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What message was this film trying to give about marriage?


I have just watched this (all the way through) for the first time. What struck me most of all about the characters were the relationships of the two main characters.

Burt Lancaster plays a man so obsessed about his job that he has no time for his wife and kids. His wife comes to the airport and says that she is leaving him. Then, at the end, he buggers off with the hot blonde he's been with through most of the film. Someone tells him he has to check something, but he says they can take care of it (thereby implying that while the job may come before family it doesn't come before the blonde).

Dean Martin plays a married man who got a stewardess pregnant who at first wants her to have an abortion, then later warms to the idea of having a child with her and leaves to go with her to the hospital after she is injured.

As a matter of fact I don't remember a single functioning marital relationship being represented in the film. Everyone was either a widow, in an unhappy marriage, chasing their husband because he's carrying a bomb or in the background. Now I recognise that maybe this film came out at the end of the sexual revolution or something, but did it really have to represent marriage in such a disdainful way?

"I don't reckon I got no reason to kill nobody."

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As a matter of fact I don't remember a single functioning marital relationship being represented in the film. Everyone was either a widow, in an unhappy marriage, chasing their husband because he's carrying a bomb or in the background. Now I recognise that maybe this film came out at the end of the sexual revolution or something, but did it really have to represent marriage in such a disdainful way?


Captain Harris described his marriage as happy, and Patroni's marriage seemed like it was pretty solid. Not all of the marriages were on the rocks, but it did seem like a lot of them were.

Bakersfeld kept trying to duck out of those black tie affairs that his wife kept insisting he attend, and she was also trying to get him to take a job offered by her father. He wanted to get a job on his own merit and support his family on his own salary. He may have seen it as less than manly to work for his father-in-law.

My own parents got divorced in 1970, so it seemed like the in thing to do back in those days. They also used the same wisdom from the movie, "Better to come from a broken home than to live in one." That was the prevailing view at the time, which was a wholesale rejection of the idea of "staying together for the sake of the kids." Having lived through it myself, I came to realize that it's far better to live in a broken home in the suburbs than it is to live in a single-parent home in the ghetto.

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Which one was Captain Harris? I've found an Anson Harris. I was really talking about how the on screen marriages were being treated.

Yes there does seem to have been a shift in attitudes towards divorce since. I wouldn't know which attitude was right personally, having come from a single parent family and never having married myself, so I don't know what I'm complaining about really.

It just felt odd watching the film because of this. Could be that I have so been indoctrinated by society to think that marriage is a good thing, even though I've never been near one.

"I don't reckon I got no reason to kill nobody."

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Harris was the other pilot along with Dean Martin. There's a scene where they're talking and Captain Harris is mentioning that he remained faithful to his wife.

I think the film's view on marriage probably reflected what would have been realistic for its time. I'm not sure that they were trying to convey any particular message, other than life happens and some people get divorced.

Whether marriage is a good thing or not, I think it gets mixed reviews overall. Some people say their marriage is blessed and that it's the greatest thing in their lives, while others consider marriage to be the worst kind of hell they wouldn't wish on their worst enemy (except their former spouse).

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This is the common Hollywood theme of having an unhappy marriage and being attracted to someone else.

Whether it's the "older distinguished male" drawn to the younger female, or the mysterious stranger who the woman finds irresistible (Shane comes to mind).

It goes all the way back to It Happened One Night, perhaps even further.

I've always wondered about the one being ditched and was never intrigued by the two who run off together.

And as in the case here, Della Street standing behind Dean Martin like that was much more captivating to me.

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This was during the bra burning period of American History. We are still in it judging by our present political leaders. 😵

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. Yogi Berra

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Who says it was trying to give a message about anything?

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As a cultural product it would deliver a message, whether they were meaning to or not. And if they aren't aware of that what the hell are the makers doing making films? Everyone knows that in the industry, that's why they are so careful with their filtering process.

So that's who is saying it, convention.

"I don't reckon I got no reason to kill nobody."

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The message this film was trying to give about marriage, or the message Arthur Hailey was trying to give? The screenplay was based on his novel.

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I'd just note that in the novel, at the end, Demarest has decided to confess his affair to his wife and ask her that they adopt Gwen's child.

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And that final scene in which Bakersfield delegates a problem to his crew so that he can have breakfast at Tanya Livingston's home isn't in the book. Arthur Hailey chose to end the novel by underlying the issues that major airports had to confront at that time. The movie chose to go the soap opera route.

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