Barbara Hale Week 3/4

Note: This is the third of four reviews to celebrate Barbara Hale Week. She starred as Della Street, the office manager and confidential law secretary of Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966.  At Columbia Pictures, she appeared in the title role in Lorna Doone (1951) and with James Stewart in TheJackpot (1951). She wasn't typecast like Burr and Talman were. She could do both comedy and drama, doing both, in fact, in this picture.

The First Time
1952 / 1:29
Tagline: “She's going to have a baby and the fun begins when she begins to feel funny!”
[internet archive]

This is the first live-action movie directed by Frank Tashlin. A movie-goer can tell Tashlin came from directing Looney Tunes because in The First Time a new baby provides voice-over commentary. Plus, the sight and sound gags are so lowbrow that they call to mind Jerry Lewis outings like Cinderfella which Tashlin was to direct later.

At first a movie-goer wonders what Robert Cummings and Barbara Hale, both veterans of serious movies, are doing in a sitcommie movie with a cozy plot. New parents, Joe and Betsy Bennett, navigate sleepless nights, brutal expenses, and the strains a new baby puts on a marriage. 

Seems safe and familiar enough.

But 20 minutes into the picture, the movie-goer senses that director Tashlin aims to express discomfort with his post-war USA. Lots of otherwise sensible people nowadays seem to kid themselves about the good old days of the Fifties, but Tashlin was there, sizing up the world the squares made with insubordinate humor.

First: money. Leaving the hospital, it is paying the bill time in a society where individuals and families still paid large medical costs out of pocket. Back then having a baby cost about $200, around $2,000 in today’s money. To pay for the delivery of the bouncing baby boy, they write the hospital a check that’s going to bounce too.

Second: work. At his new sales job, Cummings has to listen to pep talks from blowhard coaches who are motivating the washing machine salesmen with unholy bromides by Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale. Who needs values when you can fill your head with slogans? And Cummings’ fellow salesmen are all “hail, fellow, well met” types that seem as if they were stamped out of a machine.

Third: shoddy products. As for the product he devotes the best part of his day to selling, Cummings is appalled when he finds his wife Betsy has shelled out money for a diaper service. Why, when they can’t afford it and already have a washing machine? She can’t use the Whirl-A-Mart her husband sells because it tears up diapers.

Fourth: maternal mortality. Somber when Betsy and Joe discuss the terms of her will, which Joe has accidentally come across in her hospital go-bag. The scene works dramatically not only because Cummings and Hale are that good. This scene hits home when we recall that in the USA the maternal mortality rate (deaths per 100,000 live births) was significantly higher in 1950 compared to 2020. In 1950, the rate was approximately 95.1 deaths per 100,000 live births – i.e. like the Dominican Republic is now. By 2020, the USA rate had decreased to 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, comparable to Lebanon and Grenada and not comparable with howling socialist hellholes like Norway and Sweden.

Fifth: the bourgeois fear of embarrassment and judgement. The hospital recommends a live-in nurse take care of the child for a month. The couple can’t afford it. But they are too embarrassed to tell her they can’t swing it when she just shows up on their doorstep.

Sixth: the cult of expertise and the self-help industry. The nurse (Cora Witherspoon, who is great) tyrannizes them in their own house. When the bossy nurse moves on to another hapless family, she leaves an oppressive schedule for the cowed mother to follow. Betsy feverishly studies the magazine wisdom of experts in parenting advice, a profitable genre of self-help. Barbara Hale does a great job portraying Betsy feeling overwhelmed.

Seventh: what is with American men? The movie touches on the clear message I got when I was a little kid in the Sixties that real men weren’t supposed to be interested in babies, that nurturance is effeminate and thus contemptible in men. On the phone getting the news of the new bundle of joy, the grandmother quizzes the grandfather, who took the call, if it’s a boy or a girl. The geezer replies crustily, “I didn’t ask. It’s bound to be one or the other.” Another man says to new father Cummings “When you got that baby, a millstone was hung around your neck.” Later when a nurse asks Bob the baby’s name he blurts out “Millstone.”

Betsy ends up exhausted with the housework, child-care, and shopping. She feels grody because she zero time for self-care. She is outraged that over their supper of sandwiches and warm beer, her husband wonders aloud, icily, what she does all day and why can’t she even manage to look attractive anymore. His callous cluelessness is expressed in a shot of his ranting visage that will call to mind Jack’s maniacal face in The Shining. The unhappy couple then have a searing argument in tight whispered voices so as not to wake the infink.

Eighth: lions, tigers, aggressive women, oh my! It somehow got by the Hays office when Bob, thinking he is picking up a babysitter at a bus stop, is shocked when a broad-minded woman with a tolerant view of life says breathily, "Just between you and me, two scotches and I'll sit anywhere."

I’m not saying that this is a brilliant take-down of cultural attitudes in post-war American suburbs. The ending, in fact, seems a sop to the squares, though it didn’t help much since the movie enjoyed only moderate success at the box office. But it is worth watching for when Tashlin does depart from the usual slush involving angelic lil nippers making their entry into this vale of tears.