Richard Chamberlain died last year and TCM eventually got around to running a night of his movies as a tribute. One that I hadn't seen before was Joy in the Morning, so as always I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later and do the obligatory post on it. Having finally seen it, I can now write up that post.
The movie starts off with a pre-credits sequence, set against a backdrop of the radio broadcast of the Gene Tunney/Jack Dempsey title fight, which places things around 1927. Carl Brown (Richard Chamberlain) is making out with his girlfriend Annie McGairy (Yvette Mimieux) beneath the stairs of one of those old New York tenement buildings. This is the sort of thing that's scandalous if they get caught, and on top of that, Annie has an unseen stepfather who treats her badly, so Annie decides to run off and elope with Carl.
Carl is a law student at one of those smaller schools that certainly populated movies of a previous era. For college students of the 1920s to be married was just as scandalous as making out under the staircase, so Carl takes a job as a caretaker at the school to help defray expenses, with he and Annie living in a caretaker's cottage on campus. But the dean of the school, Dean Darwent (Sidney Blackmer), isn't so sure Carl can make things work. And besides, one of the student loan programs they have set up isn't for married students, which puts a crimp in the Browns' finances. Things get much worse when Dad (Arthur Kennedy) finds out not only about the marriage, but to whom Carl has gotten married. Apparently the Browns and McGairys had a history back in the old country, so when Dad learns what his son is doing, he withdraws his financial support. Carl's mother also writes a nasty letter about what type of woman she thinks Annie is.
To help further defray expenses, Annie gets a job doing babysitting work for single mother Mrs. Karter (Joan Tetzel), who is carrying on with a much older married man Mr. Pulaski (Oscar Homolka), one more thing that's scandalous. But Pulaski's Christmas present to the young married couple is to offer Carl a job as night watchman, although he's going to have to sleep away from Annie, which puts a further strain on the marriage. Annie seeks companionship with the local florist, who fortunately for the marriage is gay and has no designs on Annie. But being gay in the 1920s was also scandalous, and all the busybodies in town learn of a life for the married couple that's not quite conventional in a way that the busybodies think they should be able to gossip about.
Finally, Annie gets pregnant, which ought to be perfectly respectable considering that she's married, and there's no suggestion that anybody other than Carl is the father. It's just that he's got so much financial difficulty, and there's the possibility that he might flunk out of law school, that could push the marriage over the edge.
Joy in the Morning is one of those 1960s melodramas that the producers at the time probably thought was mildly daring as it pushed the limits of the Production Code. In retrospect, however, it's just one of those movies that's funny when it isn't supposed to be. It's turgid, trying to shoehorn a whole bunch of social issues into the plot, while at the same time laughably acted by the two leads. And the music (by Bernard Herrmann, with a bad MOR title song sung by Chamberlain) totally doesn't fit the movie. Joy in the Morning turns out to be a howler, with that badness possibly being the only real reason to watch.
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