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| Sidney and Sylvia Schumacher following Penny Johnson (Click on the image to enlarge it.) |
The wallet could have been stolen by a young couple or a middle-age couple.
In the movie, the wallet is stolen by a married couple that is old. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the scriptwriter Eleanor Bergstein based the Schumachers on a true story she heard about an old couple of thieves when she was interviewing people about Catskills resorts.
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No matter why the thieves are an old couple, I am going to read some literary significance into that fact.
In the movie, there are three married couples.
Jake and Marjorie HousemanThe first two couples are middle-aged and financially comfortable, but the husband and wife are growing apart.
Moe and Vivian Pressman
Sidney and Sylvia Schumacher
The growing apart of the Housemans is more evident in the stage musical and especially in the ABC original movie. I think that the growing apart was more evident in Bergstein's original script than in the finished movie.
In contrast to those first two couples, the Schumachers are old and must steal for their living. The Schumachers are not growing apart. On the contrary, they spend all their time working together as a team of thieves. Furthermore, they seem to be rather happy as a married couple.
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Let's suppose that Johnny Castle and Baby Houseman eventually married each other. This Castle marriage would not become similar to either the Houseman marriage or to the Pressman marriage. In the latter two marriages, the husbands were breadwinners and the wives were supportive housewives. .
In the Castle marriage, Baby would become the main, intellectual, professional breadwinner, and Johnny would provide a smaller, less reliable income.
In that regard, the Castle marriage never could become similar to the Houseman marriage or Pressman marriage, but the Castle marriage might ultimately become similar to the Schumacher marriage, in which the spouses are rather equal business partners.
Suppose that Baby dropped out of her higher education and professional career to take care of the family's children while Johnny continued to pursue his dancing career. Eventually, as Johnny aged out of his dancing career, the Castle marriage would always struggle economically.
I imagine that Johnny and Baby might, for example, establish a dance school for children. Johnny and Baby would become a couple of entrepreneurs, would become rather equal partners in their family business. Although they might never become rich, they might become very happy with each other, managing this business that they loved. Their marriage might have remained very happy with each other through their old age.
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The Houseman marriage and the Pressman marriage each grew apart because the husbands became consumed by their successful professional careers, which ultimately did not involve their wives almost at all. Especially after the children left home, the wives became rather idle and self-indulgent. The wives felt economically inferior to and dependent on their husbands. Both of those marriages might have been drifting toward divorces.
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Baby was looking for a great man like her father, but Johnny was very different from her father.
Johnny perhaps was looking for a woman like Penny, who shared his passion for dance, but Baby's passions were in social work and economic development.
Perhaps a marriage between Johnny and Baby could last happily through old age only if they eventually established a partnership in a business that they both loved and in which each contributed in an appreciated, essential manner.
The Castle marriage would be unusual but happy, as the Schumacher marriage was.
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