The Four Poster

The year was 1952. My parents had a date with another couple to see The Four Poster. I don't remember why they decided to take me. When the other couple got into my parents' car they were shocked to see me there. This movie contains adult dialogue - it is no movie for an 11 year old, they complained. My mother's response impressed me: "Either my daughter will understand or she won't. Either way is fine." The result, of course, was that I strained to listen to every word that was uttered by either Rex Harrison or Lilli Palmer, hoping against hope to hear the naughty implications. But darn it, it all sounded innocent to me. Whatever it was that the other couple thought I shouldn't hear, I hadn't!! But despite my youth, I found the movie interesting and well-acted and have never forgotten the images of Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer discussing their marriage while standing next to their four poster bed.

The Four Poster(1952)is a warm,witty,and wise play chronicling a marriage, from "I do" to "til death do us part", from the candlelit late-Victorian years through the late nineteen-thirties. The Stanley Kramer-produced movie version of the Jan de Hartog stage success utilizes the gifted, Academy-award winning cinematographer Hal Mohr (A Midsummer Night's Dream, WarnerBros. 1935) to create a frequently non-static fluidity to the mies-en-scene (the overall "look") of the necessarily stage-bound piece (the closeups are luminous). The scintillating score by the virtuoso Dimitri Tiomkin perfectly captures the changes of the characters' moods and attitudes as each of them grow and evolve - both as individuals and as a couple - through each succeeding decade of their life together. The music also helps work against staginess, literally sweeping up and propelling forward the film's pace, briskly and jubilantly. In fact, Tiomkin's screen credit "Music Composed and Directed by Dimitri Tiomkin" is entirely appropriate, for he is as much to be credited with producing a movie that moves as are producer Kramer and director Irving Reis (best-remembered film The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer starring Cary Grant). An additional innovation was the use of the famed U.P.A. cartoon studio's (Gerald McBoing-Boing their signature character) animation sequences between acts to delineate the couple's lives outside the confines of their bedroom as time moves on. The results are delightful and often poignant. Lastly, and best of all, are the shining brilliance of the performances of (at the time) real-life married couple Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer. They had been brought to Hollywood together after their British film success The Rake's Progress (U.S.A. title The Notorious Gentleman), with Mr. Harrison signed by Twentieth Century-Fox and Miss Palmer by Warner Bros. After each had enjoyed a rising success at their respective studios - Harrison especially in movies such as Anna and the King of Siam and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir - everything came to a screeching halt in 1948 after the suicide note written by actress Carole Landis implicating Harrison in an affair. Miss Palmer's decision to stand by her husband had them both deemed persona non grata and returned to England for work in the theatre and one oddly-autobiographical movie about marital infidelity, The Long Dark Hall in 1951. Stanley Kramer's desire to cast them in The Four Poster brought them back to Hollywood the following year, at last for a vehicle tailor-made and perfectly suited to each actor's respective gifts. Harrison is at his peak here: dashing and debonair, temperamental, sometimes foolish and childish, others compassionate and knowing. Palmer had never before and would never again be given a role in a Hollywood film that so completely utilized her versatility and enormous strengths. As the wife she is girlish and sophisticated, vibrant and ebullient, supportive yet never docile, fiery and earthy and warm and ever-hopeful for life's blessings. Miss Palmer's radiant beauty is seen to best advantage here in a performance that is quite simply sublime, and for which she was awarded the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for the year 1953 (Academy Award consideration should also have been hers but shamefully was not). One can sense in these two superb performances a lot of catharsis: the trials of their exile and the tensions of their personal relationship being diverted and channeled into those of their characters' situations. The Four Poster was acclaimed critically but sadly was a box-office failure, perhaps its sophisticated, innovative presentation a little ahead of its time. Yet happily for viewers today the movie is at the very least a filmed record of two glowing performances by two great stars, whose middling success overall as an acting couple would be eclipsed by later individual stage and screen successes. And this film can be seen as a reminder of what dynamic star charisma and sheer acting presence used to be.

Who was Jan de Hartog? Whoever he was, he wrote a splendid, perceptive, entertaining play, "The Four Poster," which was a Broadway hit with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy (how I'd have loved to have seen them in it), and, during that run from 1951 to 1953, was filmed and released by Stanley Kramer. Two-character plays were rare then, and two-character movies rarer still, but this one survives quite beautifully, preserving de Hartog's clear-eyed, comprehensive views on marriage, ego, womanhood, and creativity. The husband, played a bit stiffly to my eye by Rex Harrison, is a self-centered writer who nonetheless shows great sensitivity to his wife when it's required, and the wife, played beautifully by Lilli Palmer, is a searching individual whose identity is tied up almost exclusively in her marriage. The real-life marriage of this couple was, as other posters have noted, fraught, and the tension plays well into their characterizations. It's cleverly augmented by John Hubley's animated transitional sequences, which are rather brilliantly scored by Dmitri Tiomkin. Musical theater fans will know that the piece was successfully turned into "I Do! I Do!", and they'll be intrigued by the changes librettist Tom Jones made (the characters' names, the somewhat happier ending). I'd tried to track this one down for years and am glad to have finally seen it. It's unique. And it works.

In this filmed version of Jan De Hartog's play, Rex Harrison and wife Lilli Palmer go through life in half a dozen scenes in their bed room. It starts with them newly married, and goes through their hardships, from inveigling a virgin bride into consummation, through death.

Harrison and Miss Palmer were husband and wife when they made this, and it neatly compresses the joy and heartache that a couple goes through. It was later the basis of the Broadway show, I DO, I DO, and Miss Palmer is radiant... and producer Stanley Kramer was taking an awful risk, since Harrison had left Hollywood in disgrace a few years earlier. Always-ambitious director Irving Reis pulls fine performances from his to performers, while the play is opened up by careful camera movement by DP Hal Mohr, and UPA cartoons about the world surrounding the two acting as scene changes. For some reason, they look like they were based on Ronald Searle's cartoons.

I saw this movie as a very young man. I saw it only once. And I've never forgotten it. It represents, to me, a template of life that speaks of all the joy and all the sorrow of life and of all the reasons that it is worth living.

If this movie were to be made available, it is one that I would gladly add to my private library and feel priviledged to be able to share it again.