MODEL WIFE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 118, 26 September 1941, Page 17

MODEL WIFE

(Universal)

[F you and your wife worked for the same firm of costumiers to save money for a baby fund, and the boss’s attractive son made love to your

wife, and your wife couldn’t tell him she was married because there was a House Rule that no female employees were to possess husbands-I ask you, what would you do? This is the situation faced by Dick Powell, who possessed, or hoped he possessed, the Model Wife. Caught totally unprepared by Lee Bowman’s blitzkreig against his wife’s none-too-secure defences, he embarks on a polioy

of patient opportunism. The opportunity does not arrive, however, until Joan Blondell, the lady in question, has demonstrated the firm’s underwear and her own figure to an admiring circle, until her husband has lost his job and almost his home, has gambled away the baby fund and threatened to go to China. Then, almost by the touch of a magic wand, Lucile Watson, the hardbitten employer, learns the whole story, becomes a sweet sentimental old darling in the best Hollywood tradition, and reunites the fond couple. That is a sketch of the plot-almost as ideal as the wife, certainly unrealistic, and not always convincing in its metamorphoses of character. Yet it is an intriguing story, told with a quiet and homely sense of humour-quiet because it is mostly conveyed by unimportant little incidents, homely because the atmosphere’is that of a not-too-luxurious New York apartment. There is indeed one supremely comic scene that is alone worth the price of admission — the sequence in which Dick Powell acts as Lee Bownian’s mirror-refiection. An old gag but a good one. , ‘The lack of conviction in the story ma: polish in the direction prevent me giving Model Wife a handclap, but she, her husband, and her would-be husband, pro_vide interesting entertainment.