Veillée d'amour

I love Dunne and Boyer and think they are a good match. However, I am constantly amazed at how long Irene Dunne was able to get away with 20-something roles. She is 41 here, and looks it. She is playing a waitress with a roommate who is about to strike for better pay. Her character at most would be 25. Yet producers continued to give Dunne these types of roles even after this movie. I don't really get it. When Lana Turner was in her early 40s, she was playing mothers of teenagers in "Imitation of Life" and "Portrait in Black" and Mary Astor had moved to these roles by the time she was 38. I don't understand why they weren't moving Dunne to more motherly roles by this time; she certainly does not look or act like an ingenue.

This is a heart-rending story covered up in a romantic comedy of many wonderful and surprising turnings, and it is impossible to guess at the sad conclusion of this very entertaining and stimulating journey. It's a typical Irene Dunne film, it's like a twin shadow of "Love Affair" of the same year, but although this film is more hearty and gleeful in its romantic ways, it is more tragic than "Love Affair", which puts on a more sinister fateful aspect but nevertheless ends better. Here you are faced with a truly hopeless situation with no end to its abysmal tragedy, which no one can do anything about, and still Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne settle to make the best of it and hope for tomorrow anyway, and maybe, after all, it will come...

I stayed with this hoping for something and it delivered squat. I actually got hooked in the beginning which would have made a very good movie...when Dunne is essential in getting coworkers "the girls" to support a strike against her boss, never seen, of a chain of restaurants. The first part of the film sets up a smart, working women facing the exploitation of the bosses....and she is pursued by the union rep, a handsome man. Instead she becomes tied up in a subsequent dreary plot with Boyer. The first part of the film is charming and interesting and she's an arresting character. Even he is mildly interesting. The slice of 1939 life they partake of is very well played: going to the piers where people are cooling off pre AC, helping a kid who's skinned his knee, lost his pants held up by rope. He's pushing his friend in a go cart. After setting up an interesting film they are caught in a storm. Held up in a church. Which holds up the film. Even that is passably interesting. Finally, we meet Boyer's mad wife who isn't so addled when away from her mother and her minder. She wants her husband. And Dunne as a good woman in a 1939 movie, isn't going to fight her for him. This is all trite. Had it been a light, romantic comedy built around striking women it would have been a good film. A film about a strong, smart woman leading a strike. As it is...I guess this is what is called condescendingly "a woman's film" like today's "chick flicks" and it's a bore.

After Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne had been paired together in the fabulous Love Affair (1939), someone decided to pair them together again (that's the other film of theirs- Together Again (1944)), and this was the result.

It starts as a drama about women going on strike for unfair wages and there's a lot of time devoted to a working people's union, then Dunne meets Boyer and the next part of the film is devoted to their acquaintance, then there is a hurricane and they're forced to take refuge in a church, then there's drama involving Boyer, his unstable wife (gee, it's Barbara O'Neill! What a shocker! 😏) and his love with Dunne, but this being a Hollywood movie, the good couple wins- moralistically, of course. This was made under the production code, after all.

It's not that the film needed a couple of cuts- in fact, with all the plot changes, it should have been half an hour longer, or even two Dunne-Boyer films. It's that it jumps around too much and it's boring.

Dunne's working woman fair wages campaign is pretty much forgotten about after she falls in love with Boyer. Not enough time is given to Barbara O'Neill's character, other than to develop her as a crazy psycho b*tch, and remind us that O'Neill was so much more effective as Boyer's crazy psycho b*tch wife in All This, And Heaven Too (1940).

Dunne is no more or less annoying than usual- she sings a song while Boyer plays the piano, so her fans will like that. Me, I'm not overly fond of her singing, and so I just tuned out until she was done.

She and Boyer have chemistry that was just as good as what they had in Love Affair, and this film has a moralistic ending too, but what the ending of Love Affair is sweet and will bring a tear to your eye, the ending of this one is like "Well, now it's over and you can do something else now." The acting is pretty good, O'Neill is very over-the-top, but if you've seen AT,AHT, you know what to expect from her in a role like this.

Overall, not as good as Love Affair, but not quite as bad as Together Again. It won't kill you if yoy watch it, but it's disappointing.

Helen (Irene Dunne) is a waitress and Philip (Charles Boyer) is one of her customers. Soon, he seems infatuated with her and follows her about town...which is a tad creepy, actually. Eventually they fall in love but he has a secret...and she soon learns that he is married and his wife is mentally ill. What's next? Well, it's NOT a remake of "Jane Eyre", so although it's similar, there is a big twist!

The acting is the best part of this film. Dunne and Boyer were magnificent in "Love Affair" and here they are also excellent. However, the script, though interesting, is a tad disappointing...see it and you'll likely see what I mean. Still, it is interesting and worth your time.