Mr & Mrs Smith

 Mr & Mrs Smith (1941) 

Notable cast/crew: Carole Lombard as Ann.  Robert Montgomery as David.  Gene Raymond as Jeff.  Jack Carson as Chuck.  Charles Halton as Mr Deever (making his 2nd of three Hitchcock films).

Running time: 95 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Plot: David and Ann Smith have a tumultuous marriage.  They fight a lot, but they have a lot of rules to their marriage.  After another spat, she asks him if he had to do it all over again, would he marry her.  He, following her rule of being honest, says no he wouldn't because he gave up too much freedom when he got married.  She misunderstands that he is simply answering her hypothetical and does not want to be separated from her, and she gets mad at him which fires off another spat.

You've got a dangler there

David goes to work where Mr Deever is waiting for him.  Deever informs him that due to a jurisdiction dispute, the Smiths' marriage is part of a group of marriages that are technically not legal.  They are currently married by common law, but the town wants them to go through another ceremony just to make sure everything is order for legal purposes.  David intends to tell Ann that evening, but Mr Deever makes a last minute decision to stop by and tell Ann since he was a childhood friend of hers.

They go to dinner, and she expects him to marry her again that night.  Instead, he, not knowing she knows, decides to string it out.  She does a slow boil then smashes a champagne bottle when he gets ready for bed without still having told her about their non-marriage.  She kicks him out for being a cad.  She decides to get her revenge by going to dinner with other men to make David jealous.  It escalates from there with each making the other jealous.

Ann decides she wants to take up with David's business partner Jeff which makes things even more strained.  David shows up at their ski lodge and feigns illness to guilt Ann into caring for him.  They get into yet another fight which shows Jeff a side of Ann he hadn't seen.  David and Ann reconcile and presumably get married again.

MacGuffin: None

Hitchcock cameo: Walking past a hotel

Hitchcock themes: 

• Blondes

Verdict: An amusing film, this is Hitchcock's only purely comedic American film.  Carole Lombard requested Hitchcock do this film with her, although RKO documents show that Htichcock also pursued the project himself.  As such, this is one of the few films that he wasn't involved with the scripting process.  Carole Lombard directed Hitchcock's cameo and made him do repeated retakes.  In order to tease him about his comment, "Actors are cattle", she had a miniature cattle pen set up on the set with three heifers, each with the name of one of the movie's stars emblazoned on it.  This was the last movie Lombard did that was released before her death in a plane crash in 1942.

This is the first American film to feature a pizzeria.

It's a fairly straightforward screwball comedy using a plot device that has been repeated numerous times over the years about the married couple who find out they aren't married and then have to be won over into remarrying.  Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery are well cast with Montgomery having most of the best lines in the movie.  Gene Raymond is okay as Jeff, but the role as written doesn't work.  It's hard to believe that the milquetoast, Southern gentleman who is David's friend and business partner would suddenly take up with his estranged wife.  The role would need to be a little more oily for him to be believable.  A George Sanders or Carey Grant (who was the original choice for the role of David) would have been better in the role providing it was written that way.

Out of five bananas, I give it:

Next review: Suspicion