MY FAVOURITE WIFE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 74, 22 November 1940, Page 51

MY FAVOURITE WIFE

(RKO)

N "Too Many Husbands" Jean Arthur was given two husbands; in "My Favourite Wife" Cary Grant is given two wives. which show how

quick Hollywood is to capitalise on a good idea, It is perhaps unkind to draw attention to such parallelism of plot, and it would certainly be uncharitable to compare the merits of the two pictures. In any event, "My Favourite Wife" stars Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who were in "The Awful Truth," and it was made by Leo McCarey, who directed "The Awful Truth," all of which should be guarantee of smart comedy. Irene Dunne, who has been acting as photographer on an ethnological expedition (a strange hobby for a married woman with two children), is shipwrecked and cast away on a desert island, to turn up after seven years on the very day that- her husband, Cary Grant, is getting hitched to Gail Patrick. Complications arise; first from Grant’s reluctance to tell his new bride what has happened, and then from his sudden discovery that his first wife has not been alone for those seven years on that desert island. In fact she had been there with a he-mannish fellow whom she called Adam and who called her Eve. Well, what would you think? However, it all works out. The second bride, fed up with waiting for her nuptials, returns to mother, Adam proves to be a vegetarian and to have been strong and self-controlled and just a Good Friend during the island stay; and the first wife is legally restored to life and husband. Remember the ending in "The Awful Truth," with the figures on the cuckoo clock suggesting that all at last is well? "My Favourite Wife" has a similar twist fn the tail.

Best are the court sequences, with a judge (Granville Bates) taking divorces, marriages and annulments of marriage in his stride, without batting an eyelid. It’s bright, sophisticated fare, with situations that lose nothing from being a trifle blue round the edges on occasions.