On ne roule pas sa femme

Andrew and Clara Hinklin (James Ellison and Lucille Ball) are an old married couple. While they aren't chronologically old, their marriage is routine and Andrew is a mousy man with little excitement in his life....and he likes it that way. However, when the boss drafts him into entertaining an important client, his life changes dramatically. Andrew arrives home....late and drunk. The next night, he arrives very late as well...but sober. While he tries to explain it to Clara, she is having none of this and doesn't believe him. It's made much worse by her mother, who lives with them, as she keeps throwing gasoline on the fire and does whatever she can to keep the two apart. Instead of tossing 'mother' out on her ear, Andrew leaves and stays away from home for a few days.

In the meantime, Clara is having second thoughts and decides she needs to fight to keep her man...and a makeover is in order as a start. Unfortunately, both Mr. and Mrs. Hinklin don't realize that another woman will show up at the same costume party they both attend....and with her mask on, she is the spitting image of Clara!

This is a very unusual film because I have never seen Lucille Ball less attractive and plain...and this was necessary for the plot but must have posed a challenge for her. Most actresses DON'T want to be plain or dowdy! But here she seems to take to the role and it works. In her other persona (with a mask), however, she's less convincing...and sports a very strange accent. A but more subtlety and some dialect coaching would have helped....though the movie still is modestly enjoyable despite this. Overall, a film that started off very well and sort of lost its way when Ball decided on the alter ego.

This recently popped up on TCM and since it starred Lucille Ball I decided to give it a look, but it turned out to be an interminable slog, one tedious situation after another at an over-long 68 minutes. All the plot contrivances could have been cleared up if the characters took one minute to actually speak to each other, but then it would have been too short even for the bottom of a double bill.

Inexplicably, Bosley Crowther in the Times found it mildly palatable, but I found it indigestible. Ball is a mouse but does come alive a bit in her dual role, the male lead is instantly forgettable, and Emma Dunn's one-note performance as the meddling mother-in-law is without a shred of wit or charm. I'm always glad to see a new Lucy movie but this one strained my patience.

Andrew Hinklin (James Ellison) and Clara Fields (Lucille Ball) graduate from college in 1935 and get married. Neither are social people and she's concerned about their stale marriage. It doesn't help that they're living with her bitter mother. He's a meek straight-laced accountant forced by his superiors to take out wild boss' son Battincourt from the London office. Clara is not happy with drunken Andrew. Battincourt has his own idea of helping.

This is an old comedy which isn't that funny. Humor is a fickle master and it doesn't always age well. The most fascinating aspect is a young Lucille Ball. She's in her late twenties here. This is one of her numerous B-movies before finally climbing to the top. Clara is a bit of a wet blanket but she gets to grow and Ball also gets to play doppelganger Mercedes Vasquez. I just can't get over how young she looks. She is so different here that it's hard to say that her future is inevitable. All I can say is that she has a compelling presence and a good range.

Half the problems in the marriage of James Ellison and Lucille Ball are due to the fact there's the mother-in-law from hell living with them in the person of Emma Dunn. I could identify with that, my parents had one of the grandmas living at home and it wasn't pleasant for the odd one out.

Taken partly from The Guardsman and partly from The Awful Truth, You Can't Fool Your Wife is an amusing domestic comedy showing some of the talents of Lucille Ball in that direction. She plays a dual role here, Jimmy Ellison's who fears the marriage has gone stale after a year and a South American bombshell. No need for a voice coach to get the accent right, she had the best teacher in the world in that newlywed husband she had at home.

Also in the cast is Robert Coote playing a droll English visitor who runs the London office at Ellison's business. The man likes to party hearty and wants a companion to share the romping with. He really unknowingly starts all the marital discord.

The last 15 minutes with the two Lucys at a masquerade party has a lot of good laughs in it.

You Can't Fool Your Wife holds up pretty well after almost 80 years.

The beginning of "You Can't Fool your Wife" shows us Clara and Andrew Hinklin's yearbook photos, and their wedding, where the Chaplain advises the groom "You might as well make up your mind from the start - You Can't Win!" We see that time passes, and they are having their fifth anniversary, and thats when the trouble starts. In one of Lucy's first lead roles, we see the typical husband and wife misunderstandings and mistaken identity that would become usual fare for Lucy and Ricky fifteen years later in "I Love Lucy". When this film was made, Lucy had been in movies for about seven years, but mostly uncredited, deleted, or minor roles. Lucille Ball and James Ellison had worked together in "Next Time I Marry" in 1938. Robert Coote is the client Mr. Battincourt, who gets Andrew into all sorts of trouble at home. Emma Dunn is the blustering, interfering mother in law, stirring up the pot. The cast list on IMDb shows Charles Lane, scenes deleted, which is a shame, since he was a great character actor from the 1930s and 1940s. The sound effects play a role here... the toaster and the rocking chair add the only comedy in the first half of the film. Virginia Vale plays a supporting role "Sally". Vale has an interesting bio on IMDb - she had won a contest to come to Hollywood, but it appears she retired from movies at the ripe old age of 25 and didn't appear in films after 1945? In the plot, Battincourt cooks up a scheme that may or may not get Hinklin out of all his troubles... and all neatly wrapped up in a 68 minute RKO shortie. The whole way through the film, it borders on being a comedy, but no-one cracks jokes or falls down - it's a situational low-key comedy that's really more of a love story. This one does NOT appear to be a remake of the 1923 film of the same name.