Once Upon a Honeymoon

Comedy? I don't think so. Even Grant's charms can't save this one. A comedy set in Europe during WWII isn't impossible (see To Be Or Not To Be, also from 1942). But this one includes scenes with Hitler, and jokes about Nazis, not very funny I may add. The story is too ludicrous, the so-called jokes terrible. Whoever liked the movie should check is head. The ending is SO-Stupid! And what honeymoon? Forget it. Even worse than Penny Serenade. Beware. Read a book, eat, do something, anything else.

This comedy is good and at the same time shows the situation in Europe when the nazis were invading step by step each country of central and east Europe. The story is refreshing although it touches a very delicate issue, which affected millions of people in Europe in early 40s. Cary Grant was able to play a good role as a journalist, who is very well informed of the problems caused by nazis and the ways the latter used for invasion. Splendid Ginger Rogers also did very well, and no less important was Walter Slezak playing well the role of the nazi officer Baron Von Luber. In the film there is some thrill, romance and comic scenes, in conclusion Leo McCarey directed a good comedy once again.

Leo McCarey helms this 1942 lark, whose moods and genre conventions---saccharine romance, espionage adventure, screwball farce and war-time propaganda---swing to and fro so regularly that it's difficult to be bored even when the tipping scales of narrative contrivance become somewhat stressful at times. It's soapboxy-er than its early blitheness suggests, and at one point, the customary lead comic duo is mistaken for Jews and have a close shave with quite a grim fate. At times, because of the nonsensicality of the wildly contrived plot, the brashness of swastika hands on clocks and downer developments initially feel mislaid before they're consistently salvaged by a highly competent group of surprisingly naturalistic and genuinely funny performers, but meets its challenges admirably when it matters.

Vienna, 1938. Ginger Rogers plays Katie O'Hara, a Brooklyn dancer who's flown off to marry the rich and high-ranking Austrian Baron Von Luber, a Nazi VIP on the sly, for status and prosperity. Chin dimple extraordinaire Cary Grant plays hyper-transatlantic correspondent Pat O'Toole, who receives a job as a radio commentator to obtain a rare interview with the impending baroness to expose the Baron as a Nazi undercover. The Baron is played by Walter Slezak, that indelible character actor who managed to get pigeonholed as cunning Nazis. You may recognize him from Hitchcock's Lifeboat. Pat's not deterred by Katie's unwillingness to be questioned, and manages to meet her posing as a tailor.

Obviously, the reporter becomes smitten with Katie and frantically attempts to disabuse her regarding her fiancée. A turning point slams into this happy-go-lucky buffoonery when Hitler takes Austria, and Katie begins to learn the truth about her new husband's dealings. The two brash Yankees team up and go on the lam through Norway, Holland and Belgium before sudden sabotage missions are sprung on them and create grave dramatic tension. "This is the sort of thing that can make a man a Republican!" he huffs.

I had my doubts about Ginger Rogers. Not having seen many of her best known films such as those with Fred Astaire, I thought she may prove yet another example of how incomparable Irene Dunne was alongside Archie boy. About forty minutes into Once Upon a Honeymoon, I was firmly disabused of my presumptions. She has an inborn knack for being natural in a way that even transcends the stagy tenets of the Golden Age, saying a lot without saying much, and saying something different with her face than what she's saying with her mouth. I can't say this excuses the inanity of Archie earlier on managing to trick her so effortlessly into thinking straight vodka is a glass of water, but overall, she's not an uncomplicated Dumb Blonde Type present only to hang off Cary Grant's shoulder. McCarey takes the time to photograph her surprisingly emotive disillusionment about the state of affairs around her.

I'm frankly willing to forego any criticisms or dismissals of any moments that border on cornball or lugubrious purely for reward of the scene where O'Toole and Von Luber finally happen upon one another and have a man-to-man sit-down. It's one of those delicately cool scenes where two characters hold their cards firmly against their vests, but say just enough and share just enough sidelong glances to be satisfied of the other's hand. It's an exciting scene that raises the stakes and ratchets up the tension in a subdued, completely unexpected way. In fact, McCarey and his cast are so graceful that it only falls apart when it finally reaches the bungled ending, which I suppose is what happens when you try to balance propaganda and slick storytelling. Regardless, though quite the opposite of cynical or acerbic, it has a streak of the spunk and cunning of a Billy Wilder film, or the "shpontanuity," as one of the Baron's comrades suggests.

**SPOILERS** Combination 1930's screwball comedy and WWII Hollywood propaganda movie that has the Nazi's looking so ridicules even when their taking over all of Western Europe that you don't know if you should either laugh or cry as your watching it. Brooklyn showgirl and gold-digger Katie O'Hara, Ginger Rogers, has traveled to Vienna Austria to strike it big by lassoing in a rich Austrian baron. Katie hit's the bullseye with chubby but rich and well bred Baron Von Luber, Walter Slezak.

While Katie is planning to get married to the Baron American reporter Pat O'Toole, Cary Grant,is trying to get the big story, Brooklyn girl marries rich European Aristocrat, impersonates Katies tailor only to have the real one show up, after Pat took Katie's measurements, thus making a quick withdrawal from Katie's bedroom. It's at that moment that the Nazi's enter Vienna incorporating Austria into the German Reich.

Pat smitten by Katie and ignoring her soon to be husband starts to follow her and the Baron to Prague Czechoslovakia. Just then just like in Vienna the Nazi's suddenly march into town with their Fuhrer Adolph Hitler leading the parade. We see the big man himself, Adolph Hitler, all five foot eight inches of him in newsreels and being played actor Carl Ekberg throughout the film.

It's not until the Baron travels together with Katie and Pat tagging along to Warsaw Poland that we get an inkling of just what he's all about. It turns out that the Baron is the advance man for Hitler's vaunted Whermacht and Luftwaffe. In that he softens up every country that he stays in making them easy for the German Military to invade and take over. In Poland just before the German invasion the Baron sells the Polish military commander General Boneiski, Albert Bassermann, a load of new and state of the art automatic weapons only to later find out that they don't work. Making it a piece of cake for the Whermacht to overrun the Poles and capture Warsaw.

It's during the bombardment of Warsaw that both Pat and Katie come up with the idea of having her declared a fatality of war which in return has her marriage to the Baron no longer valid. This, lucky guy, has handsome and debonair Pat O'Toole, well really Cary Grant, get a crack at Katie as her new and fellow American husband.

The film starts to get serious when after both Pat and Katie run into the Baron in Paris France, another country that the Baron helped his Fuhrer Hitler to take over, this after spending some time in a German concentration camp on the suspicion of them both being Jewish. Katie switched her US passport with her Jewish maid so she and her two young children can get out of Nazi occupied Europe.

Pat cooks up a scheme to get a job as a broadcaster for the German propaganda ministry, this is in 1940 before the US was at war with Nazi Germany, to give him and Katie, whom the Baron had since lost interest in,time to get new passports and get the first boat out of Nazi occupied France and back to the USA. Pat now really getting under the Baron's skin in his first and only broadcast to America.Pat's on the air hysterics almost has the over-sized and arrogant jerk shot and killed by the Gestapo by him announcing that the loyal and obedient Baron is planning to overthrow the Fuhrer, Hitler, himself and take over the government! All in jest of course. The real kicker in Pat's hilarious broadcast is revealing, again all in jest of course, that the pure blooded Aryan Baron Von Luber is actually married to a Brooklyn Jewish woman! The identity that Katie has on her passport that she switched with her Jewish maid. That had the big and sputtering Nazi buffoon almost burst one of his pure blooded Aryan blood vessels!

The Baron now back in the good graces of the Fuhrer, whom he was accused by Pat of trying to do in, is given a chance to redeem himself by traveling on an ocean-liner to America and do his thing undermined the country and set up the land of the free and home of the brave for the next Nazi conquest. It's then when he runs into his ex-wife,the Fuhrer had annulled his marriage, Katie on deck and the rest of the movie, as well as the Baron himself, is soon to become history.

You don't know how to take this movie since it's about a very serious subject, WW II, but at the same time it doesn't seem to take itself seriously at all. It's as if the film is a precursor to movies and TV shows of post-World War Two goofy and bumbling Nazi's like in the movie "The Producers" and the 1960's TV comedy "Hogan's Heroes".

When Leo McCarey made this film, America was only a number of months into WWII. The events leading up to the start of the war (at least in Europe) were known to some, with most of America still getting their news from the newsreels at the theater or radio. This film is a great way for people to learn about how the opening of WWII began, especially now where some schools are limited in their ability to cover the events. Two "average Americans" moving about Europe, sometimes steps ahead (or behind as in the Polish through Low Countries scenes) of the events which changed Europe. The time in the Polish Ghetto, as well as in Paris, allow for the audience to get to know the characters, without having to gather the facts as the story goes along. Just as National Treasure teaches about American History while entertaining, this movie belongs in the same group, as it tells a "You Are There" version of 1939-40 European History.