La femme que j'aime

After his Oscar winning role in The Story Of Louis Pasteur, Paul Muni was given a World War I aviation story as a follow up. In The Woman I Love which was a phrase gaining popular currency at the time because of the Duke of Windsor, Paul Muni plays a flier in the French Army who's good at his job, but a rather stiff sort who's not real popular with his fellow fliers. Helping with his unpopularity is the fact that his observer/tailgunner has been killed on the last three missions.

So when newcomer Louis Hayward volunteers to team with Muni, his peers think him very brave and a bit nuts. But what neither knows is that Hayward before he joined the squadron met and fell for Miriam Hopkins who is Mrs. Muni who was stepping out on him, taking in a show at the Folies Bergere alone where she met Hayward.

In these films a wartime triangle you know they can only end with one of the men being killed. I'll let you see the film to find out which one.

Muni's home studio Warner Brothers lent him to RKO for this film. The year before they lent him to MGM for The Good Earth and that was a big hit. This one is considerably less in quality.

The best part of the film is the aerial dogfight toward the end of the film with Muni and Hayward taking on three German planes. Howard Hughes couldn't have staged it better. The romantic part of the film is all right, but we've had better war time romances. The Woman I Love is also the farewell film of Colin Clive who plays the French squadron commander in the best British stiff upper lip tradition. That isn't a crack, Clive does very well in the part and his men respect him a lot.

Although it gets a bit melodramatic in spots The Woman I Love should satisfy the fans of the principal players.

In The Woman I Love, Miriam Hopkins is torn between the charismatic soldier she meets by chance in a theater, and the steadfast love of her husband. Miriam meets Louis Hayward during an air raid, and they each get swept away by the romance and danger of the war. But, instead of telling him that she's married, or giving her real name when he asks, she lies and lets him believe she's a single woman.

Louis meets Paul Muni, a fellow flier, and they quickly become friends. No one else in the airforce really likes Paul, so he especially appreciates Louis's friendship. Have you guessed what will happen yet? If you haven't, I won't spoil it for you, even though the movie does tell you fairly early on.

If you like these types of tearjerker romances set among war-torn Europe, you'll like this one. It has all the elements in place, but I would have liked it better if the cast was reversed. I think Paul Muni is incredibly handsome, and I'll never understand why he wasn't cast as a romantic lead. The one movie I ever saw him in that could have been considered a romance turned into a crime drama halfway through. Paul is given plenty of scenes to make the audience feel sorry for him, which is probably the point of the story, and as much as I don't really like him, Louis does everything that's asked of him in the acting department. It's not his fault he's not as handsome as Paul Muni. Very few men are.

Miriam Hopkins isn't given much to do, besides act stupid and have bad judgement, but that's not too much of a detriment to the overall film. It's a romantic drama, so you can't expect everyone to be smart! For me, though, the best part of the movie was Adrian Morris. Not only did he look like John Candy, but he moved and sounded like him, too! It's as if John Candy used a time machine and made a movie in 1937, so if you're a fan of his, check out the first ten or fifteen minutes of this movie.

I remember seeing this when I was a kid. A lot of the aviation shots were really great. "Wings" was before my time, and Howard Hughes spent a ton of money on it, but this one has great impact. It's real hard to find now. What is the best way to locate 1937 films now? Are a lot of them, being on nitrate film, now completely lost? Where can one find a listing of films of this nature, not GREAT films but good ones? Would there be a source which would have a lot of these on DVD now? Many WWI aviation films, such as "Dawn Patrol" etc. were made with aircraft of that era, since it was only 20 years or so since the end of that war. Try to find Nieuports, Spads, etc. now! It's important for historical as well as artistic reasons to locate these films.