***Out In The 1940s Screwball Comedy Night-Cary Grant’s My Favorite Wife   

 

    

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

My Favorite Wife, starring Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, directed by Garson Kanin, MGM , 1940

Not all 1930s and 1940s black and white screwball romantic comedies were born equal, even when the same actor (here Cary Grant) starred in both vehicles being compared here. Recently I gave a big thumb’s up to Grant’s performance in 1940’s The Philadelphia Story (Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart’s as well) where the wit and facial expressions exploded a so-so story line into a great film (little Miss Rich Girl gets her comeuppance and gets the gold ring too). The same cannot be said for the film under review, 1940’s My Favorite Wife, which stretches a small idea well beyond even Cary’s capacity for elegant slap-stick humor.

 

Here Cary is inundated by the thinness of the story line. Cary, a lawyer with two children needing a mother, played by Irene Dunne, a mother who left on sea-borne photography assignment which got shipwrecked and left Cary believing for the required seven years that she was dead. As a result he filed papers in court to have her declared legally dead. The idea was so he could marry another. Funny thing though just as he gets that decree and actually gets remarried Irene shows up. Irene who was stranded on an island all that time (with a good-looking guy to boot). Naturally she uses her feminine wiles to try to sabotage the new marriage to get her man back. She does so by putting Cary through many hoops in the process. Too many to sustain the plot-line. See what I mean.