Life With Father (1947)

About 20 mintues into the movie, Clarence (William Powell) storms into an agency that hires out maids demanding, "Where do you keep 'em?" You see, just a few minutes earlier Clarence had scared away the most recent maid in a long line of scared maids. The woman manning the agency desk tries to prevent Clarence from rushing into the room with the maids. When she fails, and he picks which maid he wants, the woman explains that she needs to know the character of the house to which the maid will be going before she can allow her to go anywhere with him. The reply: "Madam, I am the character of my home!" And here we have the main source of comedy and conflict in the movie. Clarence is a character.

It is currently somewhere between 90 and 100 degrees outside and probably close to that in my apartment. I cannot think. I can barely move. I needed a funny movie to distract me. Unfortunately, this movie did not distract me. There is perhaps a reason I had not heard of it before I found it in Netflix's instant watch list. Many jokes were made, but they were often just too corny to laugh at. Two masters of witty dialogue and comic timing wasted.

Once Elizabeth Taylor, as a wide-eyed, bonnet-wearing young maiden, started asking Clarence Jr. if he believes in girls going to college, I decided never mind the temperature, I needed to at least be knitting so I could handle the rest of the movie. Then, during the whole to-do about how Elizabeth Taylor's character is a Methodist and the members of Clarence's family are Episcopalian and the ensuing drama about the discovery that Clarence was never actually baptized as a child, I started to pay more attention to my knitting than to the movie. But then I started to think, if only this movie ends with William Powell in a long frilly white gown getting baptized, maybe I will laugh.

To be fair, though, I did chuckle a few times throughout the movie:

*"You know your father doesn't like electricity!" (There were a lot of things Father (Clarence) didn't like, from kneeling in church to rubber plants.)

*"Do you ever play duets?"

"No, not till now."

"Neither have I, not till now." (Was this exchange between Elizabeth Taylor and Clarence Jr. meant to be funny? I'm really not sure.)

*Clarence discussing his pew and its falling property values with the minister and his wondering when it might be best to unload it.

*Clarence Jr. believing he is possessed by his father's old suit and not being able to do anything his father wouldn't do while he wears it. Elizabeth Taylor cannot sit on his lap, because it would be like she is sitting on Father's pants.

I cannot forget William Powell in this movie after puzzling over his bright red Technicolor hair for almost two hours, but from this moment on, I will do my best to forget Irene Dunn's part as his wife. In other words, one star, and I don't plan to see this again. I need a funny and GOOD movie!

Roberta (1935)

Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers... of course I had to see this movie. Huck Haines (Astaire) travels with his band, The Wabash Indianians, and his friend John Kent (Randolph Scott) to Paris for a gig. Unfortunately, almost the second they step off the ocean liner, the owner of the club where they were supposed to play becomes horrified to learn that they are in fact Indianians and not Indians. The band tries to woo the club owner with a bizarre act in which they become a human piano...but to no avail.

With no more gig, John and Huck rush off to find John's aunt Roberta, who just happens to own a fashionable clothing store in Paris. Roberta is delighted to see her favorite nephew and says that she will try to help them find a new gig through her connections. It turns out that the band doesn't need Roberta's direct help, though, because out in the lobby they find the Comtesse Scharwenka (Ginger Rogers) complaining loudly and obnoxiously about a dress that has not come out quite right. The Comtesse is merely pretending to be Polish nobility to make her singing act more intriguing. Really she is from Indiana and happens to be the long lost close friend/next door neighbor of Huck. And she can get the band back into the very night club from which they were tossed for not being Indians. And I haven't even mentioned that Irene Dunne plays Stephanie, who works for Roberta. Stephanie and John fall in love at first sight, complications to follow. One of the largest complications seems to be that John is a "hick" with an attitude about fashion, and Stephanie is a Russian princess in exile. Hmmm.

The dancing was, as usual, exciting, especially a very cool tap dance pictured above and a dance to "I Won't Dance." And then there was the highly entertaining fashion show. My favorite quote from the fashion show is actually from my roommate Barbara: "Oh, a bird died." There were a lot of fur and feathers.

Other good fashion quotes from without the movie include:

"It's more stimulating to the imagination if clothes clothe." (John is VERY against skimpy dresses, and this fact leads to some of the plot twists of the movie.)

"[Women] can pack their own junk." (about a dress with pockets)

The movie also swung towards schmaltzy, though. Stephanie sings mournful songs, Roberta dies, everyone is tragically misunderstood. All except Huck and the Comtesse, that is. Two stars for my favorite dancers. Not sure I could watch again.

Penny Serenade (1941)

Four stars, and I'm not sure if I can see it again. At least not for a while. It is just too sad.



I really liked the way the movie was set up. Julie (Irene Dunne) is about to walk away from her failing marriage to Roger (Cary Grant). She picks up an album they have made of records that have been meaningful through the years and begins to play the first one... It's the song that was playing the day they met. Julie was working in the listening booth at a record store. After seeing her through the window, Roger came in and picked out a giant stack of records for her to play for him in the booth. He ended up buying most of them (even though he doesn't own a phonograph) and walked her home. Their meeting is possibly the definition of a meet cute. Most of the movie is told through flash backs like this one... Julie puts a new record on the phonograph, and we flash back to another scene from their relationship as they date, get married, move to Japan, get pregnant, have a miscarriage in an earthquake, buy a struggling little newspaper back in the states, finally adopt a baby, almost have to give the baby up...



The fact that I sometimes wonder if I'm living my life to a soundtrack made me really excited about the concept of this film, and of course Cary Grant and Irene Dunne continue to be amazing together, but - WARNING - The adoption is NOT the happy ending you would like it to be! I think it is important to know this before watching the movie. If I hadn't read the synopsis carefully and known where things were heading, I would not have survived the movie.

Love Affair (1939)

So, not only did I see "An Affair to Remember" first, but until recently (probably because of you) I never even realized that it was based on another movie..."Love Affair." Now I know that it is not really based on "Love Affair," it is "Love Affair." It's been a few years since I saw the 50s movie, but I was actually able to recite a lot of the lines in "Love Affair" right along with the movie and say things like, "Now they're going to meet his grandmother, and she's going to offer Terry her shawl when she dies." Now I have to watch "An Affair to Remember" again before I forget this movie and see how much of it is identical. Although, with Leo McCarey directing and writing both movies, I'm sure the newer one will be as identical as I think it's going to be. But with the addition of an orange Cary Grant.

Do I need to explain the plot? American Terry McKay (Dunne) meets the charming French playboy Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer) on a ship from Europe to the US. They are both engaged, but...they fall in love. After a lot of flirting, some painful silences, and the fear of imminent docking, they decide that if what they have is real, in six months they will meet on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building at 5:00 pm on July 1.



Of course Terry is hit by a car and paralyzed on her way to meet Michel. "I was looking up...you were up there." And of course Michel waits until midnight in a thunderstorm and leaves hurt and furious. And of course Terry is unwilling to call him and tell him what has happened. She's just waiting to learn to walk again so she can run into his arms. Even knowing the plot, it still feels horrible to watch it unfold.

Why Irene Dunne is wonderful:
She really does have perfect timing. Even though this is not at all a comedy, every once in a while you can see how great she is at delivering, for lack of a better word, sassy comebacks. When Michel first meets Terry, he starts trying to butter her up with all sorts of comments about how bored he was before he met her and how he was worried beautiful women didn't travel anymore. Just as my friends were saying, "I'd be throwing him out at this point," Terry shoots back with, "Have you been getting results with a line like that?" She also manages to get in a very nice, "How's your fiancee?"



Random final detail of interest: The creator of Pepe Le Pew modeled the skunk's voice and mannerisms after Charles Boyer.

My Favorite Wife (1940)

Four stars, will definitely watch again.

A shipwrecked woman returns to her family after seven years on a desert island and finds that she has been declared dead and her husband has just married another woman.

There is no sympathy for the other woman, she is an absolute pill but after a half hour of Cary Grant not being able to figure out how to tell his second wife that his first wife is still alive you do kind of want to just pick him up and shake him.



But he just looks so darn cute in his leopard-print bathrobe.

Anyhow, eventually Grant figures out that his wife wasn't alone on the island, he tries to figure out what happened on the island, she tries to hide it, and hilarity ensues!

It's akin to Bringing Up Baby in the combination of physical comedy and comedy of errors.

The Awful Truth (1937)

Cary Grant wishlist again! I've seen this one so I only watched half of it and then Jess and I fast-forwarded through the end to remind ourselves how it ended. She remembered the weird cuckoo-clock and the door that factors into the happy reunion of the couple.



Basically, this is one of those movies where a married couple starts the movie off with a hasty divorce and we wait for them to get reunited (and remarried) at the end.

Cary Grant also does this in The Philadelphia Story, doesn't he? He's often divorced. In House Boat, too, he's about to get a divorce when his wife dies.

Anyhow, they are supposedly sharing custody of the dog, who is played by Asta again! In the movie his name is Mr. Smith.

I have to say, though, I love Irene Dunne's outfits, even her cooky hats are kind of entertaining more than annoying, but I HATE her hair.

I feel too sorry for the characters (especially Ralph Bellamy's Oklahoma Oilman) to give it more than three stars, but it's a great romantic comedy.

Will definitely watch again, sometime.
Three stars.