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Screwball comedy reminiscent of His Girl Friday - which also starred Cary Grant. Zany reporters (Grant, Joan Bennett), an editor who can't live or without them, and some strictly-for-laughs gangsters. An open manhole gag worthy of any silent comedy, too. But the ending is a bit implausible. You can't really get away with that much malicious mischief, can you?

The romance of a pair of nearly-married prankster-loving reporters is disrupted, when one of them is promoted to editor and suffers a drastic personality change. Unfortunately, despite a winning cast, this earnest attempt at screwball comedy fails to gel. Rusty Fleming and Charlie Mason clown around and play jokes, but the results are often silly and unfunny. Singing childish songs with a band on the back of a truck, making wisecracks while someone is supposedly drowning, knocking out the pilot to fly a plane into a storm; all are desperate failed attempts to be amusing.

Based on a screenplay by Joseph Antony from a story by Paul Gallico. "Wedding Present" squanders a stellar cast of comic performers, who give their best with a incredulous lame script. Cary Grant is Charlie, the crazy newsman, who goofs off at city hall and misses the closing hour to get a marriage license; meanwhile, Joan Bennett as Rusty, Charlie's news partner and romantic partner, shows the strains of life with a wild and crazy guy. However, Rusty is tolerant until Charlie's promotion, when he abruptly becomes a tough, serious-minded taskmaster in the newsroom. Nothing is predictable as wanted gangsters, a self-help author, a sinking ship, a posse of incompetent office painters, a missing archduke, and a bunch of silly songs complicate matters. Sounds funny? Not really, the script is too disconnected and ridiculous to evoke more than an occasional smile

Grant outrageously mugs his way through much of the film; while he is in his "Cary Grant" handsome comic mode, this is no "Bringing Up Baby," and the material does not warrant his efforts. Lovely Joan Bennett under-plays her role, and she registers better with a sly and subtle delivery. Like the stars, the supporting cast of comic players deserves better material. George Bancroft as a news editor, Gene Lockhart as the archduke, William Demarest as a gangster named "Smiles," and Edward Brophy as Demarest's sidekick "Squinty," have their moments, but they have had better ones in better films. Although director Richard Wallace cut his teeth on silent comedy, he generally helmed "B" pictures, and his work on "Wedding Present" is middling at best. While the film is worth catching for the cast, all have done better work elsewhere, and, if viewers want to see a classic screwball comedy about reporters, "His Girl Friday" fills the bill.

Wedding Present (1936)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Reporters Charlie (Cary Grant) and Rusty Fleming (Joan Bennett) are set to be married but after his messing around costs them a marriage license, she begins to think twice about it. Soon he is made editor and she quits her job, which sets off a chain of events that has her eventually engaged to another man (Conrad Nagel).

WEDDING PRESENT was the second straight film that Grant and Bennett did together and it would turn out to be Grant's final picture with Paramount until his return in 1955 with TO CATCH A THIEF. A lot of people including Leonard Maltin think of this as an underrated gem but I'm not certainly I'd go that far. A lot of others have noted that the film has a lot of common things with HIS GIRL Friday, which of course would go down as one of the greatest screwball comedies ever made.

For my money, this film was way too uneven to fully work and a lot of the issues come in the second half. The story has all sorts of characters thrown in and our two leads are constantly having new things done to them and I just found the majority of it uninvolving and at times rather boring. The screenplay tries to keep things moving and as I said, it's constantly throwing loops into the story but I just didn't find it all that funny no matter how hard the cast was trying.

As far as the cast goes, I thought most of them did a very good job and that includes Grant. He's charming, fast-talking ways would eventually make him a legend and his performance here was pretty good. I also thought Conrad Nagel and George Bancroft were good in their supporting bits of Gene Lockhart is also very good in his bit as the Archduke. As far as Bennett goes, she too is in fine form here but the screenplay certainly didn't do her any favors.

A rather undistinguished film, the sometimes incomprehensible romantic comedy WEDDING PRESENT contains a numerous amount of potentially interesting plot devices and story elements, but ultimately fails to capitalize on it's own potential and ends up making little to no real impression. Various characters and plot threads are introduced with great fanfare, only to be dropped with no explanation as the film wanders through it runtime with no clear direction. Cary Grant and Joan Bennett are fine in the leads, and even have a respectable degree of chemistry, but they are let down by the film's lack of narrative and structure. Not a bad film by any means, but certainly an unfortunate waste of enormous talent and considerable potential.

Screwball Comedy is one of the most popular and enduring genres that came out of the 1930s and arguably Cary Grant remains its brightest star. Long before "The Awful Truth," "Bringing Up Baby," "Holiday," and "My Favorite Wife" became part of the Grant/Screwball canon, this seminal forgotten gem showcased his emerging talent as a light comedian.

The loose and episodic plot of "Wedding Present" during its early scenes establishes the rapport between reporters Charlie and Rusty, played by Cary Grant and Joan Bennett. Their coverage of the breakup of a royal wedding and an improbable rescue at sea are enjoyable chiefly because of Grant. This seems to be the first film in which he exhibits the charm, deft comedic timing, and physical grace that we associate with the Grant screen persona. Although he seemed stiff and stilted in his earlier Paramount romantic comedies (like "Thirty Day Princess"), here he seems to have finally broken through and found the character that would make him a major romantic comedy star for three more decades.

The plot seems to be a prequel to "His Girl Friday," but Howard Hawks has always insisted that only by reading lines with his secretary in preparation for the 1940 version of "The Front Page" did he hit on the idea of casting a woman as Hildy Johnson. When you consider the plot similarities between "Wedding Present" and "His Girl Friday," it would not be surprising if Hawks got his inspiration for Friday's back-story from this film.

The setting is a Chicago tabloid (as in "The Front Page") with Grant as a ruthless editor. Although the two reporters were never married in "Wedding Present" as they were in "Friday", they did apply for a license in the Hall of Records. Like Hilda Johnson, Rusty becomes engaged to a stuffy socialite (Conrad Nagel as opposed to Ralph Bellamy.) Other analogous characters include his snooty mother (Mary Forbes as opposed to Alma Kruger), and Grant's gangster friend (William Demerast as opposed to Abner Biberman,) who helps him frame his rival with the police.

All in all, "Wedding Present" is an unheralded minor gem in the "screwball comedy" canon and would serve as a good opener on a double feature with "His Girl Friday."