REGENT THEATRE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 40, 13 June 1947, Page 4

REGENT THEATRE

“EASY TO WED” Saturday 14, Monday 16. Starfilled, dance-filled and unraveling one of the most amusing yarns of marital crosses and double-crosses to have reached the screen in years, M.G.M.’s new Technicolour musical, “Easy To Wed,” opens at the Regent Theatre as an outstanding entertainment smash. Van Johnson, Esther Williams, Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn are the stellar quartet around whom have been evolved an uproarious tangle of wedded errors, with each of the principals forced to marry the wrong party in order eventually to capture the right one. It all starts when Miss Williams, as Connie, lovely daughter of a millionaire, finds herself libelled in a news story by reporter Warren Haggerty (Wynn) in which he has called her a “husband stealer.” When Connie’s father promptly sues for two rriillion dollars, Haggerty hires ladiesman Bili Chandler (Van Johnson) to enter in what is to be purely a temporary marriage with his own fiancee, dancer Gladys Benton (Miss Ball). The idea is that Chandler will now get the glamorous Connie to fall for him, whereupon she can be truly accused of being a hus-band-stealer and will have to drop her libel suit.

As events turn out, Connie falls for Chandler all right, but unfortunately he also falls for her and, believing a previous divorce of Gladys to have been illegal, he marries Connie. When Gladys comes through with the documents of a legal divorce from her first husband Chandler finds himself with two wives on his hands. The muddle is finally dissolved, with the right couples reunited, but not without a continuous round of uproar and hilarity.