Tragic Poetry in Entertainment Yesterday

Sometimes there’s a serendipity in associations that leaves a pleasant murmur in your mind and sometimes there’s just some weirdness that produces a disconcerting buzz. From the Arizona Republic:

The Nicholson film [“Something’s Gotta Give”] doesn't share much more than the title with the 1962 [Marilyn] Monroe/Dean Martin version of Something's Got to Give. Based on the Tennyson poem Enoch Arden, the movie is about a woman who's marooned on a desert island for so long that her husband remarries, only to have her finally return. (In the poem, the roles are reversed.)

Monroe dropped out of the troubled production for a while and never completed it before her death in August 1962. For curiosity seekers, a 37-minute version has been released on video and DVD. In 1963, the story reached theaters with Doris Day and James Garner in the main roles, although Fox changed the title to Move Over, Darling.

Film buffs were probably already familiar with the tale, which had previously hit the screen under the titles My Favorite Wife (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, 1940), Too Many Husbands (Jean Arthur and Fred MacMurray, 1940) and Enoch Arden, a two-part 1911 silent by D.W. Griffith.

There’s something in here about Tennyson, then D.W. Griffith, to Doris Day in six degrees of separation that makes my head spin. But to place Marilyn Monroe at the fulcrum and her death as prime mover lends a depth of tragedy to what otherwise would have just been farce. Having Dean Martin there in his whiskey glory as our sixties version of a swinging Falstaff left to mourn rare beauty leaves me speechless. And I hear Jack Nicholson reciting it all with an ironic eyebrow raised above his disbelieving eyes.


Now when the dead man come to life beheld
His wife his wife no more, and saw the babe
Hers, yet not his, upon the father's knee,
And all the warmth, the peace, the happiness,
And his own children tall and beautiful,
And him, that other, reigning in his place,
Lord of his rights and of his children's love,--
Then he, tho' Miriam Lane had told him all,
Because things seen are mightier than things heard,
Stagger'd and shook, holding the branch, and fear'd
To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry,
Which in one moment, like the blast of doom,
Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth.

from Tennyson's "Enoch Arden"