Une femme de trop

Vivid fire scene

The story begins on an ocean liner. Jerry Marvin (Melvin Douglas) is completely drunk and falls overboard. He's rescued and the Drake family befriends him and tries to help dry him out and give him a sense of purpose. After all, Jerry had been a famous composer and his life fell apart when his wife left him. Perhaps, with some friendship he'll return to being a productive human being instead of a drunken wreck.

Over the course of their time together, Jerry finds his muse and is once back creating beautiful music. He also falls for Susan (Ruth Hussey) and wants to marry her. At about this time, Jerry's wife returns and it's obvious Babe (Ellen Drew) is only interested in him because of his recent success. But Jerry is firm and insists he WILL marry Susan. At that time, Babe fakes and injury and pretends to be paralyzed...forcing Jerry and his maid to take care of her. But Susan is not as stupid as Jerry and knows, sooner or later, that Babe will overplay her hand and folks will realize she's a fake.

This is a very unusual film because for once, Melvyn Douglas is a much more passive character in one of his films. He's cute as the drunk in the first third of the film but is uncharacteristically dim....and he usually is one of the more cynical sort of actors. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the women make up for his passivity. Overall, well worth seeing, though not among Douglas' best.

I almost stretched and gave "Our Wife" five stars, because I can't think of any film that Melvyn Douglas or Charles Coburn are in that doesn't rate that high. But, then, the screenplay for this story is so weak (just short of terrible), that one can't in honesty give it much credit. Douglas was in some great comedies and most were at least very good. But this film hardly deserves the label, comedy. Likewise for Coburn's film output in some smashing comedies.

This is not the first film with a plot that was different and might have been quite good, with a quality screenplay. I notice this problem especially with Columbia Pictures around this period - from late 1930s into early 1940s when that studio was a second-tier movie producer. The major area that Columbia Pictures seemed to suffer in was screenplays. It often got top actors from the Big 5 studios, and sometimes it had very good films. But more often, those films were little better than mediocre, and sometimes almost duds.

This film was panned by critics - again, mostly for the terrible script. It had only $1.3 million at the domestic box office - around 180th for the year, so it was a financial flop too.

Douglas gives it his best shot, and Ruth Hussey is good as Professor Susan Drake. But Charles Coburn's part as Professor Drake is barely noticeable, and Ellen Drew's Babe Marvin isn't much. It's too bad - the talent was here for a good film, but with a stinker of a script, even great actors can't save a film. Seeing a film like this, one wonders what the studio people were thinking (or drinking?) when they read the script and watched this film being made.

Even die-hard fans of Douglas will be sorely pressed to keep watching this film after just the first 20 minutes. With so little humor, I scratched to find a couple of decent lines.

Professor Drake, "Right this very night, I'm so proud of you. I'd like to wake Tom up and give him a good thrashing for not being another girl like you."

Professor Susan Drake, "This is just as big a job as smashing a few atoms. After all, we only pass through this life once and any little kindness we can leave along the way should be left along the way."

Professor Susan Drake (Ruth Hussey) is aboard a boat in the Caribbean along with her father, Professor Drake (Charles Coburn), and her brother Tom (John Hubbard). They go out on deck and hear somebody has jumped into the water in a suicide attempt. It turns out to be a famous bandleader who is drinking away his sorrows over his wife leaving him. This turns out to be Melvyn Douglas as Jerry Marvin, who gets to make quite the entrance wrapped in blankets and brought back aboard the ship.

Later in San Cristobal, the Drakes see Jerry wandering around, drunk. The car taking passengers back to the boat is about to depart, and soon thereafter the boat. They grab a very inebriated Jerry and push him into the car. Later, when all are back aboard the boat, the discover that Jerry meant to stay in San Cristobal - He had a job there, all of his luggage is there, and since he had checked out of his cabin, his cabin is gone. Sure, Jerry's drunken state had the Drakes thinking he was going to miss the boat by accident, but they are at fault too. They try to make amends by having him stay in one of their state rooms while Tom and his dad double up. They pay for him to have additional clothes, and they pay for his airfare back to San Cristobal at the next port of call.

Jerry is awful to the Drakes about them butting in for awhile, but Susan's sassiness wins him over. He gives them access to his country house in New York while they will be working there, and then he shows up there unexpectedly. Jerry sobers up, writes a symphony and performs it, and asks Susan to marry him.

But then SHE reappears - his not quite ex wife Babe. She appears at the New York house to say hello to Jerry, winds up having a tumble down the stairs, and according to the doctors is paralyzed from shock, and is a now maybe permanent guest in Jerry's home.. Susan believes Babe can walk based on objects that were out of reach that she later saw Babe using, but nobody has actually seen her walking, and if Susan says anything to Jerry she figures it could backfire. So Susan wants to prove Babe can walk and let the proof do the talking. How will this turn out? Watch and find out.

Melvyn Douglas wouldn't be funny unless he is dishing some of the sass, but here he plays a rather guileless person compared to his other roles, just accepting his ex wife at face value. It is Hussey who is playing the kind of role that he often did, suspicious of the facts as presented. As usual, a little Charles Coburn goes a long way. With an unusual combination of plot devices and characters - Douglas as a bandleader who writes a symphony, the idea of a family of globetrotting college professors, and even Warm Springs, Georgia entering the conversation, this low key comedy is worth your time.

Melvyn Douglas, talented trumpeter, stumbles drunkenly into somewhat stuck-up professor Ruth Hussey's life. She gets Douglas to complete his concerto and clean himself up, but what will she do when estranged wife Ellen Drew returns to the scene, and becomes OUR WIFE?

A lot of pictures made around 1940 -- after the screwball comedy had exhausted itself -- are billed as comedies, but do not seem intended to be terribly funny. This one, made by John M. Stahl, (best known for Leave Her to Heaven and a couple of sudsers remade by Douglas Sirk), has a script that might have one time been a howler, but, by the time Stahl is done with it, plays as a somewhat daft woman's picture with occasional "hilarious" drunk moments. The result, while interesting, is somewhat off, mostly because it takes half the picture to develop the dramatic situation that is the meat of the show, and because said dramatic situation resolves itself way too easily at the end.

But this picture does deserve to be seen. Stahl's very smooth style, frighteningly dispassionate style is distinctive, allows the actors a lot of space, and derives its tension from the acting, rather than flashy camera work or lighting. And the character played by Ruth Hussey is an interesting variant on the spinster professor, and is really humanized by the way Hussey portrays her. Also, a key moment from Leave Her To Heaven is actually foreshadowed in this film (and shot in rather the same way).

If they had only done away with the har de har har drunk moments and the last minute or so, which totally disrupts the movie's tone...

...or, rather, The Wife Who Came to Reclaim Her Husband. "Our Wife" was released in 1941 and stars Melvyn Douglas, Ruth Hussey, Ellen Drew, and Charles Coburn. Douglas plays a composer, Jerry Marvin, who meets Susan Drake (Hussey) while she's on a ship with her father (Coburn) and brother Tom (John Hubbard). Finding Jerry drunk during one of the tourist stops and seeing him heading away from the boat, Susan and her family escort him back to the ship. However, someone has taken his cabin, and they find out it's because he was supposed to have disembarked. And, since all the cabins are taken, they're stuck with him. Despite his anger -- he was en route to a job -- they all become great friends.

Jerry turns his house in Westchester over to the family for the summer, but when he gets to his job, he finds out it's not what he wants, and he returns home to do some composing. But he wants the family to continue staying in the house. By then, he and Susan have fallen for one another.

Then Jerry's wife Babe (Drew), from whom his divorce becomes final in three months, shows up. Partly to get rid of her and partly because he's in love with Susan, he introduces Susan as his fiancé. Babe promptly manages to slip on the stairs and claims she can't walk. And it could take months for her to recover. Maybe a trip with Jerry to Hot Springs, Georgia will help her. Susan, meanwhile, is positive that Babe is faking and is determined to prove it. She soon learns that she will need to have the wiles of a snake in order to do it.

Directed by John Stahl, this is an amusing comedy rather than a hilarious one. The performances really make it, with the always relaxed and charming Douglas, the beautiful Drew, and the dry-witted Hussey all turning in very good performances. Charles Coburn is great as Susan and Tom's father.

I could have really done without the very end of the film, which seemed very silly. Otherwise, it was pleasant and well done for what it was. But it could have been a lot more.