Te quiero otra vez

When the movie going public demands you back 14 times you know that something is being done right by both the studio and the players involved.

William Powell and Myrna Loy hit a real career high point in this film with a rather original plot gimmick. The amnesia gimmick is stood on its head in this film.

Powell and Loy are married and he's on a business trip involving an ocean voyage. Powell is something of a stuffed shirt when we meet him on the ship. When a drunken Frank McHugh falls overboard, Powell dives in to rescue him and in the process gets himself knocked out.

When he comes to, like in Random Harvest, he discovers his former identity which is that of a confidence man and as it turns out McHugh also is a full time grifter.

Unlike Ronald Colman who spent the whole of Random Harvest searching for his lost years, Powell has his identity there. Returning to his town with his new found friend McHugh, he finds wife Loy together with the fact he's a person of some means. But he also finds out that Loy was planning to get rid of him.

Powell together with McHugh and former associate Edmund Lowe try to work an elaborate con game on the town. At the same time Powell is falling for the woman he married and embarks on a campaign to win her back. Those two agenda items come into conflict.

Bill and Myrna are at their best in I Love You Again. Two highlight scenes for me are Powell's cooing courtship of Loy and his trip through the woods in his Boy Ranger uniform with his Boy Ranger troop. This must have been the same outfit that Jimmy Stewart was trying to get a summer camp for in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The goings on are similar to what Powell went through fishing in Libeled Lady.

I Love You Again is movie comedy at its very best. Don't miss it if TCM runs it again.

William Powell plays both George Carey and Larry Wilson, and Myrna Loy is his wife Kay in this wonderful, deft, entertaining screwball comedy directed by Woody Van Dyke III...."Hey, this is kinda funny. We're not talking about you but a lug named Wilson, and you're both fellas." The words are those of Doc Ryan, George Carey's pal. George, you see, has had amnesia for nine years, and during that time he became Larry Wilson, a pompous businessman....Enter Larry's charming wife Kay. George learns that Kay is eager to divorce Larry because of his miserable, suffocatingly materialistic ways; and when meets Kay, whom he has forgotten, he falls for her and sets out to reclaim her love....The film's defining moment surprises us with its tenderness. Standing in contrast to the film's madcap goings-on, it takes place when George escorts Kay, who thinks he's Larry, to the spot where years before he proposed to her as Larry. The scene precisely captures the distinctive and wonderful chemistry between Powell and Loy, who went on to make ten more pictures together....Like his two most famous characters (Godfrey of MY MAN GODFREY and Nick Charles of THE THIN MAN), Powell's George Carey emerges as a humane individual with the common touch. In fact, he becomes a hero, saving the townsfolk of quaint Haversville from a criminal scam perpetuated by a big city gangster named Duke Sheldon.

It's 1940 on a trans-Atlantic ship. Stodgy cheapskate businessman Larry Wilson (William Powell) falls off the boat while trying to rescue drunken Doc Ryan (Frank McHugh) going overboard. He wakes up and remembers only up to 1931. He's actually a con man named George Carey. Arriving in New York, he's met by his wife Kay (Myrna Loy) who wants a divorce to marry another man. He sees an opportunity to steal with his new found con partner Doc pretending to be his real doctor. Most of the money turns out to be locked away in a community chest account.

The pairing of Powell and Loy strikes again. Their chemistry is as good as ever despite the change in premise. The quirky premise has loads of fun. It does get a bit muddy. It needs a flashback scene in 1931 when he first transformed. Overall, this is a good piece of screwball comedy. It would be nice to have a bit more physical farce to match the premise.

Seems to me that in the course of his career, WILLIAM POWELL has been in many a movie as an amnesia victim--but here, it's strictly for laughs. He and Myrna Loy (at her most attractive) are paired again as a romantic couple with their usual share of misunderstandings and shenanigans. It has the flavor of a Nick and Nora flick--without Astor.

The story is a series of misunderstandings and comic situations all set up by the fact that Powell is struggling to remember who he was--and meanwhile rediscovers his wife and loves her very much even though she is threatening to leave him. None of it makes much sense and all of it is played strictly for laughs and romantic charm.

Working with very thin material, Loy and Powell do it again. Proof that their box-office chemistry was no fluke. If you enjoy this one, try LOVE CRAZY with an even crazier approach to the amnesia angle and even more amusing.

I wonder if this might be the great granddaddy of all amnesia films. If it's not, it's sure one of the first and has inspired countless sitcom episodes. William Powell is bonked on the head and suddenly he's a completely different person--one who apparently disappeared nine years earlier. Who he was during the last nine years is uncertain, but what IS certain is that the new personality is a crook. When this shady guy figures out that during the last nine years he's become a pillar of the community and has access to gobs of other peoples' money, he wants to steal everything he can and run. The problem is, he discovers he has a wife (Loy) and can't bring himself to leave--even when he finds out she hates him. Well, much of the movie is spent trying to win her back, though he still wonders whether or not to rob his "friends". What he does and how the entire mess is resolved is brilliant and a lot of fun. This isn't wacky fun like his other film, LOVE CRAZY, but is a little more sophisticated and deliberately paced. A wonderful old film with excellent acting, writing (aside from the dumb plot device) and direction. One of Powell's and Loy's best.