Showing posts with label screwball comedy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label screwball comedy. Show all posts

Sunday, August 25, 2024

Lady on a Train (1945)

Lady on a Train is a 1945 Universal release included in Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray boxed set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema IX. Now I really don’t mind that hardly any of the Blu-Ray film noir releases these days are genuine noir. I understand that it’s a marketing thing. Slapping a film noir label on a movie makes it a viable physical media release and as a result lots of unfairly neglected movies are now seeing the light of day. That’s a good thing.

But the sheer brazenness of trying to pass off Lady on a Train as a film noir is awe-inspiring. This movie is not noir. It’s not noirish or noiresque or noir-adjacent. It does not contain even trace elements of noirness.

Lady on a Train is a lighthearted comic murder mystery with a decided screwball comedy flavour. It’s also a rather delightful movie in its own way.

It was based on a Leslie Charteris story and if you’re a fan of Charteris’s Saint stories you know that he was all about clever plotting, style, wit and fun. And this movie contains all those ingredients.

Deanna Durbin plays Nikki Collins and she is most certainly a screwball. She’s on a train and she’s reading a murder mystery by her favourite writer of detective stories, Wayne Morgan. She spends a great deal of time reading detective stories. She looks up from her book, out the window of the train, and she witnesses an actual murder. It’s not her overheated imagination.

The problem is that the police assume she’s a ditzy blonde who reads too much detective fiction and they don’t believe her.

She decides she’s going to need some help from a real expert, and surely no-one knows more about murder than Wayne Morgan. The writer is naturally flattered by the admiration of a cute blonde but his girlfriend, fashion model Joyce Willams (Patricia Morison), is less happy about pretty blondes taking an interest in her man. In fact she’s very disgruntled indeed.

Nikki does have a lead. She is sure that the murder victim was a wealthy industrialist named Josiah Waring. He is indeed deceased, although his demise has been attributed to a freak accident with a Christmas tree.

Waring left an odd will. His two nephews, Arnold Waring (Dan Duryea) and Jonathan Waring (Ralph Bellamy), were left nothing. The entire vast fortune went to Waring’s mistress, nightclub chanteuse Margo Martin (Maria Palmer).

There are plenty of other dissatisfied would-be heirs so there’s no shortage of potential suspects for murder.

There's a solid mystery plot but the emphasis is on lighthearted fun, and on watching Nikki’s attempts to play the part of an ace girl amateur detective. Her attempts turn up some clues but cause a good deal of amusing mayhem. She has a knack for blundering into situations with all the overconfidence of an enthusiastic schoolgirl.

The part is tailor-made for Deanna Durbin. She gets to be feisty, smart, accident-prone, cute and adorable. All things that she did supremely well. Her likeability factor is high enough to keep us interested in her adventures.

Naturally she has to sing and since for much of the movie she’s pretending to be a nightclub singer the songs slot neatly into the film and they’re pretty good. When she sings Night and Day she’s as close as Deanna Durbin ever got to being sultry. And she does a very sexy version of Silent Night. Yes I know that sounds bizarre but she manages it.

You might think that Dan Duryea’s presence in the cast would add some noirness but Duryea displays little of his trademark sinister presence. He’s very good, but he’s not playing a heavy.

You just have to accept that this is not going to be a film noir, and enjoy it for what it is. It’s a decently plotted murder mystery combined with a screwball comedy. Nikki is totally a screwball comedy female protagonist and Wayne Morgan is a classic screwball comedy male protagonist. Initially she drives him insane and threatens to reduce his well-ordered life to a shambles. You know that eventually they’ll realise that since they’re both screwballs they might as fall in love.

The Circus Club (where Margo is the headliner) makes a fine visually interesting setting for much of the later action. Durbin gets to wear some very fetching costumes.

The murder mystery and screwball comedy elements are nicely balanced. The mystery plot works satisfactorily, the screwball comedy elements are genuinely amusing. And Deanna Durbin’s sparkling performance is the main attraction. A charming and delightful movie, highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray offers a very nice transfer. There is no audio commentary, and given the very dubious quality of most of the audio commentaries that Kino Lorber offer that’s probably a blessing.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Together Again (1944)

Together Again is a moderately entertaining 1944 Columbia screwball comedy, although it definitely is not in the genre’s top rank.

Anne Crandall (Irene Dunne) is the mayor of Brookhaven Vermont. Her late husband Jonathan had been mayor. In fact the Crandalls have always pretty much run the town. There’s even an impressive statue of Anne’s late husband looming over the place. At least there is until the statue is struck by lightning and decapitated. 

Anne’s father-in-law Jonathan Crandall Sr (Charles Coburn) is delighted. He sees the lightning strike as a sign that it is time for Anne to move on. He feels that rather than devoting her life to continuing her husband’s work she should live her own life, and she should remarry.

Anne decides that her husband’s statue must be replaced by a new one so she sets off for New York to offer the commission to sculptor George Corday (Charles Boyer). At which point a certain craziness starts to take over Anne’s previously orderly life. Respectable mayors do not normally get arrested for indecent exposure!

Of course George has fallen for Anne and Anne has fallen for him although it will take her a while to admit such a thing. There is a major complication, in the person of Anne’s neurotic step-daughter Diana (Mona Freeman). Diana reveres her father’s memory and she’s rather highly strung. In fact she’s very highly strung indeed. The complication comes from the fact that Anne had promised Diana that she would never remarry.

When George Corday follows her back to Brookhaven and begins work on the statue Anne’s life gets really crazy. In typical screwball comedy style wires get crossed and misunderstandings blossom and everyone seems destined to get married, but to the wrong people.

Charles Vidor was a competent director but not really a specialist in this genre, and it’s a very demanding genre. It’s very easy for a screwball comedy to fall flat and for the intended zaniness to fizzle out into mere silliness. That doesn’t happen here but at the same time it doesn’t quite have the needed spark.

The cast is excellent. Irene Dunne gives it everything she’s got and her performance works. Charles Boyer is fine although personally I found Corday to be not entirely likeable. Charles Coburn is wonderful, as always. Mona Freeman manages the difficult job of making the step-daughter suitably neurotic without being irritating.

The setup has plenty of potential and with such a strong cast this should have been a winner. Unfortunately it rubbed me up the wrong way. Brookhaven seems like a delightful little town but of course George Corday points out to Anne that actually it’s full of hypocritical small-minded bigots. He knows this because he knows that anyone who doesn’t live in New York City is automatically a hypocritical small-minded bigot. The film accepts this as a fact so obvious that it doesn’t need to be debated. There’s a certain sneering contempt here that made me uncomfortable.

Columbia have released this movie as part of their Icons of Screwball Comedy Volume 2 DVD boxed set. The four-movie set is excellent value and the transfers are extremely good.

Together Again is reasonable entertainment and fans of Irene Dunne or Charles Coburn will find plenty to enjoy. The major weakness, for me, is that for a film like this to work we have to be hoping that the two leads will end up together, whereas I found myself hoping that Anne would realise that George Corday was a pompous self-satisfied ass so for me it didn’t really work. Your mileage may vary.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

She Wouldn’t Say Yes (1945)

She Wouldn’t Say Yes, released by Columbia in 1945, is a rather late entry in the screwball comedy genre.

Rosalind Russell is psychiatrist Dr Susan Lane who has been treating shell-shock patients at an army hospital, with a great deal of success. She is a woman who believes she is always in total control of her life. Fellow psychiatrist Colonel Brady tells her that she must have some massive inner self-doubt to explain her extraordinary strength but of course she doesn’t believe him.

Then she encounters Michael Kent (Lee Bowman). He is a soldier but he is also a cartoonist, famous for creating a character called the Nixie. The Nixie is a magical fairy-like creature who encourages people to cast off inhibitions and give in to their secret impulses. Needless to say Dr Lane does not approve of such reckless behaviour. 

Michael falls for Dr Lane right away but not only does not approve of the Nixie, she also does not approve of Michael Kent. She is therefore rather disturbed to encounter him again on the train to Chicago, and even more disturbed when in order to get her a seat in the club car he pretends they are married and that she is pregnant. Even worse is to follow when she discovers they are both booked for the same sleeping berth.

On the train she also encounters Bolivian blonde bombshell Allura (Adele Jergens). Allura has decided to kill herself by leaping from the train, having become convinced that she is responsible for the death of every man who has ever loved her. Dr Lane immediately decides that Allura is a fascinating case and persuades her to enter therapy.

Dr Lane has the brainwave of trying to set up Allura with Michael Kent. This will cure Allura of her neurosis and get Michael out of Dr Lane’s life. Of course this cunning ploy fails to work smoothly as Dr Lane had hoped and things get more complicated when her father decides to interfere - her father thinks Dr Lane should get married and he thinks Michael Kent would make an ideal husband.

The screwball comedy elements take a while to start really kicking in in this film but eventually the obligatory misunderstandings and ploys and counter-ploys do come together and the craziness levels that the genre requires are achieved.

One of the common conventions of this genre is that the two lead characters should not only be initially antagonistic they should also represent opposing views on life. In this case Dr Lane stands for logic and staying rigidly in control while Michael Kent’s approach to life is impetuous and emotional and risk-taking.

The setup is certainly ideal screwball comedy material. Rosalind Russell was the right sort of actress for this type of movie. Director Alexander Hall made several notable screwball comedies, My Sister Eileen being the best known although The Doctor Takes a Wife is just as good, so he knew his way around the genre. 

And yet the movie doesn’t quite make the grade. So what went wrong?

Part of the problem is that the screenplay (by Virginia Van Upp, John Jacoby and Sarett Tobias) lacks any real zest. It’s not enough to put the characters in potentially funny situations. To make comedy (any sort of comedy) work you have to have actual gags and lots of them. This screenplay just doesn’t have quite enough gags. 

Lee Bowman is also not quite the right leading man. He’s not particularly funny but a bigger problem is that the chemistry is not there between the two leads. You have to be able to imagine that the two protagonists in a romantic comedy might actually end up together and it’s impossible to imagine these two as a couple. The final resolution isn’t entirely convincing - it’s too much like a rabbit pulled out of a hat.

That’s not to say the movie is a total failure. After a very slow start it does pick up steam and it starts to become reasonably diverting. It’s never laugh-out-loud funny but it ends up being mildly amusing.

The supporting cast is solid enough. Adele Jergens makes a suitably outrageous blonde bombshell. One highlights is the brief appearance by Arthur Q. Bryan, an actor best remembered as the voice of Elmer Fudd in the Bugs Bunny cartoons. He not only sounds exactly like Elmer Fudd, he even looks like Elmer Fudd!

She Wouldn’t Say Yes is one of the four Columbia comedies in the Icons of Screwball Comedy, volume 1 boxed set. The transfer is fine. Since it also includes the bona fide classics If You Could Only Cook and My Sister Eileen this set is an absolute must-buy for screwball comedy fans.

She Wouldn’t Say Yes is not in the top rank of screwball comedies but it’s harmless enough and at least moderately entertaining. If you’re buying the set anyway it’s worth a look.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Holiday (1938)

I approached Holiday with some trepidation. Like The Philadelphia Story it’s based on a Philip Barry play and has a screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart. Like The Philadelphia Story it’s directed by George Cukor and stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Given that I found The Philadelphia Story to be a total bore I was understandably not terribly confident about enjoying Holiday. It turns out I was right to be worried.

Cary Grant is Johnny Case and he’s about to be married to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan). Johnny is a successful businessman. He’s not short of money, but his money is new money. The Setons are old money. Julia has quite a deal of trouble persuading her crusty and very straitlaced father (Edward Seton, played by Henry Kolker) to agree to the marriage.

Julia has a brother, Ned (Lew Ayres). Ned is permanently drunk because he blames his father for stifling his creativity and preventing him from following his dreams. Julia also has a sister, Linda (Katharine Hepburn). Linda feels just as stifled as Ned although she hasn’t yet given up completely. She has however retreated into neurotic hypochondria. If you’re thinking that this sounds like a remarkably depressing setup for a romantic comedy then you’re dead right.

Given that Linda is played by the movie’s star Katharine Hepburn while Julia  is played by an actress no-one has ever heard of, we naturally never doubt that Johnny will end up marrying Linda rather than Julia.

Even though it’s painfully clear that Johnny and Julia are not only spectacularly ill-matched but actively dislike each other the movie insists on making us wait until the very end before these very obvious facts occur to the characters concerned.

This brings us to an obvious problem. Julia is such an appalling character that we cannot possibly believe that Johnny could ever have been remotely interested in her. Like Edward Seton she’s a cardboard cutout villain whose only purpose in the story is to make Johnny and Linda seem more sympathetic. To me this is lazy writing. Two-dimensional characters are fine in comedy but since the movie seems more interested in being a social satire and a psychological drama than a comedy then I think it’s a valid criticism.

I have to come clean at his point and confess to a rather considerable dislike of Katharine Hepburn. Linda as portrayed by Hepburn strikes me as being a shrill, tiresome hysteric. This dislike of Hepburn may to some extent explain why I found it impossible to like this movie, although in my view it has plenty of other problems.

Cary Grant does his best but the script just doesn’t give him enough to work with. Grant was one of the finest comic actors of all time but when the gags aren’t there in the script there’s little he can do.

The big problem is that there are very few laughs in this movie. Edward Everett Horton provides most of the movie’s very rare amusing moments. A lack of laughs is a pretty serious problem for a comedy, but Holiday is not just unfunny, it’s often perilously close to out-and-misery.

This movie also has a rather stagey feel to it at times. Some of Hepburn’s dialogue is too overwrought and too much like speechifying - you might get away with it on stage but on film it seems clumsy.

It’s worth pointing out that while Holiday is often included on lists of screwball comedies it is most emphatically not a screwball comedy. I’m not even sure it’s a comedy, but it certainly isn’t a screwball comedy. The intention seems to have been to make a romantic comedy with some social comment and some class consciousness and the two latter commodities sink the comedy (as they almost always did). There are so few laughs and there’s so much angst that I think we’re entitled to suspect that director George Cukor was not even attempting comedy in this movie.

Columbia’s Region 4 DVD release is barebones and the transfer is very grainy.

I found Holiday to be an ordeal. It isn’t funny and I didn’t like any of the characters enough to care particularly what happened to them. I can’t recommend this one, even as a rental.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

The Divorce of Lady X (1938)

The Divorce of Lady X is a 1938 British romantic comedy starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. It is in fact an attempt to do a British screwball comedy. The results demonstrate how very difficult it actually is to carry off a successful screwball comedy, and they also suggest that this was a genre that was perhaps better left to the Americans.

Olivier is successful young barrister Everard Logan. He is unfortunate enough to get himself caught in a London pea-souper fog. The fog is so thick that his taxi driver gives up all hope of finding his way to Logan’s home and Logan accepts the rather sensible advice of a passing policeman to spend the night in the hotel outside which his taxi currently happens to be.

A fancy dress party is in progress at the hotel and the guests now find themselves stranded and forced to spend the night sleeping on couches in the hotel lounge, all the rooms having long since been taken. Leslie Steele (Merle Oberon) has no intention of sleeping on a couch and manages, by dint of some very devious manoeuvres, to persuade Logan to give up his bed to her. The unlucky barrister spends the night on a couch in the sitting room of his suite.

Leslie refuses to reveal her name, a factor that will become a major plot point.

Logan finds Leslie to be intensely irritating and in a screwball comedy that is of course a sure indication that he will subsequently fall madly in love with her.

Logan specialises in divorce work and this is where the complications start. The following Lord Mere (Ralph Richardson) asks him to handle his divorce. Lord Mere has learnt that his wife has spent the night with a man, at the very hotel Logan spent the night. Logan (in true screwball comedy style) leaps to the conclusion that the mysterious woman who tricked him out of his comfortable hotel bed was Lord Mere’s wife. He is aghast at the effect the scandal will have on his practice but at the same time he has now convinced himself that he is in love with the mystery woman.

Of course the misunderstanding becomes more and more complicated and Logan becomes more and more frantic and more and more confused.

This brief plot outline demonstrates that the screenwriters understood the mechanics of the screwball comedy extremely well. There is however more to a good screwball comedy than the mechanics. Actual gags are required. The screenplay must not only have the right structure, it must exploit that structure to bring out the laughs. Witty dialogue is an absolute necessity, and the actors must know how to make the most of that dialogue. It is in these areas that The Divorce of Lady X doesn’t quite hit the target. It’s mildly amusing but there are very few laugh-out-loud moments.

Olivier does his best and with a stronger script he would have been excellent. Much the same applies to Merle Oberon. Ralph Richardson is much more successful, being an actor who was much more at home with comedy and having the ability to make moderately funny dialogue seem more funny than it actually is.

This movie was, rather unusually for a British production of this era, shot in Technicolor. Alexander Korda was perhaps the most ambitious producer in Britain in the 1930s and was always willing to spend serious money. The early fancy dress scenes look marvelous and one suspects that the fancy dress party was added to the script in order to justify the money spent on shooting in colour.

Despite these weaknesses it’s a likeable enough and reasonably enjoyable affair.

This movie’s Region 4 DVD release pairs it on a single disc with another early Olivier film, Q Planes, a much more interesting movie. The transfers are very good - the colours are bright and vivid in The Divorce of Lady X. It’s a double-header that represents good value.

The Divorce of Lady X doesn’t quite come off, but it’s an interesting near miss and it’s not without entertainment value. I can’t help feeling that a Hollywood director given the same material would have added a bit more bite. It’s still worth a look. Buy the two-movie set for Q Planes and consider this one as a bonus and you should be reasonably satisfied.

Monday, May 12, 2014

A Night To Remember (1942)

A Night To Remember is not, sadly, a movie to remember. It’s about as forgettable as a movie can be. That’s not to say it’s overtly bad but it’s certainly not a high point in cinematic history.

The idea behind this 1942 Columbia production seemed to be that any movie with a crime-solving married couple had to be a sure-fire winner. Given the enormous success of the Thin Man movies that probably seemed like a reasonable assumption. But the Thin Man movies had William Powell and Myrna Loy. A Night To Remember has Loretta Young and Brian Aherne. Loretta Young is fine but Brian Aherne is no William Powell. The Thin Man movies always had witty sparkling scripts. Wit and sparkle are sadly lacking in the screenplay of A Night to Remember.

Brian Aherne is murder mystery author Jeff Troy. Loretta Young is his wife Nancy. Jeff has decided to write a real novel, murder mysteries being apparently not real novels. It will be set in Greenwich Village. Nancy has the idea that it’s going to be pretty hard for Jeff to write a great novel about Greenwich Village unless he actually lives there so she’s found them what she thinks is a delightfully romantic and atmospheric basement apartment. The apartment certainly has atmosphere but it’s not the atmosphere she was aiming for. It’s gloomy and it soon transpires that it has an evil reputation. It used to be a speakeasy but its reputation seems to be connected with criminal activities of a more recent date.

The behaviour of the building’s other tenants is very odd, not to say paranoid. And the discovery of a corpse in the garden attached to the basement apartment does not enhance its attractiveness. There’s obviously a mystery here and since Jeff writes murder mysteries he thinks he should be able to solve it. In fact he thinks he’s better fitted to solve it than Inspector Hankins (Sidney Toler), an opinion not shared by the hardboiled New York police inspector.

There’s really nothing wrong with the set-up. The problem is that the screenplay gives the players very little to work with in the way of actual gags. As a result the performers have to work overtime in a desperate attempt to extract some laughs from the material. Not surprisingly they end up trying too hard and the performances feel forced and at times become irritating. The big problem is Brian Aherne who tries very hard indeed, to singularly little effect, and he becomes very irritating indeed. His bumbling amateur detective soon starts to grate on one’s nerves. It’s the sort of role, and the sort of premise, that really needs the sophisticated approach of a William Powell, rather than Aherne’s attempts at slapstick.

Loretta Young keeps her performance slightly more in check and at least avoids the pitfall of becoming actively annoying.

Sidney Toler is the best thing about this movie. He understands that a drily amused approach pays bigger dividends than Aherne’s mugging.

The other problem is that the mystery itself is less than riveting so the somewhat clunky murder mystery angle does little to keep the audience’s interest.

The Troy’s basement apartment has another inhabitant, a tortoise named Old Hickory who used to be the speakeasy’s mascot. It’s a symptom of this movie’s problems that Old Hickory has to shoulder much of the comedy element, and even the most comically gifted tortoise would be struggling with this script. But he does at least do his best and he has no trouble stealing scenes from the other actors.

Sadly director Richard Wallace is quite unable to overcome the deficiencies of the screenplay by by Richard Flournoy and Jack Henley.

My difficulties with this movie may perhaps reflect the fact that the style of comedy is not one that I’m especially enamoured of, my own tastes running more to sophisticated banter rather than physical comedy (unless it’s done particularly well). 

A Night To Remember is featured in volume two of the otherwise generally excellent Columbia Icons of Screwball Comedy boxed set. The transfer is perfectly adequate.

A Night To Remember is innocuous enough, especially if you’re a Loretta Young completist, but it’s certainly one of the lesser screwball comedies. The boxed set itself is highly recommended but it’s difficult to recommend this particular movie. You might want to leave to a time when you’re in a in a very undemanding mood.

Friday, February 7, 2014

The Doctor Takes a Wife (1940)

The Doctor Takes a Wife is a 1940 Columbia screwball comedy included in the Icons of Screwball Comedy, Volume 2 boxed set. It pairs Ray Milland and Loretta Young, and rather successfully too.

The first thing you need for a successful screwball comedy is a plot that will set up the necessary misunderstandings and confusions. This one does that quite successfully. June Cameron (Loretta Young) has just written a best-selling book on the joys of spinsterhood. At a hotel she runs into Dr Timothy Sterling (Ray Milland) and persuades him to give her a lift to New York. They don’t exactly hit it off at all but she needs the lift. When they stop briefly for her to send a telegraph they encounter a wedding party. By mistake the Just Married sign gets attached to the back of Dr Sterling’s car. This is spotted by an eagle-eyed reporter who is delighted to have stumbled upon such a scoop - here is the woman who has just written a book telling women they don’t need men or marriage and apparently she has just gone and got married!

This misunderstanding might have been cleared up quickly except for the unfortunate fact that Dr Sterling, after dropping June off at her apartment, gets drunk and passes out in her bed. And this is spotted by another eagle-eyed reporter who has turned up to interview her about her marriage. Now if she explains that she isn’t really married she has to explain the presence of a half-dressed man in her bedroom.

Her publisher is initially aghast. If the public learns that June is married her book isn’t going to sell any further copies and he will be ruined, and June’s career will be ruined. If she denies it there’s the problem of the aforementioned half-dressed man in her bedroom. Then he gets a brainwave. There are more married women than unmarried women in America, so if the author of the book that extolled the joys of spinsterhood now writes a book extolling the joys of marriage it will be an even bigger bestseller.



All they have to do is to persuade Dr Sterling to go along with their newly-hatched plan to pretend that he and June really are married. Once the book has made a mint they can get a quickie divorce in Reno. Persuading Dr Sterling to co-operate will be the awkward part. But not as awkward as they expected. The good doctor, currently a poorly paid lecturer in neuro-psychiatry, is desperate for a professorship. And when the dean, who believes all professors of psychiatry should be married, hears of the marriage Timothy Sterling gets his professorship. So now he has a motive to go along with the pretend marriage as well.

Of course in a screwball comedy you just know that such an intricate plan will go spectacularly wrong. The problem is that Timothy wanted the professorship so he would have enough money to marry his sweetheart Marilyn (Gail Patrick). Trying to keep Marilyn persuaded that his marriage is not a real one while trying to keep the dean and his colleagues at the university convinced that he really is living in connubial bliss is enough to set off the necessary chain of craziness on which screwball comedy depends.



The second requirement for a successful screwball comedy is a screenplay that turns the potentially comedic situations into situations that are genuinely funny. George Seaton and Ken Englund’s screenplay fulfills that requirement very neatly. Having a director who can keep the pacing as tight as possible is obviously essential as well and Alexander Hall does that with ease.

The third necessary ingredient for screwball comedy success is two leads who can exploit all these other advantages and who have the right chemistry. Ray Milland and Loretta Young fulfill both these requirements with considerable aplomb. A screwball comedy needs two leads who start off hating and infuriating each other and they manage that extremely well.



With all these ingredients perfectly combined the result is a delightful example of the genre. To add some further spice there’s a definite Battle of the Sexes angle as well, and there’s the further complication that June’s publisher Johnny (Reginald Gardner) wants to marry her. This creates more opportunities for confusion, and more fun.

Ray Milland and Loretta Young are both in fine form and the supporting players are more than competent. A romantic comedy needs to convince us that even though the two leads are both convinced that they want to marry other people they really belong together. This means that the characters they think they want to marry can’t be too sympathetic - the audience has to want the leads to end up together. Reginald Gardner and Gail Patrick do their bit in that respect - we can’t possibly imagine June will really marry the selfish and self-centred Johnny or that Timothy could seriously want to go ahead with marriage to the rather appalling Marilyn. Gardner and Patrick make sure we won’t be on the side of their characters will still making them delightfully funny.



The Doctor Takes a Wife breezes along to its entirely satisfying conclusion and a great deal of fun is had along the way. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable example of a well-made and well-acted screwball comedy and it all works to perfection.

The DVD transfer is exceptionally good.

The Doctor Takes a Wife is highly recommended.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Too Many Husbands (1940)


Too Many Husbands, made at Columbia in 1940, makes use of the woman with two husbands idea. This idea, and variations on it, seemed to have an endless fascination for the makers of screwball comedies.

Vicky Lowndes (Jean Arthur) is married to publisher Henry Lowndes (Melvyn Douglas). She had been married to his best friend and business partner Bill Cardew (Fred MacMurray). Bill disappeared in a yachting accident a year earlier and was presumed dead, allowing Vicky to remarry. The only trouble is, Bill didn’t die. After a year on a previously uncharted tropical island he was picked up by a passing freighter and now he’s back.

This is obviously rather embarrassing to Vicky, who finds herself with one husband too many. Embarrassing, but after thinking about it she decides she likes the idea. Now she has two men competing for her, each of them trying to prove that he is the ideal husband. Vicky didn’t think either of them was ideal when she was married to them. she thought that they both neglected her. Now they will both have to work much harder to prove themselves.


The idea’s potential for creating ever-increasing confusion and jealousies is pretty thoroughly milked. It’s a classic screwball comedy idea and with people who know what they’re doing on both sides of the camera (which this film has) it was always going to work.

The three leads are all splendid. The trick of course was to have the right chemistry between the leading lady and both of her leading men, and that requirement is amply fulfilled. Henry and Bill are very different sorts of men but both are equally likeable and we have no difficulty in believing that Vicky could have fallen in love with both of them, and in fact still be in love with both of them.


The other potential difficulty is that the audience might feel a preference for one husband or the other but Douglas and MacMurray both turn on the charm and so the audience finds itself wanting both of them to get the girl.

There is however one difficulty that this movie can’t overcome. Having set up the situation and milked its potential for laughs the script (by Claude Binyon from a play by W. Somerset Maugham) has to find a satisfactory ending, an ending that will leave all the principals happy. That of course is impossible. The movie tries to persuade us that somehow everyone does live happily ever after but the resolution feels forced and somehow seemed to me to be trying way too hard to be cheerful and zany.


A more minor problem is that Vicky’s behaviour is rather selfish and even at times downright cruel, to the point where she risks losing the audience’s sympathies.

Director Wesley Ruggles helmed several other good screwball comedies and he handles his duties here with energy and panache. The energy is very important. Screwball comedy has to be exceptionally well-paced in order to convey the necessary feeling of crazy situations spinning wildly out of control. Ruggles has no problems in this area.


This movie is included in the Columbia Icons of Screwball Comedy volume 1 DVD boxed set. It’s a very pleasing transfer. Both the Icons of Screwball Comedy sets are great value and can be unhesitatingly recommended.

Too Many Husbands is generally great fun. With a more satisfactory ending it could have been a screwball classic but even as it stands it’s a very enjoyable 81 minutes.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

I Married a Witch (1942)

I Married a Witch2In 17th century England a witch and her father, a notorious sorcerer, are burnt at the stake. The witch vows revenge on the family of the man whose evidence led to her condemnation. It sounds like the set-up for a classic horror movie, but in fact I Married a Witch is a light-hearted romantic comedy. And it’s a delight from start to finish.

The witch is named Jennifer and is played by Veronica Lake. Her curse is than the men of the Wooley family will never be happy in marriage. And so it proves through the ages. Meanwhile the witch and her father are imprisoned inside an oak tree that was planted on their grave for that purpose. Then in 1941 lightning hits the oak tree and they are released. They are disembodied spirits, taking the shape of puffs of smoke. The father (played with gusto by Cecil Kellaway) casts a spell to allow her to take human form again, so she can wreak her vengeance on the latest descendant of the Wooley family, aspiring politician Wallace Wooley (Fredric March).

Wallace Wooley is running for governor. He is about to be married to Estelle Masterson (Susan Hayward). Jennifer is delighted to hear this since Estelle seems like the sort of woman who would make any man’s life a nightmare. But Jennifer wants to make sure of torturing Wallace Wooley, so she gets her father to whip up a love potion so he’ll fall in love with her. Unfortunately in all the excitement of escaping from the burning building (fire being necessary to allow her to take human shape) she drinks the love potion by mistake.

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So now Jennifer is madly in love with Wallace Wooley. Only she doesn’t want to make his life a misery; she wants to be a good wife and to make him happy. Her father is disgusted by this and plans to throw a spanner in the works, if only he can stay sober long enough to remember the words of the spells he needs to effect his purpose. But he can’t stay sober long enough to do anything.

Wallace gets lots of good publicity from apparently rescuing Jennifer from the burning hotel, but Estelle is not very pleased about the sudden appearance of this blonde bombshell. Even before the wedding she’s starting to make Wallace miserable. The wedding was mostly a pre-election publicity stunt and Wallace doesn’t seem all that much in love with her. Making Wallace love her shouldn’t be difficult for Jennifer but she doesn’t have much time, the wedding being scheduled for the next day.

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There are various complications along the way but it’s obvious that Wallace is starting to fall for Jennifer. The resulting scandal will doom his election hopes, but Jennifer assures him that she can use witchcraft to make him win the election. She’s told him that she’s a witch, but of course he doesn’t believe it. Not yet. He will soon however have ample proof.

This is essentially screwball comedy with a supernatural flavour and the combination works perfectly. I’ve never been a fan of Fredric March in comic roles (or in any roles for that matter) but I have to admit he’s not bad in this movie. Veronica Lake shows a natural flair for comedy and has plenty of fun as the lovestruck witch. March and Lake develop a pretty good romantic chemistry.

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Cecil Kellaway hams it up as her father. Susan Hayward has a thankless role with which she can do little.

In the director’s chair is René Clair and he handles proceedings with skill. The movie powers through its short 77-minute running at a frantic pace and there’s never time to be bored. He has a light touch and makes the most of an amusing screenplay by Robert Pirosh and Marc Connelly.

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Blackhorse Entertainment’s Region 2 lacks extras but it looks reasonably good if not spectacular.

I Married a Witch is delightful lightweight entertainment and can be highly recommended. It’s a particular treat for fans of Veronica Lake, offering her one of her best comedic roles.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Swing High, Swing Low (1937)

Swing High Swing LowI’ve enjoyed all the Carole Lombard-Fred MacMurray screwball comedies that I’ve seen (and I've seen most of them) but I must confess that Swing High, Swing Low came as something of a surprise. This is not a standard screwball comedy but an odd mix of genres. It’s not a complete success but it’s certainly not without interest.

Released by Paramount in 1937 the movie certainly starts out in screwball comedy territory. Maggie King (Carole Lombard) is on a ship passing through the Panama Canal, on her way to meet her future husband. She meets Skid Johnson, a soldier and part-time trumpet player. In true romantic comedy fashion she dislikes him at first. And she hates the trumpet. The trumpet can never be romantic. Skid takes this as a challenge and proceeds to prove to her that the trumpet can indeed by romantic, and in the process he wins her heart. Unfortunately he also gets her mixed up in a bar-room brawl and as a result she misses her ship. She’s now stranded in Panama.

Skid’s pal Harry (Charles Butterworth) assures that that there’s no problem. She can move in with them. She can have the bedroom; they’ll bed down in the living room. Their living quarters betray the fact that this is the abode of two bachelors. Maggie sets about cleaning up the place. She also sets about changing Skid’s life. She persuades him to get a job (he’s now left the army) playing trumpet in Murphy’s Bar. They turn out to be a very successful double act. She’s not the world’s greatest singer but Skid is a dynamite trumpet player.

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The only fly in the ointment is an old girlfriend of Skid’s, Anita Alvarez (Dorothy Lamour). Nonetheless Skid and Maggie are soon married and everything is going great. That is until Skid’s success throws a spanner into the works. He is offered a job playing at the prestigious El Greco club in New York. His new agent tells her that they only want Skid, but not to worry, he’ll go to New York alone and send for her later.

Up till now it’s been classic screwball comedy all the way, with Lombard and MacMurray delightful as always and getting some fine support from Charles Butterworth (one of those wonderful character actors who enlivens any film he appears in). But now the movie changes gears abruptly and dramatically.

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From this point on there will be no more laughs as the movie heads into romantic melodrama territory. Skid is a big success in New York but he achieves his success as part of a double act with Anita Alvarez. Alvarez’s scheming is intended to break up Skid’s marriage and it doesn’t take long for her efforts to succeed. Maggie is forgotten as Skid and Anita live the high life in the Big Apple. Finally Maggie can stand it no longer and she heads off for New York.

What she finds will shatter her dreams. She rings Anita’s hotel room in the middle of the night and Skid answers the phone. She draws the obvious conclusion and files for divorce.

Skid hadn’t really meant to abandon Maggie, but he’s a rather weak character and having a wife just sort of slipped his mind.

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Maggie’s filing for divorce hits Skid hard and he turns to the bottle. He goes from the top of the pile to the bottom. Soon he’s a hopeless alcoholic, broke and out of work and wishing only for oblivion. He has one last chance, a radio broadcast that had been arranged weeks earlier. No-one believes that this down-and-out drunk will even be able to stand up much less play the trumpet. Only one thing can save him, and that’s Maggie. But will she give him another chance?

The switch from light-hearted romantic comedy to tragic romantic melodrama is very abrupt, perhaps too abrupt. Lombard and MacMurray excelled at comedy but neither was known for their abilities as dramatic performers (although MacMurray would of course go on to play dramatic roles with considerable success in the 40s). They handle the change of pace surprisingly well, in fact well enough to save the movie from disaster. The movie’s biggest asset proves to be the excellent cast.

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Lombard did her own singing in this movie and she proves herself to be reasonably capable. The duet she does with MacMurray on trumpet, I Hear a Call To Arms, is in many ways the core of the movie expressing as it does their love in good times and in bad. As well as being a comedy and a drama this is also a musical and the musical numbers are pretty good, Dorothy Lamour’s spirited rendition of Panamania being a highlight. The musical content should come as no great surprise since the screenplay was co-written by none other than Oscar Hammerstein II.

Mitchell Leisen directs with his customary assurance.

Swing High, Swing Low has fallen into the public domain and although it’s easy enough to find copies finding a decent print is virtually impossible. This is an odd but interesting little movie and it really deserves to be rescued from this neglect and given a good DVD release. Despite its schizophrenic nature this movie is definitely worth a look.