I saw this movie on TV when I was young, about ten or eleven. I thought then it was funny and adult in the sense of being a bit dirty and knowing. I saw it again yesterday. I am now between thirty and death too. "The Tunnel of Love" is a time capsule, but a bemusing one. The humour is degrading to the female characters, especially the wife trying to get pregnant, the constantly pregnant wife next door, and the adoption agency investigator who is immediately judged by her looks. I felt with the investigator when she complained to the husband that Gig Young's character made a pass at her five minutes after meeting her. Almost as bad as the nudge nudge pinch pinch attitude of the neighbor and his advice that his happily married friend should bag a babe is the total lack of common sense in the characters' actions. Why does the insulted investigator drive back to make her own pass at the husband? Why does the husband conclude that he has fathered the investigator's baby when it turns out that she is married? (And before this is revealed at the end, the audience and the husband haven't got a clue that the investigator has a husband herself.)Why does the husband give her a check for a thousand dollars without asking her more questions- like how he can be be so certain that he's the one who got her pregnant? Why is the wife next door constantly getting "off to the races" if the husband's sole contribution to parenthood is telling their kids to shut up before he ships them off to boarding school? If you're fascinated by 50s attitudes toward sex, "The Tunnel of Love" is a revealing portrait of the sort of humour that the artist character might highlight in a cartoon to sell to Playboy or one of the more downmarket men's magazines of the era. Behind the winking and the flirting of the actress in the party scene there's a stream of melancholy, especially in the story of the West Point student in his second year whose family has decided that he will marry his pregnant girlfriend: as Gig Young snaps, he'll have bars on his shoulders and a toddler in his lap. All those martinis and double whiskies and Young's box of tranquilizers that he pops like popcorn point at the terror and sadness behind the whoopie. The husband's dinner with the investigator says it all: he has a bottle of ale and a lamb chop from the children's menu. All of the characters are children themselves. Thank God times have changed.
Review of The Tunnel of Love
