Men have been marrying older women since Oedipus married Jocasta.  Of course, when Oedipus discovered that Jocasta was actually his mother, he blinded himself, and she committed suicide.  So, that didn’t work out too well.

But suppose she had not turned out to be his mother.  Could their marriage have been a happy one? There are two problems confronting a couple in which the woman is older than the man.  The first concerns how the man and woman will feel about each other as the years go by.  The second concerns the approval or disapproval of society.  At first, the man and woman may think that only the first consideration is relevant, taking the attitude that that they aren’t hurting anyone, and that it’s nobody’s business but their own.  They may soon learn just how wrong they are, however, that happiness often depends on having the approval of society, as unfair as that might seem.

A lot of people do in fact disapprove of a sexual relationship between a young man and an older woman. At the same time, those who do disapprove realize that, indeed, it’s none of their business. After all, there is nothing immoral about such a relationship.  Rather, it is unaesthetic, as it is when the woman is taller than the man.  People just don’t like the look of it.

Because people feel like busybodies in objecting to the woman’s being older than the man, they may look around for other reasons to supplement their disapproval.  For example, French President Emmanuel Macron seems to be happily married to his wife Brigitte, who is 24 years older than he is. There is a conspiracy theory embraced by Candace Owens to the effect that Brigitte is actually a transgender woman.  Of all the wives of politicians that she might have imputed this to, why was Brigitte singled out for such calumny?  No doubt Candace Owens and others feel themselves to be on firmer ground in objecting to the marriage of the Macrons if Brigitte is also transgender.

Movies are good indication of what people approve or disapprove of, and in most movies about a young man having sex with an older woman, things do not work out well for them.  Classics such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Graduate (1967) readily come to mind.  In other words, such movies act as a morality tale, saying, “See what misery comes to a man if he has sex with an older woman!”

Of course, in some movies, it is the woman who comes to grief.  In Dodsworth (1936), the movie based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis, Fran (Ruth Chatterton) is married to Sam Dodsworth (Walter Huston).  While they are in Europe, she has an affair with Kurt von Obersdorf, who is younger than she is.  She intends to divorce Sam and marry Kurt, but Kurt’s mother, Baroness von Obersdorf (Maria Ouspenskaya), disapproves:  first, because Fran would be a divorced woman, while Kurt and the Baroness are Catholics; second, because Fran is 42, too old to bear Kurt’s heirs.  As an added consideration, the Baroness says to Fran, “Have you thought how little happiness there can be for the old wife of a young husband?”

This remark is especially painful for Fran, desperately afraid of becoming old. She has been lying about her age, saying she has just turned 35, and concealing the fact that she has recently become a grandmother.  Although Fran is the villain of the piece, and we are glad when Sam leaves her at the end of the movie, we nevertheless feel sorry for her.

Neither the movie nor the novel tells us how old Kurt is, but if we may infer the ages of Fran and Kurt from the actors who played them, then Fran is 8 years older than Kurt.  By itself, that might not seem worth worrying about. Perhaps that is why, in writing this story, Sinclair Lewis made religious and fertility considerations be the main objections to the marriage.  As noted above, a lot of people object to the idea of a man marrying an older woman, but they sense that it is none of their business.  So, they need other reasons to justify their disapproval, and Sinclair Lewis has helpfully provided them.

The movie with the greatest disparity between ages, and one in which the relationship is a happy one, is Harold and Maude (1971).  In this quirky comedy, Harold (Bud Cort) is 20, and Maude (Ruth Gordon) is 79. They become lovers.  In the end, Maude commits suicide, not because she is unhappy, but because she has had a good life and decides to avoid a miserable end by finishing it on her own terms.

In none of these movies do the couples get married.  Whether a sexual relationship between a young man and an older woman ends happily or not, in most movies of this sort, they do not get married. Society is more tolerant of the age difference if the relationship is a brief affair rather than one resulting in marriage.  For that reason, there are more movies of the former sort than the latter.

One movie in which we know the couple will end up getting married is All That Heaven Allows (1955). Jane Wyman stars as Cary Scott, a widow with two grown children.  When Wyman made this movie, she was 38 years old.  At the beginning of the movie, Cary’s friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorehead) stops by her house to return some dishes she borrowed.  She mentions in passing that she has to find a date for some last-minute weekend guest for her party that night. Cary says, “A Date?” showing an interest.

Sara dismisses the idea that it might be Cary, saying, “Look, he’s 40, which means he’ll consider any female over 18 too old.”  Instead, Sara suggests that she come to the party with Harvey, the only bachelor around that she thinks is suitable for Cary.  Harvey is played by Conrad Nagel, an actor who was 58 at the time this movie was made.  Sara says she’ll call Harvey and have him pick her up.

That night, Cary’s two children, Ned and Kay, arrive home from college.  They don’t think Cary should have sex at all.  Kay sums up why Harvey is just right for her:

I like Harvey. He’s pleasant, amusing, and he acts his age. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s an old goat. As Freud says, when we reach a certain age, sex becomes incongruous. I think Harvey understands that.

However, Kay has no objection to the fact that Cary looks attractive in the red dress she is wearing for the party:

It’s about time you wore something besides that old black velvet…. Personally, I never subscribed to that old Egyptian custom…of walling up the widow alive in the funeral chamber of her dead husband along with his other possessions, the theory being that she was a possession too. The community saw to it. Of course, that doesn’t happen anymore.

“Doesn’t it?” Cary responds dryly.  “Well, perhaps not in Egypt.”

That goes right over Kay’s head.

When Ned sees Cary’s red dress, he is disconcerted, saying it is lowcut and that he hopes it doesn’t scare Harvey off.  When he goes to answer the door, Kay continues with her psychoanalytic observations, saying of Ned:  “A typical Oedipus reaction….  A son subconsciously resents his mother being attractive to other men. We call it an Oedipus complex.”

The party is not much fun for Cary.  First, she gets a backhanded compliment from a “friend,” who says, “It’s indecent to have two grown children and look as young as you do, attracting attention, isn’t it?”

Later, a married man makes a crude move on Cary, saying they could meet in New York and have sex on the sly.  Finally, when Harvey brings her home, he proposes marriage, indicating that it is only companionship and affection that he has in mind.  Cary rejects both the proposal and the proposition.

Cary’s gardener is Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson).  When Hudson made this movie, he was 30 years old. So, she is 8 years older than he is.  This was thought to be enough of an age difference to be problematic in Dodsworth, and it is enough to cause a problem here too.

They are attracted to each other and gradually start getting to know each other on a more personal basis. He invites her to meet some friends of his, Mick and Alida, who live out in the woods.  These friends are very different from those she is used to, the ones at Sara’s party.  They are warm and genuine.  In other words, there is not one society whose approval or disapproval will be important, but two:  Cary’s society, which will disapprove of her romance with Ron, and Ron’s society, which does approve.  That will make things easier for her in the end.

Cary sees a copy of Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau.  Guess which line she just happens to come across.  That’s right, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  She continues without turning a page:

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises…? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The line about “quiet desperation” is in the first few pages of the book, while the quotation above is at the end, in the conclusion, but this is a movie, so we have to make allowances.

Anyway, these lines are suggesting that one should live the life one thinks is right, regardless of the opinions of others.  At the same time, the opinions of those in Ron’s society are not judgmental. They will not disapprove of the age difference between him and Cary.  It’s nice when you can step to the music you hear while those around you like the same music.

Alida says that Walden is Mick’s bible.  When asked about Ron, she says that she doesn’t think Ron has ever read it.  He doesn’t have to.  “He just lives it.”  And, indeed, he always has a look on his face that bespeaks of spiritual wisdom.

At the party being thrown by Mick and Alida, all their friends seem to have something to do with nature:  beekeeping, birdwatching, etc.  In contrast to this, Sara insists that what Cary needs is a television, so that she will have something to do.  Presumably, we are supposed to think of television as being artificial.  But then, so is the movie we are watching.

When those in Cary’s society learn that Ron and Cary intend to marry, they are scandalized, her children most of all.  The essential objection is the fact that Cary is older than Ron.  At the same time, because age difference alone might not seem to be enough, a class difference was added to the story to give some additional justification for the disapproval of their marriage.  And as noted above, people will sometimes make up stuff to justify their disapproval, for which reason people start spreading a rumor that Cary and Ron were having an affair while her husband was still alive.

To keep from alienating her children, Cary breaks off her engagement to Ron.  But then she finds out she won’t be seeing all that much of her children anymore, for Kay is getting married, and Ned will be spending the next year in Paris.  Ned says that since he and Kay will no longer be living at home, she might as well sell the house.  However, Ned bought her a television for Christmas. After it is placed in the middle of the room, we see Cary reflected in the screen, which means her life will now be as artificial as the shows that she can watch on that television set.

Cary realizes she made a mistake.  She drives over to his Ron’s house to talk to him.  Ron, who has been hunting pheasants, sees her from up on a cliff.  He tries to get her attention, but he slips and falls a great distance, rendering him unconscious from a concussion.  There is some concern about his condition. Cary sits by his side all night.  In the morning, he opens his eyes and sees her, saying, “You’ve come home.”

Cary replies, “Yes, darling.  I’ve come home.”

I have read that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), directed by Ranier Werner Fassbinder, is not exactly a remake of All That Heaven Allows, but rather is an “update” or an “homage” to that movie, which was directed by Douglas Sirk, whom Fassbinder admired.  On my own, that the one was inspired by the other would never have occurred to me.  Although Sirk was a German immigrant, his melodramas are Hollywood all the way.  Fassbinder, on the other hand, lived his entire life in Germany, and in Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul, his version of this story is quite the other thing.

The movie is set in Germany.  Emmi, a German woman who appears to be in her sixties, stops in an Arab bar to get out of the rain. She meets Ali, who is from Morocco. If we may infer from the ages of the actors, Emmi is 26 years older than Ali.  One thing leads to another, and he ends up spending the night with her.

In addition to an age difference much greater than the 8 years in All That Heaven Allows, the added factors that also lead to society’s disapproval are equally excessive.  First, Emmi and Ali are a mixed-race couple.  It is no longer considered politically correct to say there is such a thing as race, but when this movie was made, people would have said that Emmi was a Caucasian and Ali was a Semite.  And just as people are more likely to disapprove of an age difference when it is the woman that is older than the man, so too are they more likely to disapprove of a mixed-race couple if it is the woman that is white. And though religion never comes up, we suspect that she is Christian and he is Muslim.

As the bartender says of their relationship, thinking it will be just a passing thing, “Of course it won’t last. So what?” But this movie manages to get them married anyway through a contrivance that strains our credulity.

The rudeness and bigotry they experience from almost everyone is over the top, with people calling Emmi a whore and ostracizing her.  Whereas Cary’s son bought her a television in All That Heaven Allows, Emmi’s son kicks in her television set.

In All That Heaven Allows, Ron and Cary knew they were right for each other, and it was only the disapproval of Cary’s society and her children that was a problem; in Ali:  Fear Eats the Soul, both Emmi’s society and Ali’s society disapprove of the marriage, and Emmi and Ali themselves begin to have misgivings about what they have done.  Ali becomes sullen, cheats on her, and seems to be ashamed of her. And Emmi begins to exhibit prejudice against foreigners: she tells him to carry stuff down to the cellar, as if he were the hired help; she refuses to cook him couscous, saying he should get used to eating German food; and she and her friends talk about him while he is standing in the same room, discussing how clean he is.

As we wonder how all this is going to work out between them, Ali collapses on the dance floor from a perforated ulcer, brought on by stress.  But was he not stepping to the music he heard?  Try to imagine Ron Kirby having a stress-induced ulcer in All That Heaven Allows.  

In the final scene of the movie, Ali is unconscious in a hospital bed.  Now, it would have been no trouble to add a scene in which Ali regains consciousness after a successful surgery, with Emmi sitting by his side.  Instead, it’s an unpleasant ending to an unpleasant movie.  You’d be forgiven for thinking that Fassbinder didn’t approve of their relationship either.