You're no more neurotic than a pretzel

It is a pity that it is so gravitationally rather than rhetorically difficult to fire objects into the sun, because otherwise The Feminine Touch (1941) would be on a collision course with stellar fusion as we speak. I can best describe it as a screwball comedy from the Mirror Universe. Instead of a joyful, disorderly subversion, its double-couple farce is what Boyd McDonald would have called a heterosexual training film whose heavy-handed moral is the natural and necessary primacy of monogamous jealousy, especially of men over women, as proof of love. It is relentlessly heteronormative, anti-intellectual, and not a little misogynist in its insistence that what a normal woman wants is to be manhandled and fought over, although the picture it then presents of a normal man is equally repellent. If I wanted an Exhibit A of how the Production Code came down on gender roles like the Chicxulub impactor, I wouldn't need to look further, but the problem is that I was just trying to watch a romantic comedy with a reasonably attractive cast.

I understand that in the universe of comedy, anyone who writes a sociological Gesamtkunstwerk entitled Jealousy in All Its Aspects and Universal Applications with intentions to prove the silliness and obsolescence of the emotion in question is chumming the waters for the human intellect to get clotheslined by the human heart, but I refuse to believe it is a prerequisite of Thalia that it should be done as programmatically and insultingly as in The Feminine Touch. Done with trying to hammer a passing minimum of psychology into class after class of football players, John Hathaway (Don Ameche) shakes off the hicks-sticks dust of Digby College and descends on New York City with his manuscript under one arm and his wife Julie (Rosalind Russell) on the other, whereon the out-of-towners find themselves immediately cross-tangled with neurotically womanizing publisher Elliott Morgan (Van Heflin) and his long-suffering right-hand editor Nellie Woods (Kay Francis). As the long, affably professional hours with his editor leave room for his publisher to make much less platonic time with his wife, it would be well within the bounds of humorous reversal for the even-tempered professor to discover in himself, even as he's revising his magnum opus for publication, the same silly, obsolete, inconveniently insistent tendencies he's just been decrying on the page. It is completely out of bounds for the film to characterize him as inadequate, complacent, and effete—in the violent language of the alt-right that kept crawling into my head throughout the runtime, a soy boy or a cuck—because this discovery keeps not occurring. It seemed quite sensible to me that John should feel neither his masculinity nor his marriage threatened by other men's interest in his wife or his wife's interest in other men. He explains it in terms of love. The film explains it in terms of the ivory tower's emasculation from the animal realities of life. Early in the film, as an illustration of the chasm between the attitudes of husband and wife, we get this gem of an exchange played for laughs:

"My father never read a book in his life and he loved my mother and he wouldn't let my mother look at another man!"
"And what was good enough for your father is good enough for me, is that right?"
"And good enough for my grandfather, too!"
"Your grandfather was a notorious wife-beater."
"My grandmother never complained!"

I like my actors to be versatile, but it is awful to see Russell of all people—Harriet Craig, Hildy Johnson, Auntie Mame for the love of Artemis—playing a woman who states outright that she doesn't want even the modern equality of first-wave feminism, she wants her husband to drag her around like a cartoon caveman and sock any man who notices she exists. In order to become a real boy, John has to jettison his progressive attitudes for the possessive anger sufficient to chase a supposed romantic rival around a tree while his wife watches proudly, flattered and justified, like some deathly de-ironized version of "Where Are the Simple Joys of Maidenhood?" Even the fact that both men are manifestly incompetent at fisticuffs can't save the scene for me. John redeems himself in the eyes of his wife and the movie by haring after another man to "beat his face to a pulp." It's so romantic, I may just take out a restraining order.

It is all the more obnoxious since there are fragments struggling through this sexist morass that suggest the intelligent, adult comedy The Feminine Touch was evidently under the delusion of being. Nellie and Elliott almost belong to a different film, funnier and more poignant and shrewdly more complicated than their initial impression of a girl Friday stuck on the man who plays the field every night of the week. Dark, wry, and dignified, she's turned down two proposals from the man who's her oldest friend because she doesn't want to be "a nice dry doorway to duck into out of the rain"; he has a genuine eye for literature as well as for ladies, but we observe him primarily in the unprepossessing mode of a skittish pick-up artist with an atrocious goatee, so blatantly the 1941 equivalent of a hipster beard that I rejoiced when the film called it out as such. "Neurotic, my foot . . . You're a fugitive from a pair of carpet slippers, a commonplace, domesticated guy that wants to take off his shoes, overeat at dinner, and curl up in front of his wife with a good book. I've been waiting for you to come out from behind that beard, but you won't." Their relationship proceeds on the opposite trajectory from John and Julie's, away from a conventional battle of the sexes and toward a conversation between a pair of adults who have nothing to hide from one another. Slumped in his smoking jacket in the aftermath of a spectacular party-crashing engineered by Nellie, Elliott admits that his pursuit of Julie has made him feel "silly, as if I'd been caught making mud pies . . . Here was a normal, honest young woman in love with her husband and here was a fake sophisticate who needed a beard like he needed a carbuncle, trying to develop some fake charm—for what?" All he's done is risk losing the woman he really loves and was never able to square himself up to telling until she, like the stealth heart of the screwball this story should have been, showed him up so comprehensively, there was no reason not to come clean. MGM never did figure out what to do with Heflin and if he'd been typed in light comedy, I'd have never had the chance to fall for him in noir, but he is tremendously funny as this tryhard rake, slyly countervailing the film's otherwise emphasis on machismo. His foibles, not his forcefulness, win him his love. The wince that crosses his face when he realizes the amount of housecleaning he'll need to do in order to turn a love shack into a honeymoon suite is honestly sweet.

Even the Hathaways might have achieved some reality if the script had been able to pay attention to itself. There are problems in their relationship; a better film could have built obstacles out of them instead of the enshrinement of jealousy. Julie sees herself as "not very clever and sort of un-mental," always at a disadvantage in an argument with her intellectual husband and when she sobs in frustration, "It's just that you're always right and I'm always wrong," John does not disagree or reassure her unless you count patting her shoulder with an affectionate condescension that may cause even the pacific viewer to wish to chase him around a few trees of their own: "That's just one of those things." It's open-minded of him to sanction his wife's affair with Elliott when he thinks the attraction is mutual, but it's high-handed not to check with her before signing off and Julie is entirely within her rights to be furious with him over it, although her insults would hold up better if she didn't couch them in racist similes about Eskimo wife-swapping. She's even right that when he threatens to pull his contract from Elliott Morgan, Inc., he declares he's going back to Digby College with his book and his principles, his wife conspicuously absent from the list. Had the divers hands of the screenplay wanted a romantic comedy in which a husband has to be jolted out of taking his wife for granted, it was all right there in the text. Elliott gets that arc instead, realizing at the last minute that his selfish, childish behavior has almost driven off the last person in the world he wants to lose. Our ostensible hero gets the lesson in sexual jealousy to the point where the happy ending is, on the way out of City Hall with the newlywed Morgans, John dashing back up the steps to clean the clock of the passerby who called his wife "sugar." I am trying to forget that the catfight happened at all.

In conclusion, the only reason I am not primally screaming is I don't want to scare the cat. The honest-to-God tagline for this film was "If Your Sweetheart Isn't Jealous—It's Not L-O-V-E!" It was written by George Oppenheimer, Edmund L. Hartmann, and Ogden Nash, produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and directed by W.S. Van Dyke, and I'm glad they all have better credits to their names so that I don't have to start working on orbital mechanics. For every moment like the one where Nellie declares, "I'm not doing this to anybody, I'm doing it for myself!" there's another where Julie trying to fend off a creeper on the subway is just hilarious. I appreciate the fleeting contributions of Donald Meek and Henry Daniell, but I finished the film and I just wanted to watch a nice cynical pre-Code or some wholesome gay porn. At least Van Heflin finally shaves. This carbuncle brought to you by my normal backers at Patreon.