One old movie that has someone sleeping in a bathtub: I Was a Male War Bride. Cary Grant sleeps in a bathtub when he and his new wife (who have yet to consummate the marriage) have to spend their wedding nights in a friend’s cramped apartment.
“What an awful place for a faucet!”
“Where?”
“My back!”
I can’t think of other old movies, but a common movie set-up was the married couple whose Murphy bed is in a small studio apartment. They fight, and one storms off to sleep in the bath tub. Or the unmarried couple in the same setting: he sleeps in the tub so as to avoid violating moral standards by sharing the room.
During the gasoline crisis of 1979, I was driving my MG Midget when I realized I might not have enough gas to make it home. My day to buy gas was the next day, so I pulled into a closed station and parked at the pump. Worst nights sleep ever, but I filled up and was on my way in the morning.
My daughter did. She went to another state with a friend and the friend’s mother and sister for a concert and college tour.
I still don’t know exactly what happened, but there ended up being a long spate of verbal abuse and attempted physical abuse against my kid, until she grabbed her belongings and locked herself in the hotel room bathroom.
She slept in the tub on a pallet of her clothes, jacket as a pillow.
Woke up the next morning, the people she was with were gone. I made the long drive to pick her up, a sobbing messy angry 17 year old, left alone in another state.