Once Upon a Honeymoon

**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and Katie come up with the idea of having her declared a fatality of war which in return has her marriage to the Baron no longer valid.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".

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.

I'm amazed at the bad reception that Once Upon a Honeymoon got from other reviewers here. It's not the greatest film from either the stars or the director, but far from the worst. See Satan Never Sleeps or My Son John for Leo McCarey's worst. And it's one of Walter Slezak's best roles.

Slezak plays the fictional Baron Von Luber who like the Fuehrer was Austrian born and played a big hand in the Anschluss. After that he became a Nazi ambassador of good will. But in his wake countries seem to fall to the Germans after every one of his missions. He's a rising star in the Nazi movement.

He's also married a show business American wife in the person of Ginger Rogers. That and his activities arouse the curiosity of editor Harry Shannon and commentator Cary Grant.

Once Upon a Honeymoon is very similar to that other Cary Grant film from Alfred Hitchcock, Notorious. Of course the Hitchcock film has Grant as an FBI agent who gets Ingrid Bergman to marry Claude Rains to spy on his postwar activities in a country with no extradition. Rains actually becomes an object of some audience sympathy even as a Nazi, but Slezak never does.

In fact his role is similar to that other exhibit of the master race found in that other Hitchcock film, Lifeboat. But he's gotten in a way that the gauleiter of the lifeboat never is. Cary Grant damns him with faint praise and a shrewd use of reverse psychology on the Nazi mind. Slezak's reactions to Grant's broadcast are worth seeing the film alone.

Leo McCarey makes some very serious points about the Nazis mixed in with the humor. When Grant and Rogers are caught when they think they're Jewish, it's a very harrowing predicament indeed until they are providentially rescued.

Once Upon A Honeymoon though firmly dated to World War II, holds up very well in the laugh and propaganda departments both.

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.

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.