It’s best to be forewarned about the 1963 broad comedy The Thrill of it All, in case you come across it unsuspecting and are drawn in by the caliber of names associated with it: directed by Norman Jewison, written by Carl Reiner from a story by Reiner and Larry Gelbart, and starring Doris Day and James Garner. You might be tempted to check it out as a retro, Technicolor romp -- and not realize that its entire aim is brainwashing.
During the course of the film, Doris Day’s character Beverly goes from contented “doctor’s wife” to a high-paid career of her own in commercials, much to her obstetrician husband Dr. Gerald Boyer’s displeasure, since he maintains they make enough money on his salary. For a good chunk of the movie, Gerald amd Beverly are in a kind of war over her career, to the extent that Gerald tries all kinds of farcical tricks and ruses to make her stop working. The couplr have a lot of animosity as they fight this out. However, in the end, Beverly realizes the folly of her ways and quits her job, and the couple reconciles.
One of the main brainwashing techniques the film employs is to sentimentalize giving birth, which it does repeatedly from the very start of The Thrill of it All, in the opening credits of white, paper-constructed nursery figures. It also kicks into the propaganda with Mrs. Fraleigh’s ecstasy over the news she is pregnant. Yet it is in the movie’s climax that the act of giving birth is downright lionized. Mrs. Fraleigh (Arlene Francis) goes into labor in a traffic jam and ends up giving birth in the limo -- by the time the car pulls up at the hospital, the baby is out. A close-up of Mrs. Fraleigh leaning back against the seat smiling as she tells her husband the news is back-lit and shot in soft-focus. The flowered veil on her fancy hat is spread around her perfect curls like a halo, idealizing her. It is as if, after trying to bear a child for 20 years, she has now been inducted into a mystical sisterhood of womankind. At the same time, Beverly is also back-lit and shot in a soft-focus medium close-up as she gazes proudly at her skillful obstetrician husband. Here Beverly looks soft and delicate too -- unlike, for instance, an earlier scene when she is offered $80,000 for a spokes-model contract, and falls into a crate of tomatoes. Here, it is as if the magic of childbirth has touched her too. Indeed, it has; we will soon learn that it has made her decide to leave her lucrative career and re-invest herself as her husband’s helpmate.
Interestingly, at the same time as having babies is built up as a woman’s finest calling, the difficulty of it is minimized in this climactic scene. Gardiner Fraleigh is running around frantically as the birth becomes imminent, but his wife, who has not complained to our knowledge during her pregnancy, seems to get by without labor pains, bodily fluids messing up the inside of the car, or complications – despite the fact she is middle-aged and without benefit of maternity ward care during the pivotal car ride. She also seems to have retained every single item of clothing during labor, none of her make-up has run, there’s not a bead of sweat on her, she does not seem in the least bit tired, and somehow, there was room for her, Beverly, and Gerald, to all sit in the back of the car and push out a baby without anyone’s knees getting in the way. The ease of this birth is even more striking in light of the frequent slapstick mishaps that make fools of Gerald and Beverly in the movie, and which are always linked to Beverly working outside the home. The message to women seems to be that having babies is both noble and a piece of cake, whereas getting mixed up in the work world is humiliating and causes havoc in one’s personal life.
Ironically, although childbirth is elevated in The Thrill of it All, women are not given higher status because of it. Our introduction to Dr. Gerald Boyer at the beginning of the film is when he walks confidently out of the delivery room after a successful birth to congratulate the father; the mother is invisible. Though the climactic race to the hospital with Mrs. Fraleigh is a key set piece in terms of story structure and the complexity of staging it, most of the sequence is about the externals: the traffic jam, whether Gardiner can procure needed items from other drivers like a clean newspaper, and Dr. Boyer’s arrival on a police horse – riding up dramatically to charged music as if he were a knight coming to the rescue. (A take-charge knight; as soon as he catches up to the Fraleigh car he starts acting like an authority, issuing instructions to the police.) There is no direct narrative attention to what Mrs. Fraleigh is experiencing. This may have a lot to do with the puritanical prohibitions of the Production Code, which was still limiting what Hollywood could depict, but the ironic result is that though it is her labor that sets the sequence off, she is practically a passive spectator while it is everyone else who is active.
There is a disturbing double-repressiveness when a movie extols pregnancy as female fulfillment but dares not talk about it from a woman’s perspective. The woman’s part in the process is kept in the dark – in a black Rolls Royce, out of view of the camera – and the visuals focus on men, as if male management of childbirth mattered more than what the woman does. For example, when mother and baby are moved from the limo to the hospital, Mrs. Fraleigh is moved out of the car almost invisibly at the back of the frame, and only one female nurse is in the background -- the other four medical figures taking control from Dr. Boyer are all male doctors and orderlies. Moreover, the name of the institution is the “Doctors’ Hospital”, we’ve heard that and now we see it on the front of the building. It is the (presumably all-male) doctors who make the institution.
In the same vein, Gardiner calls his wife a “genius” in the first scene for getting pregnant! At the film’s climax, he calls her “brilliant”, for giving birth! What he doesn’t call her, ever, is her first name, and neither does anyone else in the movie, so it is hard to buy the idea that she’s truly revered. (At best she gets referred to as “Mrs. Gardiner Fraleigh.”) Gardiner also compliments everyone in the limo except for Beverly for their brilliance over the childbirth, and yet Beverly has been there all along at his wife’s request and has overseen the process until her husband arrived. Also, she has first-hand knowledge from having given birth twice herself.
But even Beverly seems to forget her own first-hand knowledge. She is brought to tears by watching her husband deliver the Fraleigh infant, and afterward tells him: “Darling, you know when I helped you back there in the car? And I held that new life in my arms? I felt what you must feel every single day.” She has already held new life in her arms, twice, has actually created that life and felt an even greater feeling than what Dr. Boyer can as an obstetrician, and yet the movie seems so intent on the dangers of women competing with men in the workforce that even Beverly’s experience as a mother takes a back seat to her husband’s professional skill in helping mothers give birth.
Visually, in fact, Beverly’s journey from career woman to re-dedicated housewife in the final moments of The Thrill of it All is almost presented as if she herself were being born. She has engaged in a lot of foolery with Happy Soap earlier in the film when she was not yet fully developed – they in fact hired her because she was unpolished, awkward and hesitant – and now, having seen what a proper career is by watching Dr. Boyer pull a baby out, Beverly emerges from the dark, cramped, womb-like car into the open space -- and a brand new perspective. When the car has arrived, we see those inside it through a window that is masked around the edges in a horizontal oval shape, like an iris from early films – the inside of the car is lit, but outside the oval is dark. If you were so inclined, this could also be seen as reminiscent of a vaginal opening. Beverly walks out of the car through this opening, emerging into the pool of light in front of the hospital, and, crying, she joins her husband. We see him in profile, head and chest, holding her, as she sniffles on his chest. The position makes Beverly look weak and childish in contrast to Gerald’s strong, parental figure.
In the last shot of the scene, she pledges to leave her job to be a “doctor’s wife” and they kiss, both in profile in a close-up two-shot. We then segue to the performers in the same pose and shot, kissing at home. The two young kids tell their parents how much they want a sibling. Gerald hugs Beverly from behind during this exchange – the woman who had been so elusive earlier is now completely enclosed by his arms, the stair railing and the walls – for it appears she has been tamed, domesticated. The children on the landing appear as wise little cherubs; after hinting that they plan to make a baby together that night, Beverly and Gerald ascend the staircase together lovingly – their unseen bedroom is their heavenly destination. Their constant tribulations have been solved now and their future will be like a paradise, for Beverly has given up her career.
It is clear that Gerald has won. He has recaptured his runaway wife. Her lucid arguments earlier in the film about why she needs outside interests or why she’d like to contribute earnings to the household have been forgotten. This is depicted as a happy ending, complete with fireworks popping as we go to closing credits. The message of the movie really could not be any plainer. It is no wonder that Betty Friedan felt the need to write her book The Feminine Mystique, which came out the same year. The Thrill of it All epitomizes the kind of concerted societal campaign that was being waged to persuade post-war American women to stay home.
