I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE (1949) stars Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan as military officers in post-war France. Despite friction from a past mission — he got handsy, she objected — they have to travel together on a new assignment, despite finding each other the most obnoxious, the most irritating person they’ve ever met — that’s right, you know where this is going.
You can guess at least some of what comes next from the title (another example of Snakes on a Plane literalness). Sheridan and Grant marry but the military bureaucracy assumes overseas spouses will be women; Grant can’t sleep in the wives’ dorm, can’t sleep in the officers’ dorm (he’s out of the Army by this point) and Sheridan’s quarters are women only (getting their wedding night takes a lot of work).
As The Films of Howard Hawks says, this works well for one reason: Cary Grant. Not that Sheridan or the script or the directing are bad but Grant is utterly amazing, spectacularly funny even when all he’s doing is giving a deadpan put-upon look as in the image here. It’s not his best movie or even his best Howard Hawks movie (that would be Bringing Up Baby, which has some similarity to Male War Bride in its romantic rhythms) but it might be his funniest performance. “I think it’s only fair to warn you that Jack the Ripper’s up the alley before you go into it.”
A DOLL’S HOUSE (1973) is a filmed adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play, starring Jane Fonda as a flibbertigibbet wife, David Warner as her banker husband, Edward Fox as a disgruntled clerk, Delphine Seyrig as Fonda’s BFF/Fox’s ex and Trevor Howard as a dying doctor. Despite the cast and the play’s classic status this film didn’t work for me.
A big part of the problem is that it’s one of those filmed stage plays where dialogue that would have worked fine on stage sounds tinny and forced. Another is that Fonda’s Nora is too shallow and selfish to feel much sympathy for her plight (which involves forging her dead father’s signature on a loan as a woman in the 1890s couldn’t take one out by herself), nor does her feminist awakening at the end work for me. I don’t know if the problem is Fonda, the production or that the play, classic though it is, doesn’t work for me. “Nearly all young criminals are the children of feckless mothers.”
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