Le ciel de lit

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.

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.

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.

This movie has been impossible to find and I would so much like to see it again. It left an indelible impression about marriage and love. And it took some time to realize that this movie after all is a Movie! Now I would like to view it as an adult. One can be influenced by this media if experienced at the right time of life.

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.