The Kind of Thing I Like

I've been watching a lot of older movies lately. If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that my reviews are mostly "Could have been worse" or "At least it's short". Why do I watch this stuff if I hate it so much?

Basically, I've seen most of the more famous "classic" black-and-white comedies, so I need to go a little deeper. I don't want to use "bottom of the barrel" metaphors - how about "If you want to find a prince, you've got to kiss a lot of frogs"? Here are some princes:

If You Could Only Cook / Too Many Husbands is a fun Jean Arthur double-bill. In Cook (1935), Arthur's co-star is Herbert Marshall, a tycoon automobile designer who is getting ready to marry a gold-digging socialite. When his board of directors won't approve his new designs, he quits and goes to the park to cogitate. Jean Arthur, on the other end of the park bench, mistakes him for one of the army of unemployed, like herself. The only job she can find is for a married couple, cook and butler. Thinking she's giving him a break, she suggests they pretend to be married and apply together.

You may be surprised to hear that the gag is not that she can't cook. She's a very good cook, and they are hired - by gangster-gourmet Leo Carillo and his sidekick, Lionel Stander. I don't remember meeting Stander before, but he's great, a gravel-voiced palooka with an everything-stinks attitude.

So, deception, misunderstandings, plot twists, and a marriage. Marshall is a bit old and rather stiff, but I think he makes it work. At least he isn't playing another one of his judges or father-types. Jean Arthur is lovely as always, with her Stanwyck-like little tough girl voice, wisecracking and honest. Hard to believe she would be playing the "plain" congresswoman in A Foreign Affair just a few years down the line.

Too Many Husbands (1940) isn't quite as fresh. Arthur is the widow of deceased businessman Fred MacMurray, now married to his partner and best friend Melvyn Douglas. When it turns out that MacMurray was not dead, but castaway, Arthur has to choose between her husbands. Remind you at all of My Favorite Wife (also 1940)? Or any of the remakes and rehashes?

The fun comes from Arthur's inability to make up her mind. She clearly wants both husbands, although she gets hottest for MacMurray (he's the he-man). Douglas is a bit of a fuddy-duddy (I guess you'd call him), a role he's pretty well suited to - better than the smooth operator in Ninotchka.

As a bonus, One Touch of Venus (1948). Robert Walker is a window dresser in Tom Conway's department store. Walker is fixing the drapes around Conway's latest art acquisition, a statue of Anatolian Venus. When he impulsively kisses the statue, she (Ava Gardner) comes alive, and falls in love with Walker. I think this was remade as Mannequin, but I will never watch Mannequin, so I will never know.

Walker, best known as psychopath Bruno in Strangers on a Train, does quite well here, playing broadly as a bimbo. Gardner's Venus is all things sweet, warm and strong - you don't bother to wonder what she sees in Walker. In a nice touch, she lets Walker's best friend Dick Haymes and Walker's kind-of fiancee fall in love, thus taking her off Walker's hands. And when Tom Conway (from the Falcon series) tries to seduce her, she shows him that he has really loved his efficient secretary, Eve Arden, all along. I've got to love a movie that lets Eve Arden get her man.

So, I guess there are still plenty of good films out there. It just takes a little sifting.