The Matrimonial Bed

The complications in this plot are myriad. This was a very funny movie. The plot was truly improbable. It probably started as a French stage play. The ending was the only real way out for Fay and I suppose was inevitable. The relationship complications were remarkable and are what made this flick memorable.

Five years before this movie started, Florence Eldridge's husband died in a train crash. Or so everyone thinks. She has subsequently married James Gleason and born a son. Now a hairdresser shows up in the shape of Frank Fay. He looks exactly like Miss Eldridge's husband, and some hypnosis by family friend and physician Arthur Edmund Carewe restore his memories, but obliterates those of the last five years.

It's a rather stagey production, not requiring more than one set, with everyone thoroughly civilized, perhaps a bit to much for the rather confused and headache-inducing situation. Fay, as the center of the tsimmis, is too mild throughout. Perhaps this sort of well-mannered farce played well in Paris, but the translation by Seymour Hicks (and which he starred in in London) ran only 17 performances. Still, the large and rather distinguished cast in support offers a great deal of interest. They include players like Lilyan Tashman, Beryl Mercer, Vivien Oakland, and Flora Finch. While it's amusing, it's more indicative of the tough transition from silent movies to sound movies than anything else.

This stagey adaptation of a French play is fairly creaky but still provides the occasional chuckle as Frank Fay essays a double role as a husband missing with amnesia for five years. When he turns up on his 'widow's' doorstep one day as a trendy hairdresser, complications ensue. Harvey Thew's screenplay has a decent number of double entendres but is surprisingly restrained with the homoerotic subtext--especially when Fay is discovered in bed with James Gleason! Nicely though somewhat statically directed by Michael Curtiz, The Matrimonial Bed also features some nifty set design and a few memorable shots in silhouette.

Juliet Corton (Florence Eldridge) had remarried to Gustave Corton (James Gleason) after her previous husband was assumed killed in a railway crash five years earlier. She is shocked with her new hairdresser Leopold Trebel (Frank Fay) who looks exactly like her late husband. He doesn't remember anything before five years ago after a train accident and has married Sylvaine (Lilyan Tashman) since then.

Frank Fay is playing the character as an effeminate gay. The joke is that he refuses to accept it and doesn't remember himself. The movie keeps making suggestive allusions. It's tricky. I'm not laughing at the gay jokes or the general premise. I'm sure that it's funny to some people. This is pre-Code and based on a French play. It's a gay farce and I'm not sure if it's funny.

(I couldn't keep watching past about half-way, so take this with a gram of salt.)

This piece of fluff is obviously based on a stage play, and perhaps it suffers most from the lack of a live audience.

The other reasons it seems decidedly lacking in humor are probably:

• 95 years of cultural change
• difficulty connecting with the upper-class
• the idiotic drawing room comedy contrivances*
• all characters are 1-dimensional stock characters

So, while it's interesting to see what a presumably popular stage play was like a century ago (and realize that some current ones are no cleverer), I cannot recommend it as entertainment.

* Besides every character being completely unable to read any other character, the whole "Finding out the truth suddenly will kill him so let's put him in a situation with multiple characters who will obviously do that" is just lazy writing.