The New Pictures

Last fortnight Hollywood reworked two of its favorite ways of handling one of its favorite themes--the loonier side of matrimony. The reworkings were entitled The Doctor Takes a Wife (Columbia) and My Favorite Wife (R. K. 0.).

The Doctor Takes a Wife tells about a personable youth and an attractive girl who are mutually repelled at first glance, then forced by circumstances to pretend they are man & wife. To their embarrassment and their fiances' annoyance, they endure congratulations, pet publicly, share the same lodgings. Their sleeping quarters are, of course, conspicuously separate. In the last reel, habit having dulled discernment, they marry.

As everybody knows it will all end with Ray Milland (a psychologist) leading Loretta Young (a bachelor girl) to the altar, the problem is to provide enough comedy antics to keep the customers awake until the wedding. Cinemactor Milland and the dummy head ("Chester") which he uses for his researches provide some of them. Gail Patrick (the girl Milland jilts) and Edmund Gwenn (the butler in The Earl of Chicago) provide some more. So does the technical chatter of some eminent psychologists. Observers are likely to be delighted when the romp is over.

My Favorite Wife is the latest offering of the husband & wife script-writing team of Bella & Samuel Spewack (Boy Meets Girl), the latest comedy collaboration of Gary Grant, Irene Dunne and Producer Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth). It is also the latest variation on Too Many Husbands, though this time it is the wife (Irene Dunne) who returns after she has been declared legally dead, finds that her husband has married again that morning.

Most rational people would have got out of the mess in two minutes. But nobody in My Favorite Wife is rational. The result is 90 minutes of delightfully irrational comedy. Again Gail Patrick gets jilted. So does Randolph Scott, possibly the only actor in Hollywood who can be dignified and plausible at the same time while confessing that he spent seven years alone on a desert island with Irene Dunne without ever giving the Hays office a bad moment.

At times My Favorite Wife tends to get bedroomatic and limp, but it pulls itself together in scenes like those in which Gary Grant scampers between his wives' hotel rooms pursued by the distrustful but admiring clerk (Donald McBride); or gets caught in his wife's hat and dress by a suspicious psychologist; or tears around in Gail Patrick's leopard-spot dressing gown. And there is Granville Bates's first-rate bit as a dumb, irate, fuddyduddy judge who, having declared Irene Dunne legally dead, declares her legally alive so he can hold her in contempt of court.

Gary Grant has made better pictures than My Favorite-Wife. He has seldom collected a better fee--$100,000. For a boy who was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England and ran away at twelve to join a tumbling act, this is not hay.

Grant's tumbling act was a Three Stooges roughhouse in which the set collapsed and the performers ran around smacking each other in the face with loose planks. Grant liked tumbling. At 17 he tumbled into Manhattan, found it harder to tumble into vaudeville. So he became a Coney Island barker, did stilt walking, other odd jobs. Later he had a tumbling act of his own, still later played in stock in London. Oscar Hammerstein took Grant back to Manhattan where he worked (for five years at $350 to $550 a week) in Hammerstein musicals and for the Shuberts when they bought up his contract. Soon he was talking shop with, playing the piano for, Richard Rodgers, Moss Hart, Werner Janssen, the Gershwins.

When Phil Charig of this musical set asked him to drive to California one day, Grant went along for the ride, stayed to work five years for Paramount. As a dark, sleek, bedimpled leading man, Cinemactor Grant made $500 a week, but he did not make much headway in pictures. Says he: "They had a lot of leading men over there with dark hair and a set of teeth like me, and they couldn't be buying stories for each of us. . . ." When his contract with Paramount expired, Grant struck out for himself, since then has averaged three and a half pictures yearly. He caught Hollywood's eye as a panderer in George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett. Then came good comedy leads in The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday. Today Grant is canny about his career, reads scripts diligently, keeps an eye on publicity, tries to alternate one serious role with every two comedy parts.

Grant explains his later success by better parts. Says he: "The characters can do something. For instance, they drink." Grant himself, who seldom refuses a glass, has scaled the dizzier heights of Hollywood society, and his New Year's Eve parties are among Hollywood's best.

Lively, humorous, a great storyteller, Grant likes to tinkle on the piano while he sings bawdy verses. This makes him a great favorite with the racier, worldlier younger set that includes Reginald Gardiner, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Robert Coote, Phyllis Brooks, Lee Bowman, Randolph Scott. Scott started working for Paramount when Grant did and they are great buddies, and have often shared the same house.

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