmatians» (1961, Walt Disney), who had already collaborated with Leisen on «To Each His Own» («The intimate life of Julia Norris» (1946)[5], although she did not appear in the credits. Alongside her appears as a screenwriter Lesser Samuels (1894-1980), who that same year worked with Billy Wilder on «Ace in the Hole» («The big carnival»).
James Mathew Barrie: from Peter Pan to «Alice Sit-By-The-Fire»
Even more significant in the text of the film is that it is based on the play by James Mathew Barrie (1860-1937), «Alice Sit-By-The-Fire» [6]. From it comes the original plot of parents who have spent many years apart from their three children, while working abroad, and when they return they encounter difficulties in adapting to each other. This is particularly aggravated by the fact that the adolescent imagination of the eldest daughter, influenced by having seen plays based on marital infidelity, attributes a slip to her mother. In a heroic and altruistic way she is willing to sacrifice herself for her mother for the good of the family, proposing herself as the fiancée of the alleged lover, in order to conceal the scandalous situation from her father and save her mother’s honour as a wife.
Barrie presents such a melodrama as an entertaining farce, and this tone is carried over into the film. What must not be lost sight of is that this Scottish novelist and playwright was the creator of Peter Pan, a fictional character who seemed to convey some of Barrie’s childhood traumas. As is well known, it is about a boy who does not want to grow up and who is related to an island of lost children, who, as has been verified in an original manuscript of the author, were abandoned or orphaned children. This last aspect is prolonged in the lesser known “Alice Sit-By-The-Fire”, in which Amy, to prevent her father from repudiating her mother, appears at the end as a helpless girl who asks her father what will become of her if this were to happen. But also the attitude of the mother, who, estranged from her children, has prolonged her adolescence, can represent a variation of the Peter Pan syndrome in a feminine key: the mother who wants to prolong her youth without fully accepting that the years pass for her and that the education of her children demands greater maturity.
With the help of his scriptwriters, Leisen was able to take the subject much further. He changed some significant elements: the character of Ginevra, a close friend of the eldest daughter Amy, her soul mate, disappears – which increases the mother/daughter relationship without intermediaries; the environment is not British but American; the father is no longer a soldier in India, but a doctor at the Panama Canal, where the mother plays an active role in adverse conditions, which brings the admiration of her children; the American family has the presence of a little dog who discreetly catalyzes the feelings of its members.
Joan Fontaine, Mona Freeman and John Lund
But above all he had a triad of leading actors who managed to make the story even more penetrating: the mother, Alce Grey, is played by Joan Fontaine; Amy, the daughter, by Mona Freeman, and Dr. Grey, the father, by John Lund – as we have seen, the actor Leisen turns to in many of his latest films. Without a doubt, Joan Fontaine carries
the weight of the work, and very fluently represents that woman who has to fight to set her watch right from the moment she has to “act as a mother.” The courage of her character, Alice Gray, to accept the inclemency of the weather and of life in the Caribbean and in the Panamanian jungle, has for her an emotional compensation that Leisen shows with transparency. She is the admired woman with whom the men of the place and of the returning ship —even more so as the female presence is scarce— compete for the dances. Her husband, far from preventing it, confirms it with the satisfaction of knowing that all these are innocent games that cannot in any way compare with their solid marital relationship.
This possible flirtation comes, as Gintautas Vaitoska points out, from the fact that “when a man meets a woman, there is a surge of energy… and hope for ultimate happiness.”[7] The presence of the husband seems to confine him within the limits of honesty because, as the Lithuanian Doctor and Therapist goes on to point out, alluding to the Russian priest Alexandre Elchaninov, “when speaking to other men or women, it is advisable to say only what one would say in the presence of one’s spouse.”[8] However, this is a way of proceeding that carries its risks, and which Alice’s character in particular knows must end at some point. She brazenly points out to her husband on the transatlantic ship that takes them home, that she will take advantage of it when her daughter Amy comes of age… to apply it to herself.
Joan Fontaine’s performance is particularly appropriate for her character because she shows two qualities that, although they may seem opposite, in reality complement each other: fragility and beauty. Starting with the first, when she still recognises herself as a child, Alice Grey will be insecure, especially at the prospect of meeting her own children. She suffers because she does not know if they will like her. And her husband’s reassuring argument is sometimes wrong – when he tells her that “how could they not love her if everyone is crazy about her”: the love of children has nothing to do with seduction – and sometimes right – when he tells her that she must trust herself: the children know that she is their mother, with all that that implies. But it will be she who will have to reconquer her inner world.
A year after “Darling, How Could You!”, Joan Fontaine will exploit this aspect of fragility even more when under the direction of George Stevens she plays an alcoholic actress in “Something to Live For” (1952), with a script by Dwight Taylor. About her character as Jenny Carey, Roberto Amaba says: “Like any good actress, she is insecure, a pathological shy person.”[9] In the tone of a realistic melodrama, the actress will manage to recover thanks to the help of a married man, a volunteer for Alcoholics Anonymous, and will also know how to give him up, out of respect for her family project (with two children, his wife is expecting a third). A choice in favor of the good of the children that Fontaine had embodied in her first collaboration with Leisen, «Frenchman’s Creek» («The Pirate and the Lady». 1944).
The beauty of women
A fragility that makes her beauty more penetrating, since it frees her from any contact with the arrogance that would falsify it. Fontaine was thirty-four years old when she starred in “Darling, How Could You!”. Nieves Gómez Álvarez, in her monumental monograph on women as feminine persons in the work of Julián Marías[10], collects texts by Ortega and María on the beauty of women at that age —which today we would easily and fairly extend to the age of forty—. Ortega says: “At thirty years of age, the non-transferable, unique personality of each woman awakens, and immediately leaves her mark and puts her style on the undifferentiated, generic beauty of the blossoming girl… the withered cheek takes on a new flowering of interior gardens, in which the soul spills over the previous beauty, more banal, although fresher.” [11] Nieves Gómez then points out: “Marías will comment on this fragment as follows: The thirty-year-old woman is, therefore, the one who chooses; at the same time she is personally chosen, by herself, in her strict individuality.” [12]
The undeniable beauty of Joan Fontaine is also explicitly mentioned by Julián Marías to show that she is completely removed from what could be supposed to be an objectifying gaze, a reification. She was part of that group of film actresses who “were not what is now called ‘sex symbols’, an expression not used at that time. They were, above all, people, women in whom one could guess, through their corporeality, and above all through their face, a project, a vital configuration that was a promise.”[13]
When Amy, her daughter, is capable of believing her involved in a marital infidelity, we should take note that she falls within that story of the puritanism of the theater that has impacted her —paradoxically prolonged in film noir, even though some want to give it an emancipatory sense—, for which the beautiful and attractive woman perishes wrapped in her powers of seduction. Leisen’s personalist cinema, in tune with what Julián Marías’ philosophy shows, maintains, on the contrary, that beauty in women is part of their own personality, of their capacity to carry out their own project. That Alice (Joan Fontaine) is willing to accept the limitations that being a mother can bring is not a renunciation of her way of being, much less of her expressive power: it is a confirmation of the fertility that accompanies her project, “a vital configuration that was a promise.”
And for this reason, the most tender and fun part of the film is presented to us when we witness a real fight between Alice and Amy (Mona Freeman) to see who will sacrifice more for the good of the other: Amy, in her fantasy story, who is willing to marry the man she takes for her mother’s lover to protect her honor; Alice, who prevents her daughter from feeling ridiculous, and agrees to spend a few moments as an adulteress redeemed by her generosity, so as not to hurt her.
The exercise of mutual care for people in their uniqueness
That the family has the right to exist and progress as such is not an abstraction. It is the exercise of mutual care for people in their uniqueness. The strange situation of parents who are separated from their children for a long time for work reasons, far from being an irremediable fate in “Darling, How Could You!”, poses a challenge for each member of the family to bring out the best in themselves for the good of others. And in a unique way, the mother and the eldest daughter give a recital of creativity to achieve this.
That society and public authorities must respect and promote “the dignity, just independence, privacy, integrity and stability of each family” is not something generic and ethereal, but rather it is concretized in each woman being able to carry out her family project not according to standards of a prototypical happiness that does not exist, but according to her own choices to form a family community that is oriented towards life and love, towards joy and hope.
Bioethics cannot be conceived of as a civil, abstract and generic ethic, whose principles enter into the family community, without understanding with due precision the principles that govern it and that are explained in the Charter of the Rights of the Family to which we have referred. It must be placed at the service of the cardinal logic of women, of their own vital rationality. As Julián Marías points out: “Women are intimately present at a unique spectacle: that of personalization. It is a form of wisdom that has always corrected the abstract thought of men and has enriched it enormously, when men have been intelligent enough to realize it. Women—and this is directly connected with it—have spent their lives carrying out real and controllable operations, with immediate results; has had to respond pragmatically to the effects.”[14]
Conclusion: a right of each woman as mother and a duty of respect for all others
When at the end of the film we see the Gray parents, reunited with their three children —plus Amy, Cosmo (David Stollery) and baby Molly (Maureen Lynn Reimer)… without the little dog stopping to happily join in— by the fireplace, while the mother sings Brahms’ lullaby with English lyrics — “Lullaby and Goodnight” — an undeniable harmony and peace is transmitted that should be expressed as a right of each woman as mother and a duty of respect for all others.
José Alfredo Peris-Cancio – Professor and researcher in Philosophy and Cinema – Member of the Bioethics Observatory – Catholic University of Valencia
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[1] We have studied it in the previous contribution in this same section of the Observatory, cf. https://www.observatoriobioetica.org/2024/07/la-libertad-de-la-mujer-y-madre-como-sujeto-cardial-en-the-mating-season/10002082
[2] There is a DVD edition, and it can be accessed from a Russian website, in the original version with Spanish subtitles, https://ok.ru/video/1317954456265
[3] Cf. Article 6 of the Family Rights Charter: The family has the right to exist and progress as a family.
a) Public authorities must respect and promote the dignity, just independence, privacy, integrity and stability of each family.
b) Divorce undermines the very institution of marriage and the family.
c) The extended family system, where it exists, must be held in high esteem and helped in order to fulfil its traditional role of solidarity and mutual assistance, while respecting the rights of the family unit and the personal dignity of each member.
Cf. Pontifical Council for the Family. (1983). Charter of the Rights of the Family presented by the Holy See to all persons, institutions and authorities interested in the mission of the family in the contemporary world. Vatican City: Vatican.va. Obtained from https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/family/documents/rc_pc_family_doc_19831022_family-rights_sp.html
[4] We have explained it in the previous contribution already mentioned.
[5] We have also studied this section of the Observatory, https://www.observatoriobioetica.org/2024/05/la-maternidad-como-don-y-responsabilidad-reflexiones-bioeticas-sobre-to-each-his-own/10001601
[6] Originally published in 1919, we have followed the edition of Charles Scribner´s Sons, New York, 1935, accessible at chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://ia801609.us.archive.org/2/items/alicesitbyfire0000jmba/alicesitbyfire0000jmba.pdf
[7] Vaitoska, G. (2022). Flirting. In J. Noriega, R. Ecochard, I. Ecochard, Dictionary of Sex, Love and Fecundity (pp. 361-364). Madrid: Didaskalos, p. 361. [8] Ibid., p. 363 [9] Amaba, R. (2022).Those women! Portraits of Golden Hollywood, Contrcampo Shangrila, p. 153. [10] Gómez Alvarez, N. (2023).Woman: feminine person. An approach through the work of Julián Marías.Pamplona: Eunsa.
[9] Amaba, R. (2022). Those women! Portraits of the golden Hollywood, Contrcampo shangrila, p. 153.
[10] Gómez Alvarez, N. (2023). Woman: feminine person. An approach through the work of Julián Marías. Pamplona: Eunsa.
[11] Ibid., p. 66, n. 29.
[12] Ibid., n. 30.
[13] Ibid., p. 220, n. 95.
[14] Marías, J. (1982). Women in the 20th century. Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores, p. 193.
