Don't look to movies to see how people lived in the past--most are far too glamorous for that--but to find out how they thought, or, rather, what their assumptions were. In this movie Maggie McNamara gets Louis Jourdan to fall in love with her by pretending to like everything he likes--modern art, opera, Roman food and wine, etc. What a wealth of social pathology is here revealed! We are supposed to believe that a man (even a wealthy, cultured, sophisticated man like this one) wants a wife who brings nothing at all to the party, who will never introduce him to anything new he might like, who will never disagree with him, in short is just a clone and a slave. (Didn't anyone ever tell him that a man who wants a mate who is exactly like him really wants...another man? But maybe he knows that, since he's such a pal of Clifton Webb's.) For her part, McNamara is shown as a gold-digger who is excited to have found a rich man who is also handsome and charming. But that's fine because this is what women do, right? This trick was hardly confined to this movie--it was used in other films and TV programmes. With a view of matrimony this bleak it's no wonder that since the following decade people started to give up on the idea of the man as money machine and the woman as doormat.
The view of the arts is depressing, too. McNamara merely parrots Jourdan's or her friend's opinions on art and music. She never tries to learn anything about them on her own, and she finds them hideously boring. Which all good Americans are supposed to, right? All that highbrow stuff is for phonies and foreigners! They had some nice clothes in the Fifties (if you didn't mind wearing a girdle so tight you could hardly breathe), but as for respect for intelligence and culture, forget it. Certainly no one with a tad of aesthetics would have pawned off Clifton Webb's auburn dye job on a helpless audience.
The view of the arts is depressing, too. McNamara merely parrots Jourdan's or her friend's opinions on art and music. She never tries to learn anything about them on her own, and she finds them hideously boring. Which all good Americans are supposed to, right? All that highbrow stuff is for phonies and foreigners! They had some nice clothes in the Fifties (if you didn't mind wearing a girdle so tight you could hardly breathe), but as for respect for intelligence and culture, forget it. Certainly no one with a tad of aesthetics would have pawned off Clifton Webb's auburn dye job on a helpless audience.