by Frank Calvillo
Richard Brooks’s incredibly powerful drama The Happy Ending opens with a well-made montage of the two main characters’ romance and courtship. We see a loving couple enjoy each other, proclaim their love for one another and tie the knot all within the film’s opening few minutes. This storytelling strategy is perfect. Not only does it save us the time of having to watch love blossom, but it graciously makes way for what the film is really about. In most cases, this short sequence would be a satisfying conclusion to many great romantic films; the quintessential “happy ending” as it were. In fact, during the brief wedding scene, the audience sees a number of similar moments from past films go through the bride’s head as “the end” flashes onto the screen. For all intents and purposes, it looks like the end, yet the story is only just beginning.
In The Happy Ending, long-time married couple Fred and Mary Wilson (John Forsythe and an Oscar-nominated Jean Simmons) appear to have it all, including an upper-middle class life in the suburbs, lots of family and friends around them, and complete devotion to one another. However, not everything is not as perfect as it appears to be. An unshakable feeling of sadness and regret is dominating Mary, making her escape to pills and booze in an effort to continue with her daily life. This, coupled with a failed suicide attempt the previous year prompts her to leave her family and friends behind on the day of her and Fred’s anniversary party.
It’s safe to assume that the portrait of marriage The Happy Ending paints is a rather horrific one, at times showing the institution as a literal prison with armed guards placed everywhere in the form of mothers, friends and neighbors. An extended flashback party sequence shows all of Mary and Fred’s friends in an open jungle of infidelity, while television, alcohol and pharmaceuticals provide the kind of crutches Mary needs to exist in such a world. The film’s view of marriage seems to extend to the general public as Lloyd Bridges’ analysis of how much the American economy depends on marriages in relation to the amount of money spent on weddings, homes, and automobiles, proves both tragic and true. Likewise, when the nurse attending to Mary following her attempted suicide states: “Vodka and secconoll. Marriage on the rocks,” she says a lot. Through the soul-destroying haze of it all, however, it’s devastatingly touching to see how much Fred truly does love Mary.
Made at a time when such issues were still considered taboo, or at the very least, shameful, it’s extremely brave and admirable to see how The Happy Ending tackles the issue of depression. Mary as an individual is depressed, plain and simple. Yet this isn’t the typical form of depression that involves staying in bed for days on end and crying. Hers is a depression built out of a deep listlessness with the life and the kind of individual she has become. Continuously adding to her condition is the ongoing realization of the fact that she doesn’t know how to change any part of the world she’s in other than leaving it in one form or another. The shocking manner in which Brooks illustrates pill popping and alcohol consumption in the morning so casually, only adds to the dire type of world in which Mary exists and serves to add more fuel to the film’s already heavy themes.
The Happy Ending is chock full of stellar performances with one colorful side character after another popping up with their own unique take on love and marriage. It’s so great to see them all in such an intriguing film and doing great work on top of that. Shirley Jones as a serial mistress is so wonderfully cast against type here, as is Bobby Darin as a European playboy with a keen perception on real life. There’s equally superb work from Teresa Wright as Mary’s mother and Tina Louise as her friend who reveals a deep soulfulness behind her bombshell exterior. The look on her face throughout the party scene in which everyone is left wondering what’s happened to Mary is unforgettable.
Meanwhile, Forsythe is fantastic as the well-meaning, loving, seemingly clueless husband who isn’t really clueless at all. Yet neither he, nor anyone else, touches Simmons as the frustrated and unhappy housewife who doesn’t know why she’s either. It’s mesmerizing to watch the journey she takes her character on and the different levels she is able to reach throughout the course of it. The actress gives a career best here in The Happy Ending which was like nothing she had ever attempted before or after.
I love films whose titles contain a sense of irony and The Happy Ending fits perfectly into such a category. This is a film not about an ending that’s happy, but instead, it’s a story about breaking away at the facade of the PRESUMED “happy ending” until a real one is found, wherever, whenever and with whomever that may be.
