Made for Each Other

NY lawyer John Mason (James Stewart) is newly married to Jane (Carole Lombard) despite the disapproval of his mother. They are supposed to take a honeymoon cruise to Europe but his nearly-deaf boss Judge Doolittle implies taking a big case away from him. Doolittle promotes co-worker Carter as partner over him. The couple has a boy and they struggle to make ends meet.

The pairing of Stewart and Lombard is very promising. In the end, this lacks a structure for the drama. It's more like a run-on sentence of a family drama. It also doesn't help to be missing the courtship. It needs a meet-cute and a good relationship progression. It feels like a laundry list of melodramas rather than a good flowing plot. Their difficult marriage leaves any chemistry with the leads in a precarious position. At its core, I find it hard to feel the love sometimes. Their individual screen presence is undeniable but this movie fails to capitalize on them.

I am a huge fan of both Jimmy Stewart and Carole Lombard. However, attempting to get through a viewing of "Made for Each Other" made me cringe. The dialogue was superficial, the characters lifeless, and the situations drab and depressing. It seemed that the movie was going for a realistic portrayal of a couple in their first years of matrimony, but it failed miserably in this attempt. Although Stewart and Lombard are both talented actors, at no point during the picture did I ever really *CARE* about what happened to John and Jane Mason. Not only was the script flat and uninventive, but it never really showed what would make the couple fall in love in the first place. Furthermore, the "dramatic" turn of events toward the end of the movie were so cliched, they would easily lend themselves toward derisive laughter rather than tears. Frankly, this wouldn't even make a good "movie of the week."

"Made for Each Other" is a drama about newlyweds roughing it out with some tough times. Even with stars James Stewart and Carole Lombard and a top supporting cast, this one bombed at the box office. It was a risk that David Selznick took that didn't work. Making serious family and love films about people having serious problems wasn't a wise thing to do during the Great Depression. Even though the country was pulling out of it with help from some of the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the world economy was still shaky and threats of war in Europe bode of more tough times ahead.

Perhaps a better screenplay and/or some changes in the story would have helped this film. It had the cast, but the characters, roles and script just didn't seem to settle right with the audiences of the day. And, one can say the same thing viewing it decades later and well into the 21st century. This wouldn't be considered a plus in either repertoire of Lombard or Stewart.

Louise Beavers stands out in her fine supporting role as the Mason's cook, Lily. Her couple of wise remarks about life are little touches of humor and warmth.

This is really three stories in one about the same couple - and none of them would be really worth seeing if not enacted by Stewart and Lombard.

The first part is by far the best. It is a light-hearted comedy, in the screwball style, about a generally not self-assured young lawyer who for once has taken an impulsive decision, marrying a girl on a chance meeting as a result of love at first sight, putting himself at odds with the two persons he is in awe of and mostly dominated by - his deaf Scrooge of a boss, and his possessive mother. This is quite funny, especially the scene of breaking the news to the mother/mother-in-law.

Then things become fairly humdrum and boring with the second part. The lawyer does not get the promotion he deserved and expected, the young couple has a baby, and they start facing money problems. Baby scenes are a string of moderately amusing cliches, which are absolutely useless to the story. Money problems are trivial, and it takes James Stewart awkwardness to provide some fun when he tries to get a raise from his literally but potentially intentionally deaf boss - Charles Coburn not in one of his most memorable compositions. All of this part of the film spills the beans about what its problem really is - basically it has very little to tell, therefore it fills the void with everything which passes at hand.

And everything in the third part becomes an old plot trick of screenwriters with a shortage of inspiration - a severe, potentially fatal illness of one of the characters, in that case the baby in order to create drama where really there should have been none. Brutally the film turns to crude melodrama and the artificial suspense, extensively dilated, of a serum to be brought by an heroic pilot. Well, well - not telling whether the baby is saved, the film is most certainly not.

Carole Lombard and James Stewart are the only good reason, if any, to watch this mishmash. Stewart is mostly his usual funny and touching self, playing a well-meaning but not always well-inspired character who tries, through necessity, to become the hard-edged breadwinner whom he is not naturally. Lombard's role on the contrary evolves farther and farther away from her usual parts while the film shifts from one storyline to the other. Fresh-faced and fresh-tongued as the bride from nowhere, she adjusts less well, like her character, to the boring life of a housewife with domestic problems - hard to blame her not to put her heart fully in it when viewers are quite bored themselves. Then and finally, melodrama - not an usual or natural genre for her, but she more than deftly adjusts. Moreover, some shots of her face in grief and anxiety, unusually strained but as beautiful as always if not more, "Garbo shots", deepen our regrets of her tragically shortened life and career. Sooner or later it would probably have been discovered that beyond her innate talent for comedy, she could play with equal ease and natural much more dramatic roles. Alas, occasions including this botched one have been very limited.

Lombard was tired of doing screwball comedies, and still had her eye on the Selznick ultimate prize, Scarlett O'Hara - but she had to prove she could handle dramatic parts, to herself and to the public. This film is low-key, charming in its own way, but rather schizophrenic in plot. James Stewart is a convincingly earnest young husband and fledgling attorney who meets and marries the Lombard character in a whirlwind romance, before the couple comes crashing back to earth with a loud thud. Baby soon makes three, and Mother-in-Law makes an uncomfortable four -- in a tiny apartment, with an even tinier household budget.

The plot peculiarities begin on a New Year's Eve -- although in the midst of a huge party, Jane and Johnny don't feel much like celebrating. They argue all the time, and can't really remember what they loved about each other to begin with. Then their baby gets desperately ill, and the plot appears to belong in a different movie. After some pretty dramatic twists, the movie returns to its original focus and becomes relatively normal again.

All in all, a fairly entertaining domestic soaper, until the Plot Twist from Mars rears its alien head. You'll be making faces at the screen, saying to yourself, "Hunhhhh?????"