Holy Matrimony

Monty Woolley plays Britain's most distinguished artist who lives the life of a recluse in the jungle with his valet. When the valet dies, Woolley assumes his identity to continue a life of peace and becomes wedded to Gracie Fields. All is bliss.....for a while.

Utterly charming and devilishly witty. Woolley is terrific as Field's adoring husband but has a razor sharp tongue for everyone else. The couple go very well together and their relationship comes across as very sweet and totally believable. The strength here though is the script which is full of caustic one liners and enjoyable characters for Woolley to let rip at.

I found this on YT by searching Monty Wooley. Unknown to me, the revelation is Gracie Fields, an established stage actress with few screen roles. John Stahl and Nunnally Johnson were golden age storytellers cranking out a couple solid films a year. Surprised there are no remakes.

"Holy Matrimony" existed for me only as legend for the longest time. My father's friend Bill Gitt (renowned projectionist and elder brother of film preservationist Bob) was a great fan of this and often spoke of it, though I can't recall ever seeing it as a young lad. But I searched long and hard and finally tracked down a DVD of it (not a bad print at all), and it is truly enchanting. Marvelous, marvelous performance by Monty Woolley, in a very understated mood -- those who know him only from "The Man Who Came to Dinner" will, I think, be quite pleasantly surprised by his work here and, from Gracie Fields, a miraculous one. The first time I watched it I thought, well, she doesn't do much. But then I wanted to see it again almost immediately. And it's true, she doesn't do much, but the little things she does are simply exquisite. A great, really subtle performance, not at all played for laughs, but funny all the same. Her delivery of the simple line, "That's it," is a lesson in charming simplicity. John M. Stahl, that strange, almost mythical director, has a marvelous effect on actors (see, for example, Adolphe Menjou in "Letter of Introduction," where he really plays sincerity... well, sincerely): without fancy photography, he seems able to give them an almost mystical radiance. And he has an amazing cast of character actors to work with here: Eric Blore, Una O'Connor, Alan Mowbray, George Zucco, Laird Cregar, Melville Cooper, Ethel Griffies. A superb Nunnally Johnson script (his best?) and an excellent score (Cyril Mockridge) -- typical of Fox films of the 40s and early 50s. A film worth seeking out, one you will want to watch time and again.

When talking about the great writers of Great Britain from 1880 - 1940, one thinks of Wilde, Shaw, Wells, James, Conrad, Hardy, Kipling, Stevenson - maybe Conan Doyle, Beerbohm, Chesterton. There is one name that was once fully worthy of being listed in this group, but this person has sort of vanished (except for one novel) from public attention. The writer was Arnold Bennett. In his day novels like CLAYHANGER, RICEYMAN STEPS, THE CARD, and BURIED ALIVE were known around the English-speaking world. Bennett was the chronicler of the "Five Town" area of London, where his main fiction characters (usually lower or blue-collar types) came from - for Bennett came from that area originally. In the film THE CARD (with Alec Guinness and Glynnis John) there is a statement at the start that mentions the Five-Towns.

But after Bennett died in 1931, his readership disappeared. The sole exception was THE OLD WIVES TALE, a grown-up view of the unsuccessful married lives of two sisters. The others were basically forgotten.

Aside from Guinness's THE CARD, the only other Bennett novel to reach the screen was BURIED ALIVE, made twice into sound films (in 1933 with Roland Young and Lillian Gish, and in this 1943 film, HOLY MATRIMONY). It is a wonderful comedy, and gave Monty Wooley another specialized film to give his patented irascibility full flower. Here he plays Priam Farli, the leading English painter of his day, who returns from the South Seas to be knighted, only to find that his dead valet (Eric Blore) is mistakenly identified as him. The valet is buried in Westminster Abbey (with King Edward VII in attendance) while Wooley watches from the public benchs. Wooley sets up a house, under his valet's name, and hires Gracie Fields as his housekeeper. Eventually they fall in love and marry. But money is running out, and Fields (noting her husband's artistic abilities) sells several to a dealer (Laird Cregar). Cregar recognizes them as Farli's pictures and sells them very quickly. But one of the buyers finds that the picture she bought was of an incident that happened after Farli died. Cregar is sued, and confronts Wooley. Eventually it boils down to a second legal problem: that Wooley finds his valet was married before, and never got a divorce. Confronted with bigamy charges (the first wife, Una O'Connor, can't recognize Wooley is her husband or not), Wooley is finally confronted with the only way of identifying himself as Farli or the Valet - by physical means that he opposes revealing.

All the performances are wonderful, led by Wooley and Fields (who would do a second film, MOLLY AND ME, in a year). Cregar's Clive Oxford again showed he could play comedy (possibly even more subtlety than we think - Hector Arce's biography of Tyrone Power mentions that Power noticed that his friend Cregar coughed in a suggestive manner as though to suggest that Oxford was a homosexual who disapproved of his secretary's preening herself). Even George Zucco, normally a master of film menace, here managed to portray a prosecuting barrister doing slow burn after slow burn when dealing with the irrascible Wooley in court. Altogether a grand show. And a good place to go in order to get reacquainted with a forgotten literary master.

Any movie, even a bad one, is better if Money Woolley is in it. So, regardless of the quality of "Holy Matrimony", it was on my must-see list as it stars this wonderful and under-appreciated man. If you have a chance, read up about him...he was a VERY interesting character and acting was only his second career. The first one will probably surprise you!

As usual, Woolley plays a very talented misanthrope. He's Priam Farll, a famous artist who hates people and lives with his manservant (Eric Blore) on an island. He's also not at all happy when he learns he's to be knighted but reluctantly agrees to leave for the ceremony. On the way, his servant becomes deathly ill and the doctor mistakenly thinks the now deceased man was Priam....and Priam decides to take advantage of this and remain incognito. Let the world think he's dead...and let him go back to his wonderful, isolated life! However, he has a change of heart...but by then, no one believes that he IS the famous man! Obviously there's much more to the story than this, as all this happens just in the first 15 minutes or so of the movie! What is next? See for yourself--I don't want to spoil the fun--and this IS a fun little film. It won't disappoint and is exquisitely written and very well acted.

By the way, the folks at 20th Century Fox Studios must have loved the pairing of Gracie Fields and Monty Woolley, as they both starred in a wonderful film immediately after this one..."Molly and Me".