Always a Bride

Alice Bond (Rosemary Lane) is expected to marry rich local Marshall Winkler (John Eldredge). Instead, she likes Michael Stevens (George Reeves), but he has no prospects. He turned down a tax appraiser job due to his dislike of Mayor Loomis.

Wow! Michael annoyed me. Marshall is right about him. All that flattery and false happiness is really off-putting. There is a big difference between him and someone like Ned Flanders. Michael is faking it and it shows. The future Superman has his tall stature and good looks. At some point, the fake happiness does go completely overboard into ridiculousness and that's a little funny. As for Alice, I don't really like her. I'm not too invested in this coupling or this movie.

ALWAYS A BRIDE (1940) stars Rosemary Lane, a couple years removed from her late-1930s musical successes with her sisters, and a little-known George Reeves, early in his Hollywood career and a decade before he'd become famous as television's Superman. They're surrounded by a cast of D-list actors in this third-rate production.

The story is weak and the ending, coming only an hour into the film, caught me off-guard. I was expecting the story to continue a little further and was surprised to see it "conclude" where it did. The film feels more like an episode of a television (or radio) series. It's a short story, not a novel. Not quite enough material for a feature-length movie.

Reeves is charming, though, as a sweet-talking idler who first must win back his sweetheart and then finds himself in the middle of a mayoral race.

Rosemary Lane didn't have the kind of Hollywood success that her sister Priscilla enjoyed, but she's always been a personal favorite of mine. Her movie career didn't go very far without her sisters and I would've liked to see her in more (and better) films.

ALWAYS A BRIDE is pretty inconsequential. A cheap quickie with the minimum allowable entertainment value, buoyed only by George Reeves's charm. The movie is really only of interest to fans of Reeves or Lane.

The horrible overacting of George Reeves really ruins this film. His method of performance basically consisted of yelling his lines, and arching his eyebrow. Of course, the unpleasant characters and ridiculous plot do not help matters, either.

I thoroughly enjoyed TV "Superman" George Reeves with Rosemary Lane as the girl he pursues and tries to "win over" from John Eldridge. George does play his out-of-work, contrarian, devil-may-care role "over the top," because that's JUST THE CHARACTER HE IS: a' la Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, Joel McCrea in Sullivan's Travel, etc. Imagine either of those two actors, Bob Cummings, Robert Young--any of these would have played the part the same. It's BOY meets GIRL, BOY loses GIRL and BOY wins GIRL back by being himself. Good supporting cast, too. With all the renewed interest in poor George via Hollywoodland, see this picture for yourself when it comes on Turner Classics again. You'll really enjoy it: the underdog, march-to-the-beat of his own drummer vs. the staid, safe world out there--who should a girl (and her parents) choose?Some clever dialogue about marriage, nifty mayoral race tactics and a love triangle to boot. GO SEE IT for yourself. It's NOT awful. It's pretty darn good, and only about an hour long!

Rosemary Lane has two suitors. John Eldredge is a successful businessman who can give her everything she wants. George Reeves is a lazy good-for-nothing with a smile and a good word for everyone. Naturally, Eldredge doesn't stand a chance. But Miss Lane's parents are adamant: Reeves must gt a job to support her. So he runs for mayor of their small city as the candidate of the phony reform party; everyone figures he won't stand a chance against the well-oiled machine.

This pleasant lightweight comedy is based on a stage play by Barry Conners and has the air of something that had been hanging around since the 1920s. Fortunately it has a similarly lightweight director in Noel Smith, and the result is a fluffy bit of nonsense that looks like everyone else passed on the roles, and it still turned out amusing.