Showing posts with label left-at-the-altar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label left-at-the-altar. Show all posts

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Three Loves Has Nancy (1938)

Robert Montgomery is a distinct improvement over Robert Young. I'm sorry, but I just don't get that funny feeling in the pit of my tummy for poor little Robert Young that Robert Montgomery can give me.

Janet Gaynor's a cutie, too and it's her routine that carries this movie.
So the premise here is that Nancy's fiance goes missing on her wedding day, so, naturally, she goes to New York to fetch him. Nancy is a small-town girl from the south and has never traveled. On the train she meets Mr. Niles (Montgomery), who is returning to New York because he's heard that Vivian, the pest of a girl who is trying to corner him and wring a proposal out of him, has finally left for Europe.
Nancy is a complete bumpkin and gets herself into trouble at every turn. Mr. Niles first helps her, then helping her turns into a disaster and he never wants to see her again.
When she can't find George, however, she turns up on Niles' doorstep with perfect timing - he uses her to convince Vivian he is engaged to someone else.
Now ensconced in his life, Nancy turns his world and the world of his publisher, next door neighbor, and best friend, Mr. Hanson, upside-down - just by being herself.
It's a tour-de-force performance by Gaynor who is perfectly convincing with the help of her neat but completely unfashionable outfits. Bustling around innocently, she's actually quite clever. At one point Mr. Niles is interrupted by the telephone for the third time in a row and says "who invented those things, anyway?" and she replies with crisp precision: "Alexander Graham Bell," and adds, "in 1865." She'll teach you a thing or two, MISTER Niles.
Margo and I were actually laughing out loud at some of the slapstick scenes and there were a lot of great one-liners.
Still searching for the missing fiance, Nancy finds his ukele at a shop where he used to work. She bursts into tears, "George's ukele!" The store clerk just looks at her with stony indifference and quips "You'd cry more over it if you had to hear him play!"
After a long evening of monologues from Joan Crawford and earnest expressions of virtue from gamblers, it was really nice just to laugh.
Margo and I both proclaimed this a buried gem that we put in a category with Bringing Up Baby and we would definitely watch it again. Four stars.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Bridal Suite (1939)

Margo likes movies from the 30s, so get ready for some extra-old classics!

We watched this a few months ago so my memory is a little rusty but it also wasn't all that great...Robert Young plays an irresponsible playboy who forgets his own wedding day...TWICE. I mean, it's kind of hard to get behind the marriage at that point no matter how invested you may be in a happy ending.
His father is quite properly disgusted with him and cuts him off. His mother, indulgent to a fault, decides he needs a doctor's note from her favorite psychiatrist and drags him to Switzerland where the hapless doctor is vacationing in his chalet.
I'll tell you that this photo is of the happy young playboy and his innocent mountain maiden. And I'll tell you that there is a happy ending. But I will be damned if I'm going to explain the intricacies of the strudel-making, glockspiel-playing, antics in pajamas and avalanche-inducing yodeling that we will have to endure in order to arrive at that happy ending.
Margo looked up the starring actress, Annabella, and learned that she was all the rage in France and was imported with great fanfare to America, to no great success. You can see why. Though she comes across as sincere and sweet and Robert Young is affable as always, there is nothing to really excite you about their chemistry.
Ultimately, it's a silly movie.
Will not watch again. Two stars.