James Stewart keeping Ginger Rogers his secret wife
by Stephen_Murray - Written: Aug 10 '03
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Pros: the women
Cons: the men, pacing, plausibility
The Bottom Line: Fast forward to Beulah Bondi's scenes with Ginger Rogers (and Rogers's fight with Frances Mercer)
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Vivacious Lady |
How could a movie with James Stewart as a sheltered academic and Ginger Rogers as a Manhattan night-club singer go wrong, especially when helmed by the much-honored director George Stevens (Shane, A Place in the Sun, both from the 1950s, and one of the best Rogers/Astaire movies "Swing Time" before "Vivacious Lady"), with superlative supporting actors Beulah Bondi, Franklin Pangborn, Jack Carson, and Charles Coburn (the latter won an Oscar directed by Stevens in "The More the Merrier"), and one of the major female-female slapfests in golden-age Hollywood movies? The writing: it's got to be the writing, though there's some blame left over for the editing.
Stewart plays Peter Morgan, a botany professor at a small college that he reasonably expects to inherit from his father (Coburn) and his father inherited it from his grandfather. Peter is sent to fetch back his cousin, Keith Morgan (James Ellison), who is having an unsuitable" romance with a singer, Francey (Rogers) in the wicked Big City. Keith manages to avoid Peter and Peter is smitten by the singer whom he does not know is the temptress from whom he is supposed to extract his cousin and marries her himself. It is conceivable that his character would do that, but even with the view that finding a husband is the only concern women have, it's hard to believe that Francey would marry Peter and head off to meet the stuffy parents.
Most of the comedy in the movie centers on the newlyweds not being able to get any privacy to consummate the marriage, which is a way of saying that the implausibilities of the plot pile up. I'm sure that censorship was an obstacle, not least in that the movie pokes fun at censoriousness.
There are some scenes in which drunkenness is supposed to be cute, the predictably prissy and officious Pangborn scenes, and Coburn playing one of the many stuffy tyrant fathers he portrayed in the 1930s and 40s. Stewart is hapless, unable to stand up to his father, or to save his secret wife (only his cousin knows they are married) various indignities. Although she gets into the already-mentioned slap-fight with Peter's fiancée Helen (Frances Mercer), Rogers's Francey is remarkably patient, hard as it is for me to imagine why she would put up with all the nonsense to preserve a marriage her husband hides from everyone he can, that was very spur of the moment in origin, and lacks support from anyone (with the exception of the leering and sneering discarded boyfriend/ cousin of the groom).
The movie seems to last more than 90 minutes. The screwball comedy genre was flourishing, but they went at a considerably faster pace than the silliness of "Vivacious Lady." However, the viewer who perseveres is eventually rewarded by Beulah Bondi's scenes with the daughter-in-law she does not know is a daughter-in-law (i.e., Rogers). First she cadges a cigarette and then explains the uses she makes of everyone's belief she has a bad heart. The Rogers/Bondi scenes almost compensate for the flat comedy of most of the rest of the movie.
One might surmise that Stevens did not yet have much clout (and I only recently learned that Katharine Hepburn rather than Stevens is responsible for the hideous ending of "Woman of the Year" two years later), but the pacing of his films when he was an A-list director also lag (Giant, Diary of Anne Frank, The Greatest Story Ever Told).
Bondi went on to portray Stewart's mother four more times (including his much-loved roles in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "It's a Wonderful Life") and in 1972 won an Emmy for playing Aunt Martha Corinne on "The Waltons." Stevens cast her again in "Penny Serenade."
Recommended:
No
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age
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