I think I lost my sympathy for scheming-spouse Harry Allen in 2007’s Married Life when he poisoned his dog. I’m willing to grant some leeway to movie poisoners, but I draw the line at Fido-snuffing. Look, I understand—when poisoning your wife, you don’t want to screw up. You need a trial run first. But to test it on your dog? I don’t see why Harry couldn’t have experimented on an unpleasant neighbor. Or maybe an unpleasant relative—such as his son-in-law, who, in the one brief scene he appears, pontificating to a bored Harry at Sunday dinner on the topic of female frigidity, is no doubt an ideal test subject. Why not slip a bit of strychnine into his soup? And with Harry’s daughter also looking mighty bored with her spouse’s conversation—well, you’d probably be doing her a favor, too.
The movie’s plot is a seven-year-itch variant on the Eternal Triangle, set among upscale suburbanites in in one of those deceptively placid Cheevervilles, where unseemly desires romp beneath the tailored silk vests. Harry is a rich, middle-aged businessman whose heart, behind the waistcoat, now palpitates for a much younger woman; and he’d like to detach himself from his current, inconvenient spouse. But, fancying himself a tender-hearted fellow, Harry doesn’t want to put his dear wife Pat through what he sees as the anguish and humiliation of a divorce. So he figures on putting her out of her misery by uxoriously spiking her digestive powder (like what you’d do to a sick dog…), and he sets about his plan with what seems absurdly simple ease. Although it’s never that easy in the movies…
On hand as Harry’s confidante is his unmarried best friend, Richard (the story’s told from his point of view), who, when introduced by Harry to his young tootsie, named Kay, is smitten with her beauty and schemes on cutting Harry out. Although Richard has no idea of Harry’s lethal intentions, he’s yet in that weird position of knowing things about friends Harry and Pat that Harry and Pat don’t know about each other—such as how Pat, like Harry, is also doing a bit of tootsie rolling on the side. (I was once in a similar situation with a married couple I knew, and, believe me, it can be awkward.) So Richard tries to persuade Harry to stay with Pat and Pat to stay with Harry, to leave him free to put the moves on Kay—to whom he coos sweet manipulative nothings about the “burden of conscience” of causing a man to leave his wife. Maybe that’s not the most morally upright manner for a best friend to behave, but, in my book, it beats pooch- (or wife-) poisoning any day.
Married Life is based on John Bingham’s novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, of which only a synopsis I’ve read, but whose literary tone I gather is blackly humorous. I was hoping for something amusingly savage, or at least wickedly decadent, in the film itself, but it can’t seem to settle into one mood, genre, or mode of telling its story. Is it noir, mystery, marital drama, suspense, or black comedy? I think the narrative does work best as dark comedy, as played (crudely) in a 1962 TV adaptation for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (under the title “The Tender Poisoner”), which ends with a great, nasty, one-upmanship twist. The movie, however, descends into unconvincing sentimentality (unlike the novel), washing out its ambiguity and darker shades. I wish it could have played out like a comically cold-blooded version of a John Updike suburban morality tale, inviting viewers to contemplate, from an outside perch, the unlovely dirt under all those upper-crust fingernails.
Despite its shortcomings, Married Life is entertaining: It’s beautifully photographed, scripted, and acted, and it can be drolly cynical in its view of self-blinding human folly. Perhaps the film’s most enjoyable aspect is its Look: Set in 1949, it goes all-out retro, meticulously recreating (in color) the vintage manners, music, clothes, hair, jewels, make-up, automobiles (wow, are those cars snazzy), and plush interiors of that era, for us to ogle at and sigh over. Along with the actors, especially Pierce Brosnan, dapper and deliciously sly as Richard, and Rachel McAdams as Kay, whose platinum-blonde spit curl is so precisely, perfectly swirled, it could make you swoon. I think the movie is recreating, deliberately, another aspect of that era—when a film’s design was one of its joys, allowing spectators to luxuriate vicariously in an imagined world of good taste, fine style, and gorgeous faces. It’s like indulging in a 90-minute bubble bath, champagne and Belgian chocolates on the side and Sinatra crooning on the stereo. Maybe the movie isn’t as wickedly decadent as I’d like it to be, but watching it sure is.
You can watch Married Life on YouTube here, while available. You can also view it on Tubi here (the viewing is free, but a login is required).
You can watch “The Tender Poisoner” from The Alfred Hitchcock Hour here on DailyMotion.
Grand Old Movies 
Brian Schuck
/ May 31, 2024I’m definitely with you in wishing to see anyone but the dog on the wrong end of the poison bottle! From the stills alone I can see that they went all in on the era-verisimilitude production design. And the cast is intriguing.
Your judgment that the film “descends into unconvincing sentimentality” sounds like a classic case of studio hedging. As in, “let’s get the rights to this wonderfully edgy, darkly humorous novel, and proceed to water it down because we don’t trust or respect our audience.”
I love lines like this: “The movie’s plot is a seven-year-itch variant on the Eternal Triangle, set among upscale suburbanites in in one of those deceptively placid Cheevervilles, where unseemly desires romp beneath the tailored silk vests.”
Grand Old Movies
/ May 31, 2024Thanks so much, Brian! From what synopses I’ve read of the novel, the ending is much darker, whereas it seems the film tries to overlook everything we’ve been watching and make it all ‘nice.’ What you said, how studios water down product because of mistrust of audiences, seems so true for this film, although it’s so common in Hollywood movies — they always seem more worried about their box office than anything else and afraid of ‘downer’ endings scaring away customers. One of these days someone will do an adaptation of Hamlet with everyone happily reconciled by the end and Hamlet and Ophelia walking off hand in hand into the sunset!
However, Married Life is pretty enjoyable up till its end, and the retro look is fabulous. And if you’re a Pierce Brosnan fan, I also recommend it, as he’s very funny and charming in it, as is the rest of the cast.