Wedding Present

one of films who must see. not for story itself but for actors. and for the moral lesson about responsibility. in fact, a love story like many from the same period comedies. a shining Cary Grant, a seductive Joan Bennett and a not usual present for wedding. a mix of stories with never end - the story of Archiducke is the most relevant - and a lot of humor in different styles , from bitter to crazy. short, a nice story about free spirits and about media, about friendship with a gangster and the spiced dialogues with the woman who represents the love of your life.

Wedding Present (1936)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Reporters Charlie (Cary Grant) and Rusty Fleming (Joan Bennett) are set to be married but after his messing around costs them a marriage license, she begins to think twice about it. Soon he is made editor and she quits her job, which sets off a chain of events that has her eventually engaged to another man (Conrad Nagel).

WEDDING PRESENT was the second straight film that Grant and Bennett did together and it would turn out to be Grant's final picture with Paramount until his return in 1955 with TO CATCH A THIEF. A lot of people including Leonard Maltin think of this as an underrated gem but I'm not certainly I'd go that far. A lot of others have noted that the film has a lot of common things with HIS GIRL Friday, which of course would go down as one of the greatest screwball comedies ever made.

For my money, this film was way too uneven to fully work and a lot of the issues come in the second half. The story has all sorts of characters thrown in and our two leads are constantly having new things done to them and I just found the majority of it uninvolving and at times rather boring. The screenplay tries to keep things moving and as I said, it's constantly throwing loops into the story but I just didn't find it all that funny no matter how hard the cast was trying.

As far as the cast goes, I thought most of them did a very good job and that includes Grant. He's charming, fast-talking ways would eventually make him a legend and his performance here was pretty good. I also thought Conrad Nagel and George Bancroft were good in their supporting bits of Gene Lockhart is also very good in his bit as the Archduke. As far as Bennett goes, she too is in fine form here but the screenplay certainly didn't do her any favors.

One thing I absolutely love about films from the 30s is the now obsolete devices around which some films are centered. Locomotives and ships of course. They're a bit obvious. Then, they were symbols of technology and modernity. Technology as physical power — something in everyone's cinematic imagination then — now made quaint by microchips we cannot even see. And films are the worse for it.

Another device is the newsroom. We don't have these today in the same way. Reporters and cops don't mix it up as they used to. We don't actually "get the story," instead get some sort of manufactured fiction that glues facts together in appealing ways.

But 70 years ago there was a magical confluence of what it meant to make or discover stories, what it meant to "see," and what it meant to be an American. Mixed in there was this notion of an alert woman.

Its hard to impress on youngsters beyond a cartoonish awareness that women in society and film were extremely limited in options. Homemaker, secretary, teacher, nurse. Whore. If a woman was intelligent and witty and active, she was a reporter.

Seeing and discovering was sexy. Its lost today, that effect. This is post-code; "Picture Snatcher" is a better example where the sexiness is darned explicit.

Imagine a film that presents a woman far beyond your experience, what you know from real life. Imagine her witty and sexually available outside marriage, at least temporarily so. Smart, full of humor and ready to play severe and grand jokes. Its impossible to do today where Angelina can fight, Tilda can control and Julianne can affect.

But just imagine the cinematic power of a newsroom with such juice. The folding, of course with them writing stories and we seeing stories simultaneously. Our admiration of her just as Grant's and both of us conspiring in creating a spectacle around her.

(For those who haven't seen it the story is Cary and Joan are lovers — copulation is obvious — and both are star reporters. They decide NOT to marry as not to "ruin things." He advances to control the paper (the story) and she becomes engaged to a book writer. The books in question are vapid "self-help" books that lack the vim of "real" stories. Grant, drunk and with the help of a gangster pal, conspires to give her firetrucks, policecars, ambulances, even a hearse, all responding to the house where she will wed. That's the present: life.)

Oh how I wish we had such power to pull from in film today! Where's the sex in story, the newsroom of today?

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

The romance of a pair of nearly-married prankster-loving reporters is disrupted, when one of them is promoted to editor and suffers a drastic personality change. Unfortunately, despite a winning cast, this earnest attempt at screwball comedy fails to gel. Rusty Fleming and Charlie Mason clown around and play jokes, but the results are often silly and unfunny. Singing childish songs with a band on the back of a truck, making wisecracks while someone is supposedly drowning, knocking out the pilot to fly a plane into a storm; all are desperate failed attempts to be amusing.

Based on a screenplay by Joseph Antony from a story by Paul Gallico. "Wedding Present" squanders a stellar cast of comic performers, who give their best with a incredulous lame script. Cary Grant is Charlie, the crazy newsman, who goofs off at city hall and misses the closing hour to get a marriage license; meanwhile, Joan Bennett as Rusty, Charlie's news partner and romantic partner, shows the strains of life with a wild and crazy guy. However, Rusty is tolerant until Charlie's promotion, when he abruptly becomes a tough, serious-minded taskmaster in the newsroom. Nothing is predictable as wanted gangsters, a self-help author, a sinking ship, a posse of incompetent office painters, a missing archduke, and a bunch of silly songs complicate matters. Sounds funny? Not really, the script is too disconnected and ridiculous to evoke more than an occasional smile

Grant outrageously mugs his way through much of the film; while he is in his "Cary Grant" handsome comic mode, this is no "Bringing Up Baby," and the material does not warrant his efforts. Lovely Joan Bennett under-plays her role, and she registers better with a sly and subtle delivery. Like the stars, the supporting cast of comic players deserves better material. George Bancroft as a news editor, Gene Lockhart as the archduke, William Demarest as a gangster named "Smiles," and Edward Brophy as Demarest's sidekick "Squinty," have their moments, but they have had better ones in better films. Although director Richard Wallace cut his teeth on silent comedy, he generally helmed "B" pictures, and his work on "Wedding Present" is middling at best. While the film is worth catching for the cast, all have done better work elsewhere, and, if viewers want to see a classic screwball comedy about reporters, "His Girl Friday" fills the bill.

Wedding Present was the second of two films Cary Grant co-starred with Joan Bennett and the last one of his original Paramount contract. He would not return to Paramount until 1955 when he did To Catch A Thief for Alfred Hitchcock.

Grant and Bennett play a couple of free spirits who happen to be reporters on a Chicago paper and while they get the stories, they are bad for discipline and the bane in the existence of their editor George Bancroft. In fact the couple almost get married as the film begins, but Grant's clowning around pushed the deadline past the official closing time and you know how officious some civil servants can be. They stay 'almost married' for most of the film.

But Grant gets promoted to city editor when a harried and harassed Bancroft quits and he turns into a hardnose. So much so that he fires Bennett when she tries to break up the city room. That leaves Grant disillusioned and he quits and follows Bennett to New York where she has now taken up with and is about to be married to stuffy Conrad Nagel, a fate worse than death in Cary's eyes.

Some have compared this film to His Girl Friday. But there is a vast difference, the humor in that classic derives from the fact that Grant in that film is all business and will do anything to keep Rosalind Russell on the job and on the story. In this one the good time is the virtue prized above all others.

Paramount gave Grant and Bennett a great supporting cast in this topped by William Demarest, a New York gangster who Grant saves from drowning in Lake Michigan. Demarest is looking to pay him back and in the end really does come through for him.

Screwball comedy fans will love the ending as an inebriated Grant and Demarest decide to give Bennett a Wedding Present. What they do is for the viewer to see, but I promise they pull all the stops out.

This was a good picture to leave Paramount with and enter into superstardom with the next set of roles Grant would have as a free lance artist.