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"The story of a happy marriage," sometimes it's a surprise party and sometimes it's an earthquake. Beginnings and ends, the journalist (Cary Grant) has no use for songs but leaves the record store with his arms full so he can meet the clerk (Irene Dunne), she chuckles drily in appreciation. George Stevens sketches such things expertly—the marriage proposal is prepared by a high-angled tracking shot seeking a quiet spot at a teeming New Year's Eve soiree (it settles on the fire escape, with neon signs and falling snow), the goodbye kiss that shades into an erotic embrace is observed through the vertical sliver of a train compartment door ajar. "Like a plaintive melody that never lets me free," as the tune goes, the big dream built up comes literally crashing down, start over. The swells from The Awful Truth turned domestic, struggling with the mysteries of parenthood. (Cromwell's Made for Each Other is a forerunner in the Beautiful Stars Just Like Us subgenre.) Adoption agency operator (Beulah Bondi) and family friend (Edgar Buchanan) play fairy godmother and godfather, though the first night with the baby is something the young couple must face by themselves. The flashback structure is a bittersweet remembrance, emotional fluctuations as a series of Victrola iris dissolves. A documentarian's extended take for the infant's bath and diaper change, a melodramatist's handwritten letter for the devastation that turns lovers into "strangers to each other." How to film Cary Grant crying? Hawks tackles the dilemma admirably in Only Angels Have Wings, Stevens no less shrewdly has the pleading figure dwarfed in a wide shot, the famous voice on the verge of cracking. "I always figured a person can't have too many handkerchiefs." Cukor has his own version (The Marrying Kind), and Sirk takes it from there. With Ann Doran, Eva Lee Kuney, Leonard Willey, and Wallis Clark. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |