TOGETHER AGAIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 333, 9 November 1945, Page 18

TOGETHER AGAIN

(Columbia)

| VERY nearly missed seeing this film, imagining that the title simply indicated that Irene Dunne was again in juxtaposition with Charles

Boyer, and being of the opinion that this fact, by itself, scarcely constituted sufficient reason for making another picture. Actually, if the title means anything, this is all it does mean, but I am glad I saw Together Again, for it is an agreeable piece of comic nonsense with some bright situations and some even brighter lines of dialogue. What is more, apart from one dull patch towards the end when the heroine is dithering between love and what she conceives to be her duty, ‘the polish is pretty evenly spread over the whole surface. Together Again presents Irene Dunne in rather an unusual role; she is the second wife of a statue. This dominating piece of sculpture stands in the centre of the small town of Brookhaven and is a more-than-life-size replica of that town’s dead mayor, the muchrevered Jonathan Crandall. His handsome widow, who has succeeded to the mayoralty, is fully occupied ,in sustaining this high office with dignity and efficiency, and in coping, during her offduty moments, with a highly-strung teen‘age stepdaughter who suffers from "meta‘bolic glands," and a romantically-minded father-in-law (Charles Coburn), who holds ‘that even a mayor’s widow owes it to ‘herself to be merry sometimes. But Her ‘Honor the Mayoress copes successfully until a bolt of lightning strikes off the statue’s head and she goes up to New York to arrange with a sculptor to put it back. When the sculptor turns out to be Charles Boyer and he leads her into an adventure in Manhattan which results in the Mayoress of ‘Brookhaven being arrested as a strip-tease artist, it begins to look as if father-in-law may have been right when he suggested that the thunderbolt was "an act of Providence to end the Crandall dynasty." This threat to Her Honor (or rather, to her sense of civic duty, since M. Boyer’s intentions are reasonably matrimonial) becomes even greater when the sculptor follows her home, sets up a studio in her garage, and proceeds to remodel her life as well as the statue. And the mayoress is not the only one who starts acting, as somebody describes it, "kinda leapy"; for the teen-age stepdaughter also becomes infatuated and behaves in a manner far beyond her years, while her devoted though gangling swain, a _ high-school youth, does likewise. The plot becomes so entangled that, at one hectic point, the sculptor finds himself engaged, to the stepdaughter, while the mayoress, though not exactly sure how she stands in relation to the amorous schoolboy, realises that the position is untenable. "This is the most idiotic situation I have ever seen,’ remarks father-in-law at about this moment, a statement which may be taken as fair comment not only on this particular sequence, but on the story as a whole. However, the plot un-

ravels itself satisfactorily; and the idiocy is so cheerful, and the acting so lightheartedly competent, that I can think of many less enjoyable ways of spending an evening than seeing Together Again.