The Impatient Years (1944) is an example of the kind of movie that is hardly ever made anymore, but was a staple of Hollywood’s heyday: current events. In this case, the consequences of a hasty wartime romance, a quickie marriage and a baby – but when the couple are reunited when the soldier returns Stateside, they discover they are strangers.
It’s a comedy, but it’s also a poignant and even rather sad
take on what was a common problem as the divorce rate soared in the post-war
years. Even for those couples choosing
to stay together, it was often a tough adjustment. In a real sense, there was no getting back to
“normal.” There was only a mature and
resigned acceptance that adapting to a new life was the only course. Both husband and wife would have become
different people in the meantime, due to their wartime experiences.
Jean Arthur is the lady, and she brings her trademark comic chops and intelligent silliness to the role of a young woman, repeatedly described by her father as a “nice girl,” so that we wouldn’t mistake her marrying a soldier almost the moment she met him as indicative of a “V-girl.” “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t brought up right…it was wartime and they fell in love.”
Now, however, waiting with her father at the bus station to
welcome home her soldier husband on medical leave, she’s as nervous as a cat
and clearly uncomfortable with the idea of being married to somebody she knew
only for four days.
Lee Bowman plays her husband, home on temporary medical leave. He’s just as uncomfortable with Jean as she is with him, more so because he is coming home not only to a wife he barely remembers, but to a father-in-law he’s never met, and must try to make himself at home in a house he’s never been to and is already crowded.
Charles Coburn is Jean’s father, reprising a similar role of
curmudgeonly matchmaking as he did in The More the Merrier (1943) of the
previous year. In fact, you’ll notice
his “The Torpedo Song” of that movie being reprised as a theme for his
character in The Impatient Years every time Coburn enters a scene. He is the voice of common sense, trying to
get his daughter and son-in-law to give each other a chance before they divorce
– the movie starts in divorce court and the plot is then revealed in flashback.
There are two more people in the house who are strangers to Lee Bowman, one is his infant son, in whom he is delighted, but nervous as to how to hold him. He has seen only pictures, and is disappointed to have missed his first words – which include “Mama,” and “Henry.”
Henry, played by Phil Brown, is the other stranger, a
boarder in the house. He is a young man
who has been immensely helpful with the baby and who regards Jean and the baby
as his surrogate family. A proper fellow
who enjoys the routine around the baby that Jean Arthur has established for the
home, Henry, as Charles Coburn remarks to Lee Bowman, “He’s a very fine young
man. You’re going to get very sick of
him.”
And we see why, but I feel rather sorry for poor Henry, usurped by the baby’s real father. Despite his late-hour, petulant confession to Jean Arthur that he is in love with her, he stands no chance. Yet there he is, in Jean’s room, soothing the baby while she goes to warm up the bottle of milk, with Lee Bowman staggering around, trying to find a place to hang up his uniform.
When Jean returns and the baby is settled, Bowman asks casually, “You finally got him in bed?” and we know that her uneasy reply of “yes,” just short of a double-take is because at that moment, they are both thinking of Henry. It is one of a few clever double meanings in this script.
As I remarked in the post on her work in The More the Merrier:
“Miss Arthur makes this brittle woman interesting, and lovably obtuse.”
One could say the same for her character here in The Impatient Years,
except that here she is slightly more irritable as a means of defense. Her skittishness, and his own being baffled
by the strange surroundings and stranger family, Lee Bowman nonchalantly decides
to sleep on the floor, giving the excuse that he is not used to a bed after rugged Army life. It is a gallant move to
put his wife at ease, though we can see that she might also take it as an
insult. He ruefully remarks of the baby in the crib next to her bed, “I think he’d be ashamed
of his old man.” It is both self-deprecating
and a shaft of conscience to Jean Arthur.
But they quickly get on each other’s nerves the next day and decide to call their marriage quits. We are brought back to the courtroom scene where Charles Coburn, in an attempt to force them to get to know each other as a way to avoid divorce, suggests to the judge, played by Edgar Buchanan, that they be required to re-live the four days of their courtship that led to their marriage. Judge Buchanan remarks, “You boys and girls think it’s very romantic to get married just because it is wartime. You don’t stop to think for a minute that there’s going to be an after the war time, with a whole long life to be lived together.” Yes, if they're lucky.
It is an admonishment to the young lovers in the audience, and it is a daffy screwball comedy turn in the great tradition of that era, and so we have our second half of the movie as the now bickering couple find themselves in the scenes of their hasty courtship in San Francisco, revisiting the same restaurants, tourist sights, hotel, and marriage license office, leaving confused desk clerks in their wake. As Miss Arthur grumbles about a marriage license clerk who does not understand that they need to fill out a marriage license to get a divorce, “For heaven’s sake, if he’s going to be so stupid, let’s go.”
Ironically, it is their very spatting like an old married couple that brings them closer together, along with reliving the scenes of their romance and being away from Pop, the baby, the crowded house, her regimentation with household chores, and Henry.
Because they need to follow through on the judge’s orders, they kiss, but only to avoid committing perjury. But aha, there’s a glimmer of falling in love again.
Grant Mitchell plays a befuddled hotel desk clerk very concerned about Jean Arthur’s welfare when he thinks Lee Bowman is not only a wolf, but mentally unstable; and Charley Grapewin is the world’s oldest bellboy.
He loyally sits outside Jean’s door all night to protect her, and humors Lee Bowman when Lee says “I love you,” meaning this is the message he was trying to tap in their old code on the wall of Jean’s adjoining room. Charley thinks Lee loves him.
When sailor Frank “The Old Magoo” Jenks cuts in at a hotel dance, we see Lee Bowman getting jealous, to Jean’s delight. But she saves Bowman from the MPs by vouching he is her husband and takes him firmly by the arm, “C’mon, darling.”
Finally, they trek to the house of the minister who married them. He is Harry Davenport, and his sweet wife is Jane Darwell. She remembers the couple, and the old folks are thrilled that a couple married in their livingroom, for once, came back to visit them. It is not a screwball moment, but a very sober example of what a long and dedicated marriage is, and Mr. Bowman and Miss Arthur feel somewhat shamefaced at their fecklessness.
Afterward, they end up at the place where they had their wedding dinner—a Chinese restaurant where the vocalist is Bob Haymes, actor and singer Dick Haymes’ younger brother. I’m not sure the point of this interlude of him singing at their table, except to give the up-and-coming fellow a bit of screen time. He has a nice voice. But the dinner is where they really relive their wedding night—Jean becomes ill on fried shrimp, just as she did the first time.
The hotel clerk and his erstwhile bellboy are on the alert when Bowman must carry her up the stairs and she blithely announces her husband has poisoned her. Charles Coburn and poor Henry arrive at the 11th hour with a telegram ordering Bowman to the military hospital for his end-of-furlough checkup.
It now appears that since their trial courtship is over and
Bowman is ordered back to active duty, there’s nothing to keep them together anymore.
In a sweet ending, however, Jean returns to her father’s
house to reunite with her baby and discovers Bowman there, playing with him on
the floor. Miracle of miracles—the little
boy takes his first steps to Daddy, and Jean is overcome with emotion. She wants the toddler to walk to her next,
and Bowman asks, “Can I come too?”
We have our happy ending, except for Henry, of course. He's out of luck.
The movie, while not packing a punch like The More the Merrier, has some good moments, and it is particularly noteworthy that the screenwriter and associate producer for the film was Virginia Van Upp (1902-1970) – a child actress in silent films, later a script writer, producer, film editor, casting director, agent – pretty much a Hollywood jack-of-all-trades, unusual for a woman at that time. (And is this a swell photo or what?) She had been brought over from Paramount to Columbia for Cover Girl rewrites that same year by studio boss Harry Cohn. Lee Bowman also appeared in that film.
Speaking of the studio boss, The Impatient Years was Jean
Arthur’s last film for Columbia under her much-hated contract with much-hated
Harry Cohn. She was free at last, and
the wonderful A Foreign Affair (1948) here, and Shane (1953),
discussed here, were ahead of her.
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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
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