Too Many Husbands

When I first heard the premise;a spouse declared dead comes back home after months alone on an island , only to find his beloved wife has re-entered marital bliss with his best friend, I thought 'it'll be interesting to see if they come anywhere near the brilliance of "My Favorite Wife"' And I also presumed this had to be a rather blatant rip-off of the Cary Grant-Irene Dunne classic released ,incidentally, in the same year. Boy was I wrong! For starters this appears to have been released months earlier and the screenplay,comic timing,and acting are easily in the same league as the best of the so-called 'screwball comedies'. When Jean Arthur is "on" there is no actress who can beat her and she looks about as good in this rarely shown film as she ever has . Fred MacMurry and Melvyn Douglas hold up their end, but the surprise, for me, was good old Harry Davenport who gets many lines , many chances to display bravado mugging and line readings, and never fails. This is a Jean Arthur film that needs immediate release on the DVD market!!

This delightful comedy falls just short of being one of the classic screwball comedies of the era. It's a story of a woman whose husband disappears in a boating accident and is presumed to be dead. The woman then marries her late husband's business partner. When the first husband turns up alive after a year on a desert island, the woman has two legal husbands. The plot evolves around the woman's decision about which husband to keep. Jean Arthur is a delight, as always, and McMurray and Douglas could hardly be better.

It's a stage-bound film, however, clearly a filmed version of a play. There are really only six characters, including the butler. Columbia didn't want to spend much money on the production. In one scene, upstairs in the woman's family home, you can twice see the set walls shake when doors are shut. Still, the movie is great fun and should not be missed by serious students of film.

The problem with this movie is that it keeps only the original premise of the play (Home and Beauty, 1918) by Somerset Maugham--that a man who has been presumed dead returns home to find his wife has remarried. In the play the comedy derived from the fact that neither husband wanted the wife and each kept trying to out-noble the other and step aside. (The wife is very pretty and charming, but each husband has been married to her long enough to discover that she is selfish and vain.) At the end of the play the wife married a third man, who did not know her well enough to know her true character. In a movie, however, one could hardly have a heroine whom both male leads disowned, so one is left only with the clumsy and repetitious jokes of one woman, two husbands, and which one will she pick.

I've just discovered this lighthearted film today on tv and must admit it has all the fine elements that make for a good stage play -- plenty of sure-fire dialogue, continual momentum to the story (never a dull moment), and light touches of original music. There are some hilarious moments so downright comical it made me burst out laughing. Just accept it as one more comedy of that era and you'll enjoy it nicely without having to make comparisons or look for weaknesses. Harry Davenport as the father adds his wisdom where he can. I feel all the actors had a good romp in this movie and I liked the repartee amongst them very much. Not sure precisely how it ended so will need to see it again some day. It's a fun movie indeed.

I wasn't expecting much from this Jean Arthur comedy vehicle, and as a result, I was pleasantly surprised by it.

Arthur plays a woman married to the best friend of her dead husband, who's mighty surprised when her dead husband turns out not to be so dead after all. Now she's got two men fighting over her, a state of affairs she settles back to enjoy, much to the dismay of her father, played by that terrific character actor Harry Davenport.

Jean Arthur is absolutely adorable, even if she is a bit of a brat in this. You want to hug her even as you want to see her kicked in the seat of her pants. Fred MacMurray plays the back from the dead husband, while Melvyn Douglas plays the best friend. I felt MacMurray straining a bit at the screwball comedy antics he was asked to tackle, but Douglas navigates the material expertly and probably gives the film's best performance.

I will say that the film is utterly unpredictable -- I could not guess how it was going to turn out right up until its closing credits.

Grade: B