Rendez-vous d'amour

In Appointment For Love it certainly got playwright Charles Boyer's ego out of joint when he spies a sleeping Margaret Sullavan in the audience showing the ultimate indifference to his dialog. She can't help it though, she'd been working a long shift at a hospital and just didn't want to give up theater tickets.

Out of such a disastrous first encounter, a romance does bloom. But their separate careers, his in the theater and her's in medicine have not let them get the marriage consummated. They live like ships in the night in two separate apartments in the same building with a very confused elevator operator in Gus Schilling running a nuptial shuttle service.

Sullavan is a doctor with liberated views, even to the point of wanting to keep her own apartment. That's where Boyer draws the line.

In fact their sudden courtship and marriage have former boyfriend and girlfriend, Reginald Denny and Rita Johnson all kinds of upset, but they both move in for the rebound. Johnson is especially very good as a drama queen who Boyer knows all her tricks since he taught them to her.

There was a lot of potential in Appointment For Love and if someone like Ernst Lubitsch or Mitchell Leisen had directed it the film would be far better known and received. As it is the stars and the rest of the cast have nothing to be ashamed of.

Margaret Sullavan and Charles Boyer were good actors. So, you naturally would expect "Appointment for Love" to be a good film...but it isn't. The problem isn't their acting but the basic story idea...which just doesn't make any sense at all.

After a whirlwind romance, Andre Cassil (Boyer) and Dr. Jane Alexander (Sullavan) marry. However, soon he realizes her number one love is her job working at the hospital. In fact, she leaves on her wedding night to work on a case and Andre gets no nookie whatsoever. Later she returns and has a brilliant idea...because of their jobs, she'll get a separate apartment! So, no sex...and living in separate homes...it's as if they never got married in the first place.

Sometimes a script idea is so patently absurd, you can't help but wonder how it got made. This is clearly the case with "Appointment for Love". The story idea makes zero sense and is so fundamentally absurd you cannot help but feel baffled. The actors tried their best...but the story is just inexplicably bad.

By the way, it's a sad coincidence but both Sullavan and Boyer in real life committed suicide.

Playwright Charles Boyer woos and wins doctor Margaret Sullavan. Once they are wed, they run into matrimonial problems because the good doctor believes they can and should lead their lives separately: not just their professional lives, but separate apartments.

It's directed ably by William Seiter, with Eugene Pallette, Rita Johnson, Cecil Kellaway, and longtime Seiter collaborator Reginald Denny as the other man. Comic situations arise naturally out of the basic thesis. The problem is that the characters don't work well within their assumptions; Miss Sullavan's idea of marriage is a whim of iron that admits of no imperfection on her part, which makes this screwball comedy not really appealing. Instead of being caught up in the silliness of it all, I was annoyed.

In many ways, it can be compared to the next year's Woman of the Year. In that movie, Katharine Hepburn is so caught up in her life that she has no time for the responsibilities she has assumed, leading to a denouement that I consider ill-conceived. Here, Miss Sullavan is a nitwit.

"Jane" (Margaret Sullavan) falls asleep during one of the plays of "André" (Charles Boyer) and in the kerfuffle that ensued, he assumes she is ill, discovers that she is a doctor and engages in a whirlwind romance that ends up with them married. They are both busy people, though, so it takes some time before they are able to get together for the first time as a married couple and then to his horror, he realises that she is very much an independent spirit. She takes an apartment on the twenty-second floor of his building, and with him on the seventeenth she proposes - much to the bemusement of the elevator boy - to visit him, or he her, from time to time. He's having none of this but hasn't really a clue how to rectify matters. Both are egged on by their friends and after a while they wonder just what ever possessed them to wed in the first place. Is it all doomed to failure, or might there be room for an accommodation - perhaps on the 20th floor? It's the supporting efforts from Eugene Pallette and Reginald Denny that raise the odd smile here, but I didn't find there to be very much chemistry between Boyer and Sullavan and the original joke starts to wear thin too quickly. Thereafter the scenarios are all just a bit repetitive and barring the odd quip there is a great deal of dialogue that doesn't really advance the plot very much. It's not so much a battle of the sexes, more a slight skirmish that passes the time effortlessly enough, but is unlikely to ever merit a second visit.

I was not planning on making a comment for this unimpressive effort, but I felt obliged to after noticing that only one other person had bothered to write something. First of all, I must say that although I never really cared for Charles Boyer "debonair" style of acting, Margaret Sullavan has always been one of my favorite actresses. Whenever I see her in a drama I am sure of the ending (one of the main characters, usually hers, will find a way to die in the end) but in comedy she tends to be more light and fun to watch.

In a plot that strives to make sense in some sort of Lubitsch-like battle of the sexes, we have a writer and a woman- doctor who find love and marriage rather quickly. In a unique way, we soon learn that Sullavan's doctor has a rather open view of her relationship with Boyer's womanizing writer, one that allows separate apartments and separate lives as well. The direction by Seiter is uninteresting; unlike Lubitsch he doesn't permit his audience to imagine what is happening. Not that he receives much help from the script department, since that seems to be dwelling in the creation of its main characters and not too sure of which direction it should take its story. With all that in mind, I felt a bit sorry that one of Sullavan's few attempts on comedy failed, having seen her shine on the wonderful Shop Around the Corner. Perhaps if Lubitsch had helmed this one as well we could have had a classic.

Either way I just feel that I have to clarify the fact that, even though this will hardly ever be in anyone's top ten, it's not disgraceful and can be quite fun to watch once one accepts its defects. If you like 1940's style of comedy, I see no real reason that would keep you from enjoying this one, even if you can easily come up with a better movie to watch. A guilty pleasure as they say, specially if you are a bit of a fan of either one of the two main actors.