Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Nineteen Review: Divorce American Style

Good movies from the sixties often don't get the credit they deserve. Take any class on film history and one of the first things you'll learn is that many critics consider the sixties -- especially the early sixties -- to be one of the low points, creatively-speaking, in Hollywood's lifespan, for reasons too numerous to name here, although they boil down to the fact that while there a great many "fun" Hollywood films made during the early sixties, there weren't necessarily a great number of "important" films. For every Psycho, there were myriad versions of the Beach Party movies; moreover, even truly good films like The Sound of Music seemed like safe holdovers from the studio system, without any real sense of innovation. It wasn't until the late sixties, with films like The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, that a broad spectrum of filmmakers began taking more risks and ushering in a new era of creativity, which reached its zenith in the seventies.

That doesn't mean we should overlook the less groundbreaking movies from the sixties, however. While some of them are genuinely stupid, most of them have their own unique qualities to offer that can't be found in films from other decades. Divorce American Style is a good example of this kind of film. Released in 1967 and directed by the actor Bud Yorkin, it stars two people strongly associated with mainstream entertainment -- Dick van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds -- yet also sports a bitingly satirical script by Norman Lear, the man who a decade later would permanently change television with All in the Family. Reynolds and van Dyke play a married couple with two sons who decide to get a divorce after failing to find a solution to their constant bickering, she because she feels like he's no longer fun or interested in her, he because he feels she doesn't respect him. What they find, however, is that sometimes the results of divorce are more excruciating than the irritations of staying married, especially as she struggles to find someone new and he loses nearly all his money through court-mandated payments to support his family. Along the way they meet another divorced couple, played by Jean Simmons and Jason Robards, who are in precisely the same situation, with Robards' character so desperate for his ex-wife to remarry that he spends most of his time playing matchmaker for her.

What could easily have ended up a miserable story instead plays out as comedy in Lear's script, which, unlike Truman Capote's script for Beat the Devil, I consider the model of a light satire. The film opens with a composer climbing to the top of a hill and waving his conductor's wand to the sounds of couples bickering in houses all across town, and anybody who thinks the 2006 "comedy" The Break-Up with Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston was the first to put the full horror of a long-term couple's arguing on the screen needs only to watch the first twenty minutes of this film, which features a literal symphony of barbed dialogue interspersed with pointed silence. Reynolds and van Dyke are both good in roles that cast them slightly against type, and the sequence of the two of them getting ready for bed after a big argument is notable for the lack of vanity involved, especially on Reynolds' part: she's still Debbie Reynolds, prettier than any real girl-next-door could hope to be, but as she pulls off her wig and sits in front of her mirror in nothing but a slip, scrubbing her makeup off her face, we also see that she's no longer the teenager who danced beside Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain.

I did have a few problems with the film -- mainly that Reynolds' and van Dyke's characters really didn't seem that great of a match, especially as he had much more chemistry with Jean Simmons -- but overall I came away feeling like it should be better known than it is, and I have to wonder if part of the reason it doesn't get a lot of credit is because, even worse than being released in the sixties, it looks like it was released in the sixties, with all the bright colors that accompany films from that era. When you look at a movie and find your eye bombarded with colors that share their names with fruits -- tangerine, lime, and plum -- you don't anticipate a highly relevant experience, and it occurred to me that the film might be taken more seriously in black-and-white or the subtler palettes of Bonnie and Clyde or Cool Hand Luke. Then again, forgoing the bright colors of mid-sixties' fashion and interior design would have also betrayed the film's setting in Any Town, U.S.A., and losing that specific sense of time and place would have done more harm than good.

Grade: B+