The Constant Husband

This is certainly a film to savor for marvelous performances and the style of an almost fine film maker as he slowly peels back the layers of the onion skin of a story with the audience struggling right along with the lead (the always charming Rex Harrison) to find out who and what he is after he comes to in a seaside Welsh hotel with no memory of either.

Unfortunately, the original ad campaign seriously undercut the chief interest in the film as a light hearted mystery, trying to lure audiences with a presumably "racy" tag line about the "Intimate revelations" of Rex's character who "went one better than Henry VIII" (all told in "Blushing Technicolor")! Tack that onto a plot which, once the past nature of Rex's character was revealed, had no where to go even with a courtroom full of women still anxious to throw themselves at him, and you can readily understand THE CONSTANT HUSBAND going straight to TV in the U.S. - the first relatively major film to do so - not getting a theatrical release for two years.

You certainly cannot blame the sterling cast for the film's ultimate letdown - any film with BOTH Margaret Leighton and Kay Kendall (the soon-to-be Mrs. Rex and reputedly the love of his many partnered life off-screen) AND droll performances from Cecil Parker, Robert Coote, Michael Hordern, Valerie French and a generous bevy of other beauties is going to hold the viewer's delighted interest right up to the end. If the film HAD an end or any idea how to end, I suspect it would be a perennial which we would play constantly on both sides of the Atlantic like so many of the sublime Ealing comedies, rather than only now (in 2010) enjoying a British DVD release with no likelihood of being offered in the Colonies.

Instead, THE CONSTANT HUSBAND (a/k/a MARRIAGE ALA MODE - no relation to the brilliantly satirical Hogarth painting) just peters out - leaving a hint in the resemblance of the leading ladies what a better director (than Sidney Gilliat) might have done with the property had he chosen to have ALL the women in Rex's life played by the same actress (either Kendall or Leighton would have been marvelous) the way Alec Guinness famously played all the doomed members of the D'Ascoyne family six years earlier in the dazzling KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS. Just that little touch of style might have made all the difference. It might have even made the lame final fade out make some sense...the 84 minutes which preceded it were such fun.

In 'The Constant Husband' a man loses his memory, and then recovers it to find that he has an unusually large number of women in his life. The success of a comedy like this hinges on the strength of the leading actor; Rex Harrison carries it off very well. The character he plays is comparatively wealthy and over-privileged, and it is not easy for this viewer to forget than life in the mid 1950s was considerably less comfortable for the vast majority of people in Britain. Among the glamorous and less-than-glamorous supporting actors are Kay Kendall, Margaret Leighton, Cecil Parker, George Cole and Michael Hordern. The script includes some sort of running joke about Wales which, being from Wales, I failed to understand.

Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat enjoyed a fruitful partnership starting in 1929. One of their most interesting ventures was 'The Rake's Progress'. That film featured Rex Harrison playing an unmitigated cad. Ten years later we have another Launder/Gilliat production again featuring sexy Rexy as yes, an unmitigated cad! The two films are of course as different and chalk and cheese and the later film has not dated nearly as well as the earlier. Harrison is immaculate and never misses a beat. Not for nothing was he considered by Noel Coward to be the second greatest light comedian, the greatest being Himself naturally.

He is complemented here by a lovely cast notably Cecil Parker, the ill-fated Kay Kendall whose 'chemistry' with future husband Harrison is palpable and the superlative Margaret Leighton. Gilliat's script is excellent although let down by the ludicrous trial scene.

'A testament to the unutterable folly of Womankind'. These words are uttered by the female lawyer who defends Harrison's character on a charge of bigamy. Upon his release from prison he finds this same lawyer plus all of his wives awaiting him with eager anticipation. This spectacle is one that will surely cause assorted feminists to boil over with rage and indignation, assuming of course they have endured it this far.

A period piece to be sure but beautifully performed by all and hopefully can be enjoyed for that alone.

The 1950s were an awful decade for comedy--censorship was strict, and middle-class manners were corseted so tight as to induce hysteria. This movie has a supposedly comic situation, but there is no funny dialogue, no funny scenes. There is just a lot of embarrassment, which is supposed to be ipso facto terribly amusing. The script is careless--Rex Harrison is a man who marries women for money, but his Italian wife clearly doesn't have much (she has, though, a stupendous bust and a foreign accent, and gestures a lot, all of which are, of course, terribly amusing to proper English people). The film begins with Harrison waking up in a hotel, not knowing who he is. Well, how could he have registered without giving a name? The laziness of the whole enterprise is grossly condescending to the viewing public in general and to women in particular.

Rex Harrison wakes up in a hotel in Wales with amnesia. Professor Cecil Parker helps him to try to discover who he was and it is not what Harrison was expecting, as he appears to be a fraud and a bigamist married to 7 different woman.

After a ponderous first 30 minutes which sets the scene, rather dryly, it gains momentum when he discovers his Italian wife and thereafter as he decides to turn himself in and face trial - which is also a lot of fun. Not as funny as it was no doubt intended, there are though some pleasures to be had here eg Judge Michael Hordern and it has a strong cast worth watching. Good enough then, but it could have been sharper.