Veillée d'amour

Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne couldn't catch a break in 1939. First LOVE AFFAIR turns out badly for the body of the movie, then here we have Miss Dunne, a waitress, in love with Boyer, a concert pianist-prince with Barbara O'Neil as his mad wife. He loves her too, but Miss O'Neil has bouts of sanity, during which she comes to Miss Dunne's apartment.

This is one of the prestige dramas that John Stahl directed every year or so for Universal during the 1930s. As in the other movie, the chemistry between the leads is marvelous. This movie is the lesser, which I attribute to the utter lack of humor of Stahl, as opposed to Leo McCarey. Of course, the fact that a reported 21 writers worked on this picture may have given the film maker so much material that any humor had to be cut. Once you get past the meet cute, in which Boyer tries to order apple pie with cheese, hold the pie, it's all a romantic heartbreaker with their unfulfilled love. And that it is.

Helen (Irene Dunne) is a waitress and Philip (Charles Boyer) is one of her customers. Soon, he seems infatuated with her and follows her about town...which is a tad creepy, actually. Eventually they fall in love but he has a secret...and she soon learns that he is married and his wife is mentally ill. What's next? Well, it's NOT a remake of "Jane Eyre", so although it's similar, there is a big twist!

The acting is the best part of this film. Dunne and Boyer were magnificent in "Love Affair" and here they are also excellent. However, the script, though interesting, is a tad disappointing...see it and you'll likely see what I mean. Still, it is interesting and worth your time.

I stayed with this hoping for something and it delivered squat. I actually got hooked in the beginning which would have made a very good movie...when Dunne is essential in getting coworkers "the girls" to support a strike against her boss, never seen, of a chain of restaurants. The first part of the film sets up a smart, working women facing the exploitation of the bosses....and she is pursued by the union rep, a handsome man. Instead she becomes tied up in a subsequent dreary plot with Boyer. The first part of the film is charming and interesting and she's an arresting character. Even he is mildly interesting. The slice of 1939 life they partake of is very well played: going to the piers where people are cooling off pre AC, helping a kid who's skinned his knee, lost his pants held up by rope. He's pushing his friend in a go cart. After setting up an interesting film they are caught in a storm. Held up in a church. Which holds up the film. Even that is passably interesting. Finally, we meet Boyer's mad wife who isn't so addled when away from her mother and her minder. She wants her husband. And Dunne as a good woman in a 1939 movie, isn't going to fight her for him. This is all trite. Had it been a light, romantic comedy built around striking women it would have been a good film. A film about a strong, smart woman leading a strike. As it is...I guess this is what is called condescendingly "a woman's film" like today's "chick flicks" and it's a bore.

This is a heart-rending story covered up in a romantic comedy of many wonderful and surprising turnings, and it is impossible to guess at the sad conclusion of this very entertaining and stimulating journey. It's a typical Irene Dunne film, it's like a twin shadow of "Love Affair" of the same year, but although this film is more hearty and gleeful in its romantic ways, it is more tragic than "Love Affair", which puts on a more sinister fateful aspect but nevertheless ends better. Here you are faced with a truly hopeless situation with no end to its abysmal tragedy, which no one can do anything about, and still Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne settle to make the best of it and hope for tomorrow anyway, and maybe, after all, it will come...

I love Dunne and Boyer and think they are a good match. However, I am constantly amazed at how long Irene Dunne was able to get away with 20-something roles. She is 41 here, and looks it. She is playing a waitress with a roommate who is about to strike for better pay. Her character at most would be 25. Yet producers continued to give Dunne these types of roles even after this movie. I don't really get it. When Lana Turner was in her early 40s, she was playing mothers of teenagers in "Imitation of Life" and "Portrait in Black" and Mary Astor had moved to these roles by the time she was 38. I don't understand why they weren't moving Dunne to more motherly roles by this time; she certainly does not look or act like an ingenue.