Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow (1955)

There's Always Tomorrow is an ironic soap opera film noir, a film that is effective on many levels, as bored husband and father Fred MacMurray is surprised by a visit from an employee he has neither seen nor heard from in twenty years, played by Barbara Stanwyck..  It becomes clear that they once loved each other and MacMurray tries to rekindle the romance, to the tune of the appropriate "Blue Moon" and under the nose of his homemaker wife Joan Bennett.  There's a great deal to see and think about in this film, if one lets it take place, as Jean-Luc Godard has suggested, halfway between you and the screen.  I just wanted to mention two important incidents:
   
MacMurray comes home from work on his wife's birthday with two tickets to a musical.  But Joan Bennett can't go with him because their daughter is having a ballet recital.  Apparently MacMurray didn't even know about this and doesn't care about his daughter's recital, all he wants is someone to go to the theatre with him.  His two other children can't go either and as they leave for their own dates they hit up MacMurray for money.  As MacMurray puts on an apron to get his own dinner, a scene some have seen as emasculating (incorrectly in my view), Stanwyck arrives out of the blue and agrees to go to the theatre with him, though they leave at intermission when Stanwyck says she has already seen the show in New York.  Certainly MacMurray's children are brats, as we gradually see in detail, but it is also true that he shows little interest in their lives, presumably because he thinks this is his wife's job.

Stanwyck is a successful designer and has set up a branch of her business in California.  After she comes to dinner with MacMurray's family (which turns out to be a disaster, because the two older kids think there is an affair going on between their father and Stanwyck) she invites Bennett to her shop and recommends a dress to her to try on; it looks lovely on her but she rejects it, saying it is too "young" for her.  Stanwyck suggests she take the dress home because her husband will rave about it.  Bennett shakes her head and says, "After twenty years of marriage a husband never raves about anything his wife wears."

This is a film about fatalism, choices and whether it is possible to change things if one, as MacMurray says "is in a rut."  It was written by Bernard Schoenfeld, who wrote a number of film noirs (including Phantom Lady in 1944), and photographed in black-and-white by Russell Metty, who helped Sirk make a suburban home look like a prison of bars and shadows.