This Charming Couple (1950) Affiliated Film Producers. Creative Commons license: Public Domain. Marriage training film dramatizing a partnership too fraught with conflicts to survive. Produced as part of a post-World War II initiative to make marriages more sustainable in the face of postwar dislocation. An unusually literate, neo-realist film produced by a talented group of documentarians. A series of films based on the textbook "Marriage for Moderns," by Henry A. Bowman. Director: Willard Van Dyke. Writer: H. Partnow (pseudonym for blacklisted screenwriter Millard Lampell). Cameraman: Peter Glushanok. Editor: Aram Boyajian. Production Manager: Howard Turner. Producer: Irving Jacoby. With Ken McCannon (Ken) and Nancy Todd (Winnie). Produced on the campuses of Stephens College and the University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo., and in the surrounding country. Producer: Affiliated Film Producers. Keywords: Marriage; Social guidance; Gender roles. Once again it is proven that modern day film companies have lost their way by trying to be sensationalistic instead of being insightful and informative. Why are so many modern directors so short sighted? This couple was living in a dream world. They refused to face reality and accept their many differences. Physical attraction would not be enough to sustain a marriage. The film showed a set of problems that causes many couples to divorce. For 1950, "THIS CHARMNIG COUPLE" has a good innovative script, is well acted, directed and filmed.
This Charming Couple, one of a series of five films on courtship and marriage designed to be used with Henry Bowman's textbook Marriage for Moderns, was part of the massive postwar response to family disintegration and problems. Most educational films hover safely within the realm of conventional wisdom. They feature characters who are not too attractive, not too smart, and not too unusual-the better for ordinary students to identify with. Not This Charming Couple. Like the other Marriage for Moderns films, and quite unlike most social guidance movies, the film is about the lives-and problems-of educated people and intellectuals. The film is considerably more literate than others of its type, incorporating prose, poetry, and ballads into its soundtrack. The dialogue is witty and odd enough to be quoted: "Blue eyes mean love me or I die. Brown eyes mean love me or I kill you." The film begins in divorce court, so there is no suspense about the outcome. Eyes on the course rather than on the finish, we see vignettes showing the weaknesses of Ken and Winnie's partnership. In a manner unusual for an educational film, the vignettes do not appear to have been created to prove specific points. Rather, each makes an impression that, taken with the other segments of the film, creates a feeling of unease. The attempt, it seems, is to make a narrative as full of ambiguity as a real-life discussion of good friends. Although the failure of the marriage is predetermined and essentially forced on the viewer, the film imparts its ideas in a noncoercive way; they seem to arise out of the events. There are power struggles in This Charming Couple, but the warfare is unconventional by most standards. Neither Ken nor Winnie wants to change his or her behavior, and both are wedded to their Bohemian ideals. When the question of marital compromises is broached, both seem to feel threatened on the gender level. Shades of social class and mobility also seem to color the relationship; Winnie imagines the enviable life of a writer's spouse, while Ken, a Louisiana boy, seeks to emulate his intellectual friends from New York. Winnie, queen of her own small world, seeks to control Ken within marriage, because she cannot control his success in the bigger world. The core dilemma of their marriage anticipates the late-century urban plight in which so many couples find themselves today: "They would rather change each other to satisfy their own ambitions." Creative Commons license: Public Domain
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