directed by Garson Kanin
written by Bella Spewack and Samuel Spewack
story by Leo McCarey, Bella Spewack and Samuel Spewack

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. I saw this on TCM. I think it’s proper to say I caught this on TCM, meaning (to me) that before it began, I neither knew that I was about to watch it nor had any particular intention to watch it, ever.

I had caught the first three-quarters of it, also on TCM, some months earlier, and had enjoyed it well enough, and was glad to get the chance to see the rest. But there was no need. A lot of the movie is loose and tepid, and I had already seen all the good stuff. Now that I’ve seen the whole thing I know that the good stuff accounts for a dissapointingly small percentage of the whole.

The good stuff is mostly Cary Grant clowning. His unique quality as a comic actor is, I think, that he himself is amused by what’s going on, but isn’t generally at liberty to come out and be open about it, 1) because as a charming well-bred fellow, it’s more suitable for him to say something witty, and 2) because it’s a movie and it would be improper for his character to be amused by circumstances that couldn’t possibly be amusing from his point of view. That is, his constant understated amusement reads both as a charming attribute of his character and as the proof that he is not really the character after all, that it’s all just some fun. This is a very hard line to walk, as evidenced by someone like Jimmy Fallon, whose willingness to be amused by his own performances is detrimental to the material both internally and externally. Whether or not it is calculated (but especially if it is), it is indefensibly unprofessional. Oh yeah, but back to My Favorite Wife. Cary Grant gets to do some fun stuff during the early honeymoon hotel sequence, and has a few more moments of pleasant goofiness scattered through the rest.

His scenes with Irene Dunne show them to have satisfyingly similar instincts about how to balance the characterization with the absurdity. I should see The Awful Truth, their previous – and by all accounts much better – movie together. As I said above, and I’m sure I’m not the first to observe this, the appeal of the screwball style derives from simultaneously being in the story and not really being in the story. It works particularly well with couples, because it’s closely modeled on the kind of attitude longstanding couples can have toward their own well-worn schtick. Screwball is warm and satisfying in the way that it’s warm and satisfying to see a couple playing at being mock-frustrated with one another: they’re free to pretend only because they’re actually so stable and content.

That thing about both being in the story and also outside it, having fun with it, accounts for the good-natured appeal of so much old comedy. That’s how the Marx Brothers are, too, and Bob Hope, and lots of other “classic” comic performers; it’s a vaudevillian sort of attitude toward material, one that doesn’t privilege content over entertainment. I’ve heard someone (Christopher Guest?) say that for something to succeed as comedy, the stakes for the characters have to be real and have to be high. But that’s not a universal; that’s a recent attitude, and it creates comedy with a different, less sympathetic flavor. In that school, you’re really laughing at the characters; there’s no with because they’re not laughing at all. Frequently they’re quite genuinely upset. You might still have sympathy for them, but it’s dramatic sympathy for characters, not that old sense of actual comic camaraderie.

But old-style “inclusive” comedy has always lived on, in diluted form, in the sitcom, among other places. Of course, it’s hard to say whether that really counts as living on, since sitcoms (particularly the warmest, most inclusive ones, like Home Improvement et al.) are generally idiotic, and they also frequently seem to forget how the game works. Witness Drew Carey’s grotesquely stupid show, which seemed actually to take pride in how little it believed in itself. But the “quality” sitcoms, like Frasier, have managed to maintain that sense that the people who live in a comedy are really there but are always, in some unshakeable way, having fun. Unlike Spinal Tap and, you know, any of those movies where bad things happen to Ben Stiller’s penis.

The high point of My Favorite Wife is right in the middle, when Cary Grant learns that his wife was, in fact, with some dude when she was shipwrecked on a desert island for seven years. Irene Dunne makes the dude out to have been some harmless wimp, but Cary Grant is suspicious. He tracks the guy down to see what he looks like, and finds that he is Randolph Scott, hanging out by a pool with several women at his side. Cary Grant’s anxious jealousy/sexual discomfort peaks as Randolph Scott shows off his broad-chested body to the crowd in an athletic performance on rings before diving into the pool, to admiring applause. The sequence quite explicitly stands in for Cary Grant jealously imagining his wife having sex with this guy, which is a bit dirtier than anything I expected in a movie from 1940, and the heightened, exaggerated quality of it all delighted me both times – Scott’s ridiculous, self-satisfied grin as he casually launches into his acrobatic routine, Grant’s cringing as though he’s seeing something nightmarish, all to the winking strains of, I believe, the Skater’s Waltz (or a close approximation). I generally like scenes in comedy where something goofy and exaggerated is staged for the benefit of one of the characters; I like watching people have to cope with seeing silly things. The Coen Brothers use some form of this setup in almost every one of their movies.

But after that things start to go downhill. The irritatingly protracted final sequence had all of us groaning with frustration. The elements of the story seem perfectly sufficient for this sort of movie, but scene for scene, the setups just aren’t funny enough, and the efforts to make something out of almost nothing are only occasionally successful. I blame the writers, for sloppy pacing and weak “jokes,” and the director, who lets everything linger just a little too long.

The movie is said to be inspired by Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” (uncredited, but Dunne’s character’s name is Arden…) which I attempted to read in preparation for writing this, but gave up when I saw how long it was going to take. It’s so long! I’ll read it soon and report. On first look, it seems like it’s also the inspiration for Cast Away, the Tom Hanks movie.

Here’s a picture of Bella and Sam Spewack, the writers, better known for writing Kiss Me, Kate. Everyone knows that pretty much all the pictures on this site are thumbnails, right? Click on the picture for the bigger version. You knew that already, right?