The central conflict in the film revolves around the traditional models of social behavior and religious behavior expected by New York Jewish families in the 1950s, and Marjorie's desire to follow an unconventional path. The film is notable for its inclusion of Jewish religious scenes—including a Passover meal, a synagogue sequence, and Jewish icons in the Morgenstern house. These depictions were one of the first times Jewish religion was portrayed overtly in film since The Jazz Singer (1927). The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Song ("A Very Precious Love"), sung by Kelly.
Plot
Marjorie Morgenstern is a student at Hunter College and the girlfriend of an eligible young man, Sandy Lamm, who attends her family's synagogue. Her parents are happy with her choice of mate (department store heir), and her mother Rose Morgenstern (Claire Trevor) tells her father, Arnold (Everett Sloane), that she hopes the two children marry.
Marjorie breaks up with Sandy after he proposes unsuccessfully and goes to a Catskills resort that summer to be a camp counselor. One night, Marjorie and friend Marsha Zelenko (Carolyn Jones) sneak to a Borscht Belt resort for adults called South Wind. Marjorie stumbles into a rehearsal for a dance routine, and she is noticed hiding in the back by the social director Noel Airman. After watching, and trying to return to camp, she is caught by resort owner Maxwell Greech (George Tobias), but Noel Airman (Gene Kelly) vouches for Marjorie as a person looking for a job, which he then offers to her. She begins a relationship with Airman and a friendship with aspiring playwright Wally Wronkin (Martin Milner), who writes Airman's stage act. The latter has a romantic interest in Marjorie, but she's tempted by the older, more seasoned Airman, who meets the disapproval of her parents. Airman, whose original name was the more Jewish Ehrman, renames Marjorie as well from Morgenstern to Morningstar.
Marjorie's sweet Uncle Samson (Ed Wynn) comes to the resort to keep an eye on her. Samson intervenes as a waiter to lecture Noel on the character of Marjorie and not to take advantage of her good nature and youth. Noel reconsiders his plan to woo her into bed, and tells Marjorie to leave. He accuses her of wanting to find a husband and argues that he will never be subjected to a life of mediocrity and married suburban life. The relationship goes up and down all summer but they seem to coalescing as a couple until Marjorie's parents appear on a surprise visit. During a lunch, the conversation becomes testy as her parents grill Noel on his career plans for the future. The relationship turns sour again, as Noel doesn't want to have anything to do with traditional Jewish life and business aspirations. Later, during a party, Marjorie notices that her uncle is feeling unwell but is distracted by Noel, who professes his uncontrollable attraction for her. When her uncle dies of a heart attack unattended, Marjorie blames herself, and Noel and leaves to go back to the city. A year later, after graduating Hunter College, Marjorie plans to continue her acting career to the chagrin of her parents. She ends up dating a doctor named Harris, with whom she quickly breaks up when Airman returns to find her showing up in a limousine. He declares that love has convinced him to become respectable and conventional. Marjorie tells her mother, who insists her daughter bring him to a Passover meal. "Not Passover, mother. He's not very religious. He doesn’t believe in those things," Marjorie says. Rose answers "He doesn't believe in those things...you're going to get married. How are you going to raise your children?"
In the midst of the Passover meal, he leaves, and Marjorie follows him. She is concerned he's bored, but he says "I wasn't bored. I was disturbed, deeply. I couldn't help thinking of all the things I've missed in life. Family, your kind of family. Faith, tradition. All the things I've been ridiculing all the time. That's why I couldn't take it anymore. I love you very much, Marjorie Morgenstern."
Airman is hired by an advertising firm and seems to do well, but one week he doesn't show up at work and refuses to take Marjorie's calls. She goes to his apartment and finds him drunk with a strange woman. He has decided he cannot stand the professional lifestyle and wants to be an artist. The impetus to change careers is the success of Wally Wronkin on Broadway; the playwright has launched a series of hits, and Airman is consumed with jealousy. He admits he hates his conventional job and his anger toward himself, and Marjorie convinces her girlfriend's new husband to invest in his play. Wally and the investors critique the play's ending as being depressing and not viable, but in a fit of rage, Noel refuses to make the changes required to appease them. Despite Airman's outbursts, the investors are convinced to back the play with Wally's lukewarm assurances that it was viable enough. The play is panned by critics. "We were crucified," the investor explains to Marjorie. The relationship with Noel is unable to survive, and he runs away, again, this time leaving her a note saying he is on his way to Europe. She travels to Europe to search for him. In London, she meets Wally who tells her Noel is back at South Wind, the resort where they first met.
Marjorie returns to South Wind, where she watches Noel rehearsing a new summer show. Everything is exactly as it was, her first summer there, except for herself. Greech observes that she's done some growing up. We see her board a bus. In the rearview mirror, Wronkin sits in back. He smiles, as he has been waiting for her to get over her summer fling. The suggestion is that they will embark on the relationship for which Wronkin had been hoping from the beginning.
The film was mainly shot at Scaroon Manor in upstate New York.[4] The footage of fictitious Camp Tamarack was filmed at Camp Cayuga, Schroon Lake, N.Y. in Essex County, N.Y.[5] Part of the film was filmed in Glens Falls, N.Y. and Warren County, N.Y.[6]
Until Marjorie Morningstar, Natalie Wood had played mostly child-like roles, including that of Judy in Rebel Without a Cause.[citation needed] A New York Times reviewer wrote "Natalie Wood, who only yesterday was playing with dolls in films, has blossomed into a vivacious pretty brunette who very likely is as close to a personification of Marjorie as one could wish. But the character is hardly complex, and while Miss Wood is competent in the role, it is rarely a glowing performance."[7]
Gene Kelly was near the end of his film career when he appeared in Marjorie Morningstar. His 15-year association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had ended the previous year. Born in 1912, he was age 46 when he took the role of Noel Airman. By contrast, his love interest Wood was only age 20.[citation needed] The Times noted: "Although Mr. Kelly appears a mite uncomfortable in his assignment, he plays it with understanding. And, as a professional song-and-dance man, he both hoofs with polish and pleasingly warbles 'A Very Precious Love,' the film's theme number."[7]
Times critiques of the other performances: "Carolyn Jones, as Miss Wood's best friend, makes it an outspoken performance marked by one truly poignant scene in which she reveals her essential loneliness. Ed Wynn, in the comparatively short role of an impecunious but understanding relative, adds some glint of humor and compassion. Claire Trevor, as Marjorie's over-protective mother and Martin Milner, as the playwright, who is one of Marjorie's retinue of devoted suitors, are well-turned, if not inspired, characterizations."[7]
Differences between the film and novel
The most significant difference between the 1955 novel and the 1958 film is the ending. At the end of the novel, the free-spirited Marjorie Morningstar settles down with a man agreeable to her parents. In a criticism of Herman Wouk's ending, Alana Newhouse writes in Slate that "In the final nine pages, the formerly vibrant Marjorie gives up on her career, marries a man named Sidney—er, Milton—Schwartz, and moves to Westchester...Most female readers cry when they reach the end of this book, and for good reason. Marjorie Morningstar, as they came to know her, has become another woman entirely: 'You couldn't write a play about her that would run a week, or a novel that would sell a thousand copies...The only remarkable thing about Mrs. Schwartz is that she ever hoped to be remarkable, that she ever dreamed of being Marjorie Morningstar.'"[8]
The film's ending suggests a possible relationship between Marjorie and Wally Wronkin, the playwright. Although he is successful, he is far more artistic than the Milton Schwartz that Marjorie settles for at the end of the novel. This ending suggests a different conceit in the film than Wouk's novel. The novel suggests that people grow up to realize they have no real choice but to follow their family and upbringing. The film's ending suggests that maturity implies assuming responsibility for one's choices and finishing what was started. Wally had been waiting for Marjorie to learn that Noel will never mature in this sense. In the novel the moral seems to be that her only solution is to settle, as her Mother warns her, for someone to take care of her. In the movie, she begins a new journey.
The film is also contemporary, set in the late 1950s, whereas the novel is set in the 1930s.
The Caine Mutiny is a 1954 American military trial film directed by Edward Dmytryk, produced by Stanley Kramer, and starring Humphrey Bogart, José Ferrer, Van Johnson, Robert Francis, and Fred MacMurray. It is based on Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 novel of the same name. Set in the Pacific theatre of World War II, the film depicts the events on board a U.S. Navy destroyer-minesweeper and the subsequent court-martial of its executive officer for mutiny.
Natalie Wood was an American actress who began her career in film as a child and successfully transitioned to young adult roles.
A happy ending is an ending of the plot of a work of fiction in which there is a positive outcome for the protagonist or protagonists, and in which this is to be considered a favourable outcome.
Herman Wouk was an American author who published fifteen novels, many of them historical fiction such as The Caine Mutiny (1951), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
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War and Remembrance is a novel by Herman Wouk, published in October 1978 as the sequel to Wouk's The Winds of War (1971). The Winds of War covers the period 1939 to 1941, and War and Remembrance continues the story of the extended Henry and Jastrow families from 15 December 1941 through 6 August 1945. The novel was adapted into a television mini-series, War and Remembrance, and presented on American television in 1988.
Marjorie Morningstar is a 1955 novel by Herman Wouk about a woman who wants to become an actress. Marjorie Morningstar has been called "the first Jewish novel that was popular and successful, not merely to a Jewish audience but to a general one". In 1958, the book was the basis for a Hollywood movie starring Natalie Wood, also titled Marjorie Morningstar.
The Varsity Show is one of the oldest traditions at Columbia University. Founded in 1893 as a fundraiser for the university's fledgling athletic teams, the Varsity Show now draws together the entire Columbia undergraduate community for a series of performances every April. Dedicated to producing a unique full-length musical that skewers and satirizes many dubious aspects of life at Columbia, the Varsity Show is written and performed exclusively by university undergraduates. Various renowned playwrights, composers, authors, directors, and actors have contributed to the Varsity Show, either as writers or performers, while students at Columbia, including Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Lorenz Hart, Herman J. Mankiewicz, I. A. L. Diamond, Herman Wouk, Greta Gerwig, and Kate McKinnon.
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The Caine Mutiny is a 1952 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard two destroyer-minesweepers in the Pacific Theater in World War II. Among its themes, it deals with the moral and ethical decisions made at sea by ship captains and other officers. The mutiny of the title is legalistic, not violent, and takes place during Typhoon Cobra, in December 1944. The court-martial that results provides the dramatic climax to the plot.
Stereotypes of Jews are generalized representations of Jews, often caricatured and of a prejudiced and antisemitic nature.
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The Winds of War is a 1983 American war drama television miniseries, based on the 1971 novel of the same name written by Herman Wouk. It was produced and directed by Dan Curtis, while Wouk adapted his own novel to screen. Like the novel, the series follows the lives of the fictional Henry and Jastrow families as they intersect with the major global events of the early years of World War II. The series also includes segments of documentary footage, narrated by William Woodson, to explain major events and important characters. It stars an ensemble cast, featuring Robert Mitchum, Ali MacGraw, Jan-Michael Vincent, John Houseman, Polly Bergen, Chaim Topol, Peter Graves, Jeremy Kemp, Victoria Tennant, and Ralph Bellamy.
War and Remembrance is an American miniseries based on the 1978 novel of the same name written by Herman Wouk. The miniseries, which aired from November 13, 1988, to May 14, 1989, covers the period of World War II from the American entry into World War II immediately after Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to the day after the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It is the sequel to the 1983 miniseries The Winds of War, which was also based on one of Wouk's novels.
Alexandra Denisova, real name Patricia Denise Meyers Galian, was a Canadian ballerina. Born in Canada, she started taking classical ballet lessons in childhood.
Natalie Wood (1938–1981) was an American actress who started her career as a child by appearing in films directed by Irving Pichel. Wood's first credited role was as an Austrian war refugee in the Pichel-directed Tomorrow Is Forever (1946) with Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles. The following year, she played a child who does not believe in Santa Claus in the Christmas comedy-drama Miracle on 34th Street (1947) opposite Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, and Edmund Gwenn.
Morgenstern is a German surname that is also used in Scandinavia and is common among Ashkenazi Jews. It literally means "morning star" and is sometimes anglicized as Morningstar.
↑ Cohn, Lawrence (October 15, 1990). "All-Time Film Rental Champs". Variety. p.M172.
↑ "Top Grossers of 1958". Variety. 7 January 1959. p.48. Please note figures are for US and Canada only and are domestic rentals accruing to distributors as opposed to theatre gross
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