My favorite thing about Old Hollywood films is that everything was done in pre-modern technology. Every strip of film had to be cut. Every effect had to be meticulously done without the help of computers. It is a lot more impressive when you think of how much work went into films back in the day. That’s how I felt while watching What a Way to Go! Aside from its plot, which I absolutely loved and found very amusing, the film was also visually stunning. While I focused mainly on the plot, I did dive into the colors in the film as I found them hard to ignore. It would have been a shame not to discuss the olden days of technicolor.
Money Is All
When Louisa was a child, her church told her, “Money is the root of all evil.” Her mother hung signs around the house with this phrase, as well as “tis better to give than to receive” and “love thy neighbor as thyself.” However, Louisa’s mother doesn’t actually live by these morals. She hounds her husband about making more money and compares him to other men who are more successful in their careers. Some of my favorite shots in the film are close-ups of Louisa’s mother’s signs as some of the letters are falling off, revealing the new phrases, “tis better to receive,” love thyself,” and “money is all.” This is what Louisa’s mother was actually living by.
While this sequence is early in the film, the moral of the story stands out the strongest. The rest of the film only adds to this message and provides further entertainment. Most people claim to live by these morals, but since we live in a world that operates on money and we need money to survive, people find themselves unknowingly contradicting themselves. They say they hate money, but they need it for food or to pay their bills. People who enjoy luxuries like vacations or big houses need money for these things, too. I also don't love the way society shames people for liking these luxuries because they are not inherently bad. People only claim to live by these truths because they think hating money makes them a good person.
Louisa learned to resent money because of her upbringing. All she wanted was to live the simple life, but her mother tried to force her to marry a rich man named Leonard Crawley (Dean Martin), who Louisa saw as greedy, arrogant, and superficial. However, Louisa rebelled against her mother’s wishes and married a poor man named Edgar Hopper (Dick Van Dyke) instead. While Louisa and Edgar were happy early into their marriage, being mocked by Leonard pushed Edgar to work hard and attain a massive fortune, leading to his death. This pattern repeats itself throughout the film with Louisa’s three following husbands.
“You get to the top of the ladder, you’re a slave to your fans, you’ve got no life of your own. Then you gotta start worrying about staying up there”-Pinky, What a Way to Go!
Louisa went on to meet a painter in Paris named Larry (Paul Newman), but as soon as he started selling his paintings for a lot of money, the same pattern played out. For her next marriage, she decided to marry someone who was already rich and successful, Rod Anderson Jr (Robert Mitchum.) At first, she embraces the life of luxury and wealth, hoping it will produce a different outcome. When he starts getting stressed over his business, and it seems history might be repeating itself again, she converts him into a simple man, and they live on a farm. Unfortunately, this reverse method also ended in his death. When she settles down with a clown named Pinky Benson (Gene Kelly), she thinks she’s finally found her simple life until he becomes obsessed with the spotlight and, as all her other husbands did, dies.
Each time one of her husbands dies, they leave her more money, increasing her fortune to over $200 million. At the start of the film, Louisa tries to give her fortune to the government, which lands her in a therapist's office to share her story. Such a fortune would overjoy most people, but Louisa wants nothing to do with it. There's an obvious pattern in Louisa's life, and while she ultimately concludes she must be a witch who keeps killing her husbands, the film is really exploring society's obsession with money and what people are willing to sacrifice in order to be wealthy.
“Oh, I can’t understand it; I never wanted money,”-Louisa, What a Way to Go!
From my perspective, I don’t believe “money is the root of all evil” to be the moral of the story at all. If that were the case, then as soon as Louisa inherited millions from her husbands, she would have also become greedy and money-obsessed. Because of Louisa’s upbringing and her mother’s behavior, she had a much different perspective on money than all the men she married. I believe this pattern was playing out because Louisa was running from her past. She didn’t want to be like her mother, so she set out to live a simple life with a man who didn’t care about money. This only led to more problems and a life where she kept getting more and more money because she never faced the messages she was fed about money as a child.
There’s another saying I find more productive than “money is the root of all evil,” and that phrase is “money amplifies.” We knew when Edgar was embarrassed by Leonard making fun of him for being poor that there was a piece of him that wanted to be wealthy, too. That led him to start working really hard. I believe all the men Louisa married already had greed within them, so the money amplified that part of them, ending in their demise. People who have goodness in their hearts will never be turned evil because of money. Instead, the money will amplify the goodness, and they’ll become people who use their money to make the world a better place. I believe Louisa could have been one of these people had she not been so afraid of money because of how she was raised.
Love & Death
Apart from money, there’s a message about love and loss in this film. Louisa desperately wants a loving relationship, but she keeps coming second to money and success. Every man she marries makes her their number one priority until their desire for wealth and success takes over, and suddenly they have no more time for her. Louisa is already grieving her husbands before they died because she’s already lost them to their love for money long before their deaths.
While Louisa swore she’d never marry again after the tragedy with Edgar, she ultimately did get married again because she wanted to find the loving relationship she always dreamed of. Her money pattern ends when she meets Leonard again at the end of the film. However, this time he has lost his fortune and is working as a custodian. Even though Louisa previously hated Leonard, she decides to marry him and it’s with him she finally gets to live her simple life without any money.
With this ending, it's almost like Louisa comes full circle, ending her cycle. She marries the man her mother wanted her to be with and her mother was the one who instilled her with her money beliefs to begin with. In the end, Louisa's mother technically gets what she wants by her daughter marrying Leonard, but Louisa really gets what she wants because the Leonard she marries is no longer rich and is a much nicer person than he was at the beginning of the film.
“You’re the only man in the world I ever really hated. Hate’s a very strong emotion, you know?”-Louisa, What a Way to Go!
Money does not have to make you a horrible, greedy person, but it doesn’t have to rule your life either. What I especially love about the film is that it challenges stereotypes that all women are gold diggers by having Louisa uninterested in wealth and looking for a genuine loving connection, and it portrays the male characters as the ones who are obsessed with money.
The Use of Technicolor in What a Way to Go!
The reason I chose to cover What a Way to Go! Is that it showed up on Twitter (now called X, but I'm still calling it Twitter) in a post about the now-extinct use of technicolor film in cinema. The general consensus about technicolor these days is that it would be way too expensive to produce, so unfortunately, we may never see another technicolor film again. What I will say is Ti West's 2022 film Pearl, which I would love to cover on Movie Mondays eventually, is visually the closest I've seen anyone come to replicating technicolor.
However, back in 1964, when What a Way to Go! was released, technicolor was used, even though it wasn't as widely used as it had been in the years before. The film is visually stunning in terms of colors. There are so many moments where the colors seem to pop off the screen, like the intro and toward the end of the film when Louisa's house is painted all pink and she's wearing black. The juxtaposition of the colors works so well, and even in scenes where Louisa is wearing neutral shades like black, white, or gold, the colors appear richer than usual.
In the flashback scene to Louisa's childhood, her plaid blue dress, reminiscent of Dorothy's from The Wizard of Oz, stands out against the more muted tones of her home, and the stained glass window behind the pastor at her church illuminates the screen. Other memorable color moments include Leonard's red Mercedes, Larry's vibrant paintings, the orange dress Louisa wears during the Lush Budget sequence, as well as her yellow dress and the royal blue sailor outfit Louisa wears during her dance scene with Pinky. The film's climax, where Pinky's house and backyard are painted pink, is a visual feast, with everything appearing freshly painted, a visual effect that is rare in modern film.