Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Twenty-One Review: My Favorite Wife

I have mixed feelings about Irene Dunne, the star of the 1940 Garson Kanin comedy My Favorite Wife, in much the same way I have mixed feelings about her modern-day equivalent, Meryl Streep. I usually hate when people compare actors of today with actors of yesterday, especially when it comes in the form of "So-and-so is the next James Dean," because trust me, so-and-so is not the next James Dean, but my comparison between Irene Dunne and Meryl Streep has more to do with the breadth of their talent and the effect they occasionally have on screen. Like Streep, who has been in everything from Mamma Mia to Sophie's Choice, Irene Dunne was an extremely talented and flexible actress, moving seamlessly from romance (Love Affair) to drama (I Remember Mama) to screwball comedies (The Awful Truth) to musicals (Show Boat); of her five Academy Award nominations, one was for an epic, one was for a romance, one was for a drama, and two were for comedies. Also like Streep, she occasionally comes across like she knows she's good at whatever she tries, and some of her performances -- especially her comedic performances -- are shot through with a touch of superiority, not so much a holier-than-thou quality as a better-than-thou quality that sets her both above and apart from her films -- as well as Hollywood as a whole.

The difference between Streep and Dunne is that whereas Streep's superiority comes both from her stellar reputation and her slightly hippy-dippy, anti-Hollywood personality (anti here meaning opposite-from, not against), Dunne rose above the Hollywood hoopla by only engaging it when she felt it was necessary. Sometimes I feel like every actress I feature on this blog had an issue with Hollywood during the studio system, but while Jean Arthur, Vivien Leigh, and Margaret Sullavan professed to hate everything that went along with the process of making movies, Dunne simply treated acting as her profession, neither immersing herself in the Hollywood lifestyle nor raging against it -- and thus she was arguably the most successful actress of the era at keeping her public life and her personal life separate. She had no drama, no scandals; she was married to the same man for thirty-seven years. By all accounts, she was probably exactly the kind of person with whom I would get along in real life, but when it comes to watching her on screen, she sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- comes off a touch removed from the action of the story -- not unwilling to participate, but with a smirky air of "Oh, yes, well, I'm awesome and dignified while acting like a fool, too."

That, in effect, was my only problem with My Favorite Wife, wherein Dunne costars with another actor I find notoriously guilty of detaching himself from his roles: Cary Grant. Grant, unlike Dunne, was the consummate movie star during the studio years, glamorous and exciting, with a carefully-crafted screen persona to boot, but the effect is the same: are we ever really watching anybody but "Cary Grant" when we watch a Cary Grant movie? He can be serious and he can be gratingly over-the-top, but he is always, always the entity we recognize as Cary Grant, so how can he be a fictional character at the same time? He can't, as far as I'm concerned. He exists apart from his characters because his characters can never match up to the sum total of his on-screen self, and Irene Dunne exists apart from her characters because they can never match up to her off-screen self; either way, what you end up with in My Favorite Wife are two professionals doing a very good job of turning their charms toward the camera, but not exactly through the filter of the script.

Fortunately, the script, the direction, and, yes, the performances of the two stars -- plus supporting work from Gail Patrick and Randolph Scott -- are good enough to make My Favorite Wife worth watching. As much as I sometimes dislike Cary Grant, his movies are almost always light, enjoyable fun, and Irene Dunne is quite charming in her role, superiority be damned. She understood, I think, that the audience would smile if she smiled, and part of the smirking quality I mentioned above comes from her realizing that of course the story is ridiculous, and of course the characters are ridiculous, so why not laugh at them even before the punchlines arrive? She plays a woman who, after being lost at sea for seven years, returns home to find that her husband has recently remarried, and her perpetual sense of amusement helps the film float along at a brisk pace, rather than getting bogged down in jealous catfights between her and the new wife (Patrick). Dunne and Grant have good chemistry, and more importantly, they seem to be having fun, which is an attribute not to be taken lightly when it comes to screwball comedies.

Grade: A-