Third Finger, Left Hand

Margot Merrick, a magazine editor, says she is married in order to be free of the attentions of the men at work. The invented husband serves her well for a long while. But a suitor named Jeff Thompson sees through it and turns up at her family home posing as that husband. What follows is a comedy in which both sides have to keep the bluff going. The film also shows why the woman needed such a lie in the first place; the pressure at work is where the joke starts. It comes from the vein of American comedy of 1940 built on fast dialogue. Whom a lie binds as it grows is the real matter of the account. Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas take the leads in Robert Z. Leonard’s ninety six minute American film, completed in 1940.