In Praise Of The Cantankerous-Monty Woolley’s The Man Who Came To Dinner

 

 

DVD Review 

By Sam Lowell

The Man Who Came To Dinner, starring Bette Davis, Monty Wooley, Ann Sheridan, 1942

Some plays, like many of Shakespeare’s, when they get to the film screen lose their polish (although a few of the Bard’s, particularly the ones with the likes of Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles going through their paces do shine). Others like the one under review, The Man Who Came To Dinner, from the pens of Kaufman and Hart two big names in the by-gone Broadway theater make the transition quite easily (although the location of the scenes on the screen, few as they are, look rather stagey a minor criticism  though).    

Most of that ease has nothing to do with plot, per se, which is actually quite conventional. A cantankerous big name radio critic and celebrity, Sheridan Whiteside, played by grizzled Monty Wooley, from New York City goes to a small town to be feted by an unsophisticated adoring audience and along the way gets laid by a fall on the ice on the steps in front of his host’s house. Meaning, meaning hell for all concerned since he will have to convalesce at the host’s house and that will bring on all kinds of unintended consequences, unintended for the host not by old wizened Sherry. During his long stay Sherry is able to manage to alienate almost everybody but the servants with his outrageous demands and self-centered needs. There is a long build-up of dear Sherry as an impossible man to deal with in the first half or so of the film.       

But hidden behind every cantankerous old man is a man with a heart of gold, an old softie, at least in the case of one Sheridan Whiteside.  And so he makes his peace with most of the characters in the household and its environs, except his hard-working hard-pressed secretary and Girl Friday, played by Bette Davis (you remember her, the girl the Bette Davis eyes), who during the stay falls head over heels for a “townie,”  a newspaperman (and budding playwright). That is where Shelly draws the line- his organizational needs come before love. But naturally those needs are ultimately thwarted because whether in Hollywood or on Broadway, take your pick, when two people fall head over heels in love with each other then it would take a civil war of sorts to not have a happy ending. Not that the devious Sherry doesn’t take a stab at it trying to break up the happy couple by bringing in a “ringer.” Bringing in a beautiful stage actress, played by beautiful, 1940s beautiful anyway with those crazy hats they wore then to top off that beautiful head, Ann Sheridan, to try to bust up the lovebirds. But all for nothing as the now kindly Sherry gets “religion” in the end and finally wishes the couple well.

Like I said a pretty conventional plotline when you get right down to it. What makes the whole comedy work, at least for 1940s audiences work (and 2000 something audiences too except the overbearing Banjo, played by Jimmy Durante, who added nothing to the plotline or production), is the sparkly repartee of the dialogue, the to and fro between old Sherry and everybody who tried to cut him down to size, or just tried to get a word in edgewise. Yeah, Sherry could whip that tongue of his whenever he needed to, for good or evil.