My Favorite Wife

Ellen was lost in a shipwreck seven years ago and the court declared her dead. Her husband Nick remarries on precisely the day she comes back, having survived on an island, and turns up at the honeymoon hotel. What complicates it is that she was not alone out there: she spent those seven years on the island with a man named Stephen. Garson Kanin directs. Cary Grant plays Nick, Irene Dunne plays Ellen, Randolph Scott plays Stephen. The starting point is Tennyson's poem Enoch Arden, where the return of the presumed dead comes from, and cinema has used the shape many times since. Leo McCarey wrote the story and was to direct. Badly injured in a car accident, he handed the direction to Garson Kanin and stayed on as producer. Grant and Dunne had played together the year before in McCarey's The Awful Truth, and this was designed as the direct continuation of that success. The best passages are the ones where Grant has to lie. The comedy comes out of the character's panic rather than out of the lines. Years later the same story went into production with Marilyn Monroe as Something's Got to Give and was never finished; it was eventually made in 1963 as Move Over, Darling. Who it is for: viewers who like classic screwball and the Grant and Dunne pairing. Who it is not for: the template is very familiar now, and the jokes about Ellen's years on the island read strangely today.