Esposa Improvisada

Well this is a weird one. It's a Pre-Code sex comedy with very odd casting. Thelma Todd is cheating on her husband, Olympic javelin thrower Cary Grant. Wait until you see who she's cheating with -- Roland fricking Young! That's right, the mousy mumbly guy from Topper. On what planet, I ask you...on what planet!?! Anyway, to cover for their affair, Young hires Lili Damita to pose as his wife. Gradually he and Damita fall for each other.

Notable for being the feature film debut of screen legend Cary Grant, who makes quite an impression in his first scene. Cary's great in his minor role. Young is fine but I never liked his character enough to get invested in the story. Same with Todd. Damita is sexy but I couldn't understand half of what she said with her thick French accent. Charlie Ruggles does his usual shtick. If you're familiar with him, you'll realize he's very much an acquired taste. He's tolerable here though. Frank Tuttle's direction is nice. I think the blue-tinted night scenes are a good touch. Love the opening few minutes. It's an amusing movie at first but grows less so as each minute passes. It helps that the mood stays light. Didn't find much of it believable and, like I said, I didn't like the main characters much. Swapping Young and Grant's roles might have improved the overall picture. Although then we'd have the absurd image of Young as an Olympic athlete. But that's no more ridiculous than him being able to take any woman from Cary Grant. It's not a bad film and there's certainly enough of interest to entertain most classic film fans. Definitely one Cary Grant fans will want to see at least once.

Frank Tuttle was a highly competent house director for many years, working for Sam Goldwyn, Paramount and so forth, turning out well-made movies in which the style served the story. In our day of auteur worship and the insistence that, if a critic can't tell who directed a film without looking at the credits, it is not a good film, craftsmen like Tuttle are considered hacks. I disagree. You may disagree with me. We'll leave that unsettled for the moment and thumb wrestle over it later.

This movie has all the earmarks of a Lubitsch picture: the European settings (Paris, Hollywood, which Lubitsch said he much preferred to Paris France; Venice, where he had set the opening of TROUBLE IN PARADISE two years earlier) and is the sort of racy European comedy that Paramount specialized in until the Production Code killed them dead later that year. The setups are all Lubitsch: the recitative number "Madame Has Lost Her Dress" that opens the movie; The sexual imagery of Cary Grant carrying around a bagful of javelins and reducing Roland Young and Charlie Ruggles to blithering idiocy; Thelma Todd in her underwear; and into this mess lands Lily Damita, an honest girl reduced to sleeping on movie sets: trouble in Paris, Hollywood.

Although Tuttle lacks the ability to direct actors in the small, exquisite details that Lubitsch did, he had a fine hand at framing and storyline. The movie is near perfect, except for the miscasting of Roland Young as the love interest..... but perhaps that is the point of the matter: we do not always fall in love with Maurice Chevalier.

Although This Is The Night which is the feature film debut of Cary Grant is an enjoyable enough bedroom farce it probably has more significance as the possible inspiration of one of Paramount's best feature films of the Thirties, Love Me Tonight. This film directed by one of Paramount's more competent contract directors Frank Tuttle plays a whole lot like Rouben Mamoulian's classic. Possibly if Tuttle had better material to work with, this film would be better known.

This Is The Night has Cary Grant as a French Olympic athlete whose sport is the javelin. But apparently he's not spearing Thelma Todd enough and she's casting a roving eye. The eye of Roland Young meets her's and the two plan a holiday in Venice.

To which Mr. Grant arrives and rudely interrupts. Thinking fast on his feet as American Express agent Charlie Ruggles arrives with tickets at Todd's apartment, Young says that he'll be traveling with his wife and once outside frantically looks for a wife. He finds Lily Damita and hires her for a railroad holiday from Paris to Venice. Ruggles goes along as a fifth wheel on this carriage, presumably to catch whoever comes flying off the rebound. As he's soused most of the time, I can't see what appeal he would have. Of course I can't see what appeal he would have sober.

Cary Grant was billed fifth in this film, but in 1932 he gradually went up the billing ladder and by the time of She Done Him Wrong, he's co-starring with Mae West. His debonair charm could barely be concealed in a role which required him to be a bit of a fathead.

Ralph Rainger and Sam Coslow wrote a couple of forgettable songs and it's in the musical numbers that this film bares the closest resemblance to Love Me Tonight. Note the Italian gondolier in the Venice scenes. He gets no billing in the film, but it is Donald Novis one of the most popular singers of the day on radio. In three years he would move to Broadway and play the romantic lead in Rodgers&Hart's Jumbo where he would introduce The Most Beautiful Girl In The World and My Romance. Novis had a wonderful tenor voice as you'll agree if you see this film.

Speaking of Rodgers&Hart maybe if they wrote a score as good as the one they did for Love Me Tonight, This Is The Night would be more remembered than as footnote as Cary Grant's feature film debut.

Lili Damita sleeps, stretched across a luxurious bed…until a man wakes her up and tells her to move and we discover that she's a struggling actress sneaking some sleep on a quiet movie set. –Appearances are frequently misleading in this witty and ultimately charming comedy of manners, deceit and romance.

A great cast of more or less sympathetic characters surrounds the lovely Damita:

Roland Young and Charlie Ruggles are fine as a pair of wealthy gentlemen of Paris. Young is about to embark on a clandestine Venetian trip with girlfriend Thelma Todd—when her husband, Olympic javelin-thrower Cary Grant, unexpectedly returns home. One lie leads to another, and soon Young has hired an actress—Damita, eager to accept any job—to pose as his wife, and the whole gang boards a train for Venice.

Thelma Todd is excellent as the deceiving wife jealous of her lover's new partner; we don't get to see Todd angry in many of her movies, but smoke positively comes out of her ears here. Cary Grant—very youthful and athletic, bag of javelins slung over his shoulder—has a minor role but is awfully fun to watch (in his first picture).

Roland Young is outstanding as the would-be cosmopolitan lover who can't quite control either Damita or Todd; his face and mannerisms express varying degrees of discomfort, frustration and worry as he struggles to keep multiple relationships from caving in on him.

A hilarious running gag involves chauffeur Irving Bacon repeatedly catching Thelma's dress—in a car door, for example—and accidentally pulling it off.

Overall, it's very funny, with a plot that is tough to predict…and somewhat surprisingly, it gradually turns into a very sweet picture, at that. Very enjoyable, especially for fans of these great character actors—and well worth watching just to see Roland Young and the great Thelma Todd together.

Claire (Thelma Todd) and Gerald (Roland Young) are carrying on a rather heated affair, but just as they are about to go away together to Venice, Claire's javelin-throwing husband Stephen (Cary Grant) returns home. In order to dispel his distrust, Gerald hires a woman to pose as his wife. Germaine (Lili Damita) is a hungry young French actress who poses as a more experienced woman named Chou Chou. She vamps Gerald incessantly while Stephen is around, and she is so successful that she makes Claire insanely jealous.

This sing-songy film is a delight to watch. It is fast-paced, comedic, and filled with a stellar cast, but it is not well known today. Film collectors find it interesting because it marks Cary Grant's first screen appearance and because it is one of the few films of Lili Damita, a popular but heavily-accented French star. Her career fizzled quite quickly, but not before she appeared with stars like Gary Cooper and Laurence Olivier.

Fans of the pre-code era will enjoy this one quite a lot, as it is peppered with naughty jokes ("I was living in Cin--, I was Naughty.") and a running gag about Todd losing her clothes.