So Goes My Love

Myrna Loy and Don Ameche star in this excellent comedy/drama based on stories about real-life inventor Hiram Maxim's life. Episodic storyline has Loy leaving her rural pig farm and heading to the city to marry a rich man. Instead she meets and marries a poor would-be inventor and raises a family.

Loy looks great and is excellent as Jane. She gives a warm and funny performance. Ameche is also good as Maxim, the slightly off-center inventor who marches to his own drummer. His inventions are mentioned in passing but show that he becomes a famous and wealthy man. The real story of Maxim and his legal problems with women and many failed inventions is not told.

Bobby Driscoll gives a solid performance as son Percy (who would eventually write the stories the film is based on), a boy definitely in the mold of his father. Others in the cast are Molly Lamont as the cousin, Richard Gaines as blowhard Josephus, Rhys Williams as the artist, Sara Padden and Renie Riano as maids, and Howard Freeman as the committee chairman.

Excellent period production sets and costumes and two star performances make this one a unknown gem worth looking for.

Ameche and Loy are playing roles not unlike more brilliant performances in more brilliant movies during the 1940's. That doesn't make So Goes My Love any less enjoyable despite the unnecessarily esoteric title. A more appropriate title would have been The Unconventional Hiram Maxim - a British-born inventor who lived in Brooklyn and, according to this movie, was fond of eschewing dignity. Loy is as successful here in engaging her co-star in remarkable chemistry and holding her own on the comic front (her smoking of a cigar is hilarious) as she was to be in her upcoming masterpieces Life with Father and Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House. Ameche, fresh off Heaven Can Wait - one of my personal all-time favorites - and having perfected the inventor biopic in his essay of Alexander Graham Bell, is ideally cast as Maxim and has excellent chemistry with Loy. Add in highly competent support by Bobby Driscoll as Loy and Rhys WIlliams as an equally eccentric portrait painter and you have a highly amusing if episodic 80 minutes of entertainment.

Since I'm partial to almost any Myrna Loy film, I recorded "So Goes My Love" with the intention that I might watch the first 10 minutes and then hit delete. However, to my delight, this quirky comedy based on the early married life of Hiram Maxim (Don Ameche) turned out to be thoroughly enjoyable.

Loy and Ameche made a wonderful screen pair. Always elegantly coiffed and dressed, they are a very attractive couple with perfect chemistry. They both play the "straight man" which makes the humor very subtle and underplayed. It is the opposite of the screwball comedies that I so dearly love. Its quirkiness makes most every scene tongue in cheek funny more so than laugh out loud funny and it works well. I particularly enjoyed the casting of the extremely talented Loy and Ameche as well as a young Bobby Driscoll who plays their son, Percy, with such a natural talent that even he could underplay the humor appropriately.

The movie is actually based on the 1936 book by Percy called "A Genius in the Family." The book was a series of family anecdotes that Percy recounted from his early life. The plot is actually the tying of each anecdote together to make a precious story. There is little focus on what Hiram was inventing as that was not the point of the film since it is really more of a family film. Further reading (which I easily found on the Internet) is necessary if you really want to learn more of the actual Maxim family history. Meanwhile, if you want to relax and enjoy a cute film that was probably laced with lots of Hollywood glamour and fiction, then I recommend this enjoyable gem.

This subtle comedy, "So Goes My Love" from 1946 is based on a book by Hiram Percy Maxim, who is a character in the film, about his family.

Jane Budden (Myrna Loy) comes to the city from a farm life in order to find and marry a rich man. It doesn't quite work out that way. She marries her cousin's neighbor, Herman Maxim (Don Ameche), who is an inventor - of what, we don't know.

Jane is determined that Herman find success, and in fact, with her encouragement, he does. They also have a family.

That's really all there is to it, but the humor in the film is delightful from the cast, including Bobby Driscoll as Percy. Myrna Loy and Don Ameche both approach their roles seriously, which makes the humor even better.

This is a film Ameche made after his career with 20th Century Fox; Loy at the time was 41, an advanced age for a woman to play a leading lady who wasn't in a character role in those days.

Lovely film that will leave you with a smile on your face. Bobby Driscoll is a sad reminder that Hollywood can chew you up and spit you out. After all his success as a child actor, his body was found in an alley and he was buried as a homeless person. The real Hiram Percy Maxim fared better.

Not much of a plot after the marriage, more of a series of barely connected events in their home life. Much of the events centre around their son, Percy. They should have styled Loy's hair this way more often. She looks absolutely beautiful, as do her gowns. Would have been wonderful in colour. Don Ameche was no slouch in the looks department either. There is quite a bit of humour throughout the movie which holds up very well decades later. I laughed out loud at the rice throwing comment. Also the pull back while a jilted fiancé is giving a break -up speech. Contemporary humour in a movie set in the 19th century is rare. I actually wish they had made it a little longer as I really enjoyed watching Loy and Ameche together.