La revoltosa se casa

Poster Mkilmer gets it.

This movie by the way underrated Vincent Sherman is a sequel to the 1944 Michael Curtiz picture, Janie, which was about a high-spirited bobby-soxer and the havoc she inadvertently causes for her family and her town. I thought the Curtiz was at best fitfully amusing but contrived, sit-comy and slight. The Sherman is something else entirely. As the title indicates, the eponymous character is now wed (to a returning G.I. she fell for in the first film) It's rather grim for a comedy, and much of the thrust of the film is a portrayal of marriage as a stultifying and unrewarding condition, hardly what one would expect in a 1940s comedy about newlyweds. There are intimations of adultery, and Janie and her husband even have a contract, which is to be renewable each month at each spouse's option if he and she want to remain married. One can certainly see the pair 20 years down the line having become the couple in Sherman's 1947 masterpiece, Nora Prentiss.

Despite the dark undertones, the film is also quite funny. And as a story of G.I.s returning from World War 2, it's more effective and empathetic than Wyler's pompous The Best Years Of Our Lives, and spares us the self-seriousness (it also has the same deep focus cinematography that was celebrated in the Wyler film).