USA 91m Dir: Leo McCarey Key Cast: Irene Dunne and Cary Grant
Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy (Irene Dunne) are a married couple who accuse each other of infidelity and begin divorce proceedings. They then proceed to begin dating other people but constantly find themselves interfering with their former's partners love life, to comic effect.
This had a really unusual production with very little scripted and the actors turning up each day and improvising their way through scenes that director Leo McCarey had come up with overnight. At first both Grant and Dunne hated this way of working and Grant even tried to leave the film but over time they began to enjoy it and Grant continued to ask for improvisation throughout his career.
This method of direction has it's advantages and disadvantages. The film is certainly funnier than most other comedies of the time and feels more natural than if it had had a written script. It helped that Cary Grant was able to refine his on-screen persona here too. McCarey was a really experienced comedy director who had directed Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers so he was able to take sequences and ideas from his previous work and sprinkle them in here too.
On the other hand, this way of working means that the film doesn't really have much of a plot. There's a clear start and end point but everything in between is just a series of sketches which are often fairly loosely interlinked. The premise just about holds it all together but there are parts where I wanted something more interesting to happen or to see some more character development.
This is a charming screwball comedy that doesn't work especially well in terms of story but is pretty funny thanks to the improvisational skills of it's stars. It was off the back of this film that Cary Grant became a huge star and you can certainly see why.
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