Word: boccaccian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gamy Gamut. Unlike soap opera, the average confession story runs a gamy gamut of misadventure and misfortune whose-Boccaccian detail is tempered only by the bowdlerized prose of Hollywood. A bastard is a "sin child" or "living proof," adultery is "cheating." But in the end, every Wedding-Ring Dodger and Faithless Mate, however devious, rises above the blighted past ("Is he remembering her when he kisses me?") and, overcoming the doom-fraught future ("A lifetime of not knowing"), concludes his or her chronicle on a hopeful note. "Sure, we're Pollyanna," shrugs Nina Dorrance, young (35) editor of superslick...
This assumption would be defensible or the comedy were played merely for the laughs inherent in the reversal of the accepted view of marriage. Marchant does make the most of his Boccaccian situation, even dragging in somebody else's mistress to add to the incongruity. Unfortunately, however, after he has more than exhausted the possibilities in this direction he begins to moralize abstractly on the role of the husband in the home, the wife in the home, the mistress in the home, and the "delicate balance" of human relationships...
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