The Matrimonial Bed

This stagey adaptation of a French play is fairly creaky but still provides the occasional chuckle as Frank Fay essays a double role as a husband missing with amnesia for five years. When he turns up on his 'widow's' doorstep one day as a trendy hairdresser, complications ensue. Harvey Thew's screenplay has a decent number of double entendres but is surprisingly restrained with the homoerotic subtext--especially when Fay is discovered in bed with James Gleason! Nicely though somewhat statically directed by Michael Curtiz, The Matrimonial Bed also features some nifty set design and a few memorable shots in silhouette.

Juliet Corton (Florence Eldridge) had remarried to Gustave Corton (James Gleason) after her previous husband was assumed killed in a railway crash five years earlier. She is shocked with her new hairdresser Leopold Trebel (Frank Fay) who looks exactly like her late husband. He doesn't remember anything before five years ago after a train accident and has married Sylvaine (Lilyan Tashman) since then.

Frank Fay is playing the character as an effeminate gay. The joke is that he refuses to accept it and doesn't remember himself. The movie keeps making suggestive allusions. It's tricky. I'm not laughing at the gay jokes or the general premise. I'm sure that it's funny to some people. This is pre-Code and based on a French play. It's a gay farce and I'm not sure if it's funny.

(I couldn't keep watching past about half-way, so take this with a gram of salt.)

This piece of fluff is obviously based on a stage play, and perhaps it suffers most from the lack of a live audience.

The other reasons it seems decidedly lacking in humor are probably:

• 95 years of cultural change
• difficulty connecting with the upper-class
• the idiotic drawing room comedy contrivances*
• all characters are 1-dimensional stock characters

So, while it's interesting to see what a presumably popular stage play was like a century ago (and realize that some current ones are no cleverer), I cannot recommend it as entertainment.

* Besides every character being completely unable to read any other character, the whole "Finding out the truth suddenly will kill him so let's put him in a situation with multiple characters who will obviously do that" is just lazy writing.

Five years before this movie started, Florence Eldridge's husband died in a train crash. Or so everyone thinks. She has subsequently married James Gleason and born a son. Now a hairdresser shows up in the shape of Frank Fay. He looks exactly like Miss Eldridge's husband, and some hypnosis by family friend and physician Arthur Edmund Carewe restore his memories, but obliterates those of the last five years.

It's a rather stagey production, not requiring more than one set, with everyone thoroughly civilized, perhaps a bit to much for the rather confused and headache-inducing situation. Fay, as the center of the tsimmis, is too mild throughout. Perhaps this sort of well-mannered farce played well in Paris, but the translation by Seymour Hicks (and which he starred in in London) ran only 17 performances. Still, the large and rather distinguished cast in support offers a great deal of interest. They include players like Lilyan Tashman, Beryl Mercer, Vivien Oakland, and Flora Finch. While it's amusing, it's more indicative of the tough transition from silent movies to sound movies than anything else.

Everyone else commenting on this film prior to myself did so between Dec 30, 2003 and early January 2004. That would lead me to believe that everybody saw it on TCM during that timeframe - and not before and not since. That's a shame, since it is a very unusual and unique precode. So, when WHV says there is no real demand for many of their precodes on DVD they should remember that it might be because few people have ever seen them.

This film is a French farce, but the pace and dialogue are very characteristically pre-code Warner Bros. Leading man Frank Fay is unremembered today, and he had a meteoric rise to fame courtesy Warner Bros. and matching meteoric fall courtesy the public's response to his films. Watching him today I just think he was given the wrong kind of roles. I think he pulled the part off of the amnesiac hairdresser very convincingly with just the right balance of comedy and pathos. It is quite touching when he realizes that he has been considered dead for five years and that his wife is lost to someone else whom he strongly dislikes and he sings "their song" to her just once more in an attempt to woo her back. However, Mr. Fay was not a dashingly handsome man, and I think the fault lies at the feet of the Warners for trying to turn him into a musical comedy version of Clark Gable. The absolutely most tiresome part of this film is all of the women in the film who knew Fay's character before his "death" in the train wreck declaring "What a man! What a man!" whenever they look at his portrait. There are title cards at various points in the film declaring the exact same thing just in case the audience forgets what a desirable hunk of man Fay is supposed to be.

Lilyan Tashman lends strong support as the first wife's current best friend and also as the lover of Trebel (Fay) the hairdresser, not knowing he has a previous identity. The catty rivalry between Tashman and the wife's maid (Marion Byron) is priceless pre-code stuff if only we could forget who they are fighting over (Fay) - it is too much of a suspense of belief. James Gleason still has some color in his hair as he plays the second husband of Trebel/Noblet's first wife, one who greatly resents all of the "What a man!" comments. Here he shows what made him one of the great character actors of the 30's and 40's.

P.S. did anyone else notice that when Fay and Gleason finally have a showdown and strip down to their underwear to duke it out that they are wearing exactly the same underwear?? It is as strange as the elephant with the question mark painted on it in "Manhattan Parade", another Warner Bros. precode that has had only a few airings on TCM as far as I know.