I've just read an interesting article about the history of the tunnel of love. It seems as though they were originally intended a a permissive way for couples to get together.
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That's exactly what the Tunnels of Love were for, a way for couples to grope in the dark for a bit! Because young couples had very little privacy in those days, even though the old rules of chaperonage had been relaxed by the 1940s. Most lived with relatives and weren't allowed to bring a person of the opposite sex into a bedroom, there were busybodies everywhere who thought it was their social duty to keep girls from "getting in trouble"... for kids in a small town the only way they could get a little private time with their boyfriend or girlfriend was to get their own car, or wait for the carnival to bring a Tunnel of Love to town.
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Ah..."where there is a will, there is a way."
Your alternative -- a car -- is why drive-in movies used to be very very popular. With the overall decline of the drive-in movie theater being available anymore...what do those poor kids do?
Ah...their bedrooms while the parents are home, anymore, I guess. Parents don't always care.
I do like how Hitchcock "spent the dough" to create that entire amusement park somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. He had TWO carousels built so he could film one while the other one was being set up for another shot.
As for "The Tunnel of Love," well, all sorts of symbolism, yes? Miriam is a one-woman tunnel of love -- married, pregnant with another man's child, on a date with TWO guys and...open to seduction from a third.
And the great moments:
Bruno's shadow overtaking the other shadows in the tunnel.
Miriam's "false alarm scream" When she is REALLY killed by Bruno...she CAN'T scream.
PS. I never saw it but there is a movie called Tunnel of Love with the odd couple of Doris Day and...Richard Widmark?
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And that's why people married so young back then.
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..and why a lot of people marry much older back now! No need!
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Otter (24464)
a year ago
My aunt went to college in a very cold part of the US, in the late 1940s. She told me that the college dorm had "Mush Rooms", booths in the common areas where couples could have a bit of privacy, because young folks spending time outside in the dark could mean frostbite or hypothermia. So the booths had doors... which didn't lock. And everyone know that a staff member would be patrolling the "Mush Rooms" and opening doors without knocking, to make sure that nobody got themselves into trouble.
So yeah, people married a lot younger then.
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