Many years ago, in what sometimes seems like an earlier life, I taught Shakespeare courses to both young and "mature" students. When we reached Othello, halfway through the semester, I would, of course, point out that the play did not take the traditional form of tragedy-- of a great man or king gone awry as in the case of Macbeth or Richard III. Othello instead introduced a formula that was innovative for its time but which has become commonplace in ours. Othello is a domestic drama in which a marriage falls all to pieces. I liked to tell my captive audience, only slightly facetiously, that the whole of life is divided into two parts: the comic, which begins with birth and ends with marriage, and the tragic, which begins with marriage and proceeds to death. A statement which is a kind of shorthand, simplified version of a cliche of criticism. Like many such abbreviations, this formula contains a dollop of truth. Othello in fact begins with a marriage -- or more accurately a defiant elopement -- and comes to conclusion with Desdemona strangled in her bed and her husband the Moor a suicide. It's the sole play of Shakespeare's that follows the strict marriage-to-death path, although Romeo and Juliet is comic until the secret wedding but becomes tragic afterwards, while the wondrous Winter's Tale begins with Leontes and Hermione already married and pushes through some desperate circumstances only to come to a miraculous comic climax with the restoration of a woman presumed dead and a glorious second-generation wedding. Both RJ and WT sometimes seem like two different and opposite kinds of plays condensed into one -- and yet are all the more triumphant for being so.
These musings were precipitated by the film that we watched a couple of nights ago -- Nora Prentiss (1947), which Wikipedia characterizes as a film noir, but which is better thought of as two films in one -- a film that starts as an instance of domestic drama or "bourgeois realism" or even soap opera and doesn't become a murder mystery until two-thirds along the way. In a limited sense, it's not unlike Shakespeare's hybrids, but alas does not successfully yoke or blend its disparate plots. As a result, the last section of Nora Prentiss, I'm sorry to say, becomes not intriguing but unbelievable and ludicrous. It's an odd and interesting film, although not a good one, but it's worth watching for aficionados of TCM not only for its manipulation of genre expectations but also because it is one of a large group of films that are so very common and ordinary in twentieth-century America where such enormous value is attached to a happy and fulfilling marriage -- and to the disappointment that arises when the marriage comes a-cropper. In Nora Prentiss, a midlife couple with a pair of kids, who live in an orderly picket-fence house, ought to be living a happy life, but, by golly, both husband and wife are discontented and bored. They are afflicted with the whole package of suburban anxieties. It's Cheever-land or Updyke-land: demanding children and divorcing friends, the stultifying daily routine, the unsatisfying jobs, the dull obligatory social events, and especially the lack of sexual excitement which is signified in these Code-burdened movies by the gulf between the twin beds and the sterile head-to-toe sleepwear and also by that pathetic chaste kiss before husband and wife turn away from each other as they extinguish the cute matching bedside table lamps. Gosh, it's a scenario that is familiar from dozens and perhaps scores of postwar (and later) films.
Melodramatic Nora Prentiss follows the fortunes of steady-Eddie Dr. Richard Talbot, enacted by Kent Smith, who meets nightclub chantoosie Nora, played by Anne Sheridan. Flirtation turns into an affair, and the affair evolves into true love or at least into genuine sexual passion. But all goes from bad to worse when Talbot, instead of seeking a divorce from his stern unlovely wife, concocts a dumb whopper of a plot that makes Friar Lawrence's harebrained sleeping-dram waking-up-in-the-tomb plan seem brilliant in comparison. Talbot fakes his own death and disappears -- causing the film to turn police-procedural. And then, through a series of hard-to-credit mischances and gimmicks, Talbot finds himself in his newly assumed fake guise indicted for murdering -- oh no yes indeed! -- his very own self. Nora Prentiss by this time has metamorphosed into a film that by rights should be renamed City of Naked Death or Shadow of Evil Night. Even so, the film might have been salvaged had not so much depended on the acting skill of Kent Smith, who is perfectly fine in the first part of the film, but incapable of managing the switch from reliable doc to nervous fugitive. It's not entirely his fault: the role puts too much pressure on the actor. I doubt whether such a transition could have been handled by Roscius or Burbage or Garrick or Sir Laurence Olivier himself.
Here is a picture of Ann Sheridan and Kent Smith. Sheridan wisely holds on to her hat; Smith's chapeau dominates the scene; very 1940s.
