I was watching 'The Music Man' on the classic movie channel and was inspired by the character of Marian the Librarian to start a list of films that portray loveshy characters. For those of you who don't know the film, it takes Marian '26 years to get to the footbridge with a fella.' She is a music teacher and the head librarian in the town library, the keeper of all things cultural and intellectual in a small farm town. She falls in love with a travelling salesman, and even though he's a swindler she defends him because he's brought some excitement into her buttoned-up life. "There were bells on the hill, but I never heard them ringing, til there was you", she sings to him.
There's a similar plot in 'The Rainmaker' (1956.) Katherine Hepburn plays Lizzie, smart and practical and plain. She's fated to be an old maid until Burt Lancaster, the rainmaker, comes into town. He is revealed as a phony and chased out of town but not until he and Lizzie share a kiss in the barn. For the first time she feels beautiful. Burt Lancaster leaves, and Lizzie settles down with the town sheriff. (Burt Lancaster is absolutely magnetic in this role, by the way.)
Katherine Hepburn played a few spinsters in her day...There's also The African Queen, where she plays a prim and proper missionary, and Summertime, where she plays a middle-aged school teacher who has a fling with a married man on a trip to Italy. Katherine Hepburn is such a quirky, smart, strong woman herself that she seems to either get the role of powerful wife who has to embrace domesticity in order to live peacefully with a husband threatened by her independence, or the spinster. Women who choose to remain single and are fulfilled by their independence challenge woman's role as wife and mother in the structure of society, so they have to be shown as depressed, dumpy, objects of ridicule. I'm stealing some of these ideas from this great article I just read, on a blog I'm going to check out again when I've got more time: Hollywood Spinster
Bette Davis in Now Voyager transforms from a dumpy old maid to a stylish confidant woman through her love for a man she can't have and a child that's not her own. All of these women are grateful beyond expression for the chance to be loved, even if it's only temporary or socially unacceptable.
The only film I can think of that deals with incel for both sexes is Marty (1955.) From IMDB: "Marty is a 34-year-old butcher whose Italian family is constantly after him to get married. He meets plain-looking schoolteacher Clara. They are both lonely, unglamorous people who have resigned themselves to their unloved lives. But they manage, in time, to grope their way to love."
Some quotes from the movie:
"All my brothers and brothers-in-laws tell me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain."
"Ma, sooner or later, there comes a point in a man's life when he's gotta face some facts. And one fact I gotta face is that, whatever it is that women like, I ain't got it."
"See, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are."
I find this film very hard to watch, and yet I'm drawn in. I think at one point one of the two characters actually talks about thinking about killing themself. Marty calls himself and Clara 'dogs'. They meet at a dance when nobody else wants to dance with them. Clara's date leaves her for another, more attractive girl, and Marty is asked to take over for him. His family and friends discourage the budding relationship, but he decides he was happier with Clara and asks her to marry him.
Sometimes I feel like love is only for beautiful people....In the movies it is anyways.
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