Ugly Marriage

Early one workday morning, a middle-aged housewife staggers downstairs, still half asleep, tying a well-worn tartan bathrobe around her. "Hey, honey," her bright-eyed husband calls from the top of the landing, "would you mind starting my eggs?" She nods, smiling slightly. "Hey," he says again, cutely. "I love you." Obviously this marriage is in trouble.

Or, more obviously, Writer-Director Richard Brooks thinks it is. Exactly why is never made clear, which is the crucial trouble with The Happy Ending. The lady in question is Mary Wilson (Jean Simmons), who has been married for well over a decade to an enterprising Denver lawyer named Ered Wilson (John Forsythe). Soon after the breakfast scene, Mary is revealed to be an alcoholic, pill-popping neurotic who flies off to the Bahamas to calm her tortured soul. Providing some salve under the sun are an old college buddy turned mistress-for-hire (Shirley Jones) and her latest beau (Lloyd Bridges), who watch benignly as Mary succumbs to the brilliantine blandishments of an aging gigolo (Bobby--pardon, Robert--Darin). Refreshed and renewed, Mary returns to Denver and informs her husband that she is leaving home for good.

What drove Mary to this sort of behavior is tritely hinted at: the boozy infidelities of suburbia, the shattering of some romantic girlhood dreams, the parade of horror every night on the late news. What is stressed, underscored and bludgeoned home is the general ugliness of married life. Brooks just cannot let it alone. Add to this a generous quota of misogyny (lots of beauty parlor closeups of fat thighs, wrinkled faces, and housewives struggling into girdles), and the result is a film as misguided and one-sided as the marriage it struggles to portray.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.