Fiancée contre remboursement

Though Bette Davis dismissed this film as a piece of fluff it was an entertaining piece of fluff. For the one and only time in her career Davis entered the world of screwball comedy. This film is the sort of stuff that Cary Grant and Carole Lombard would have been right at home with.

Davis is paired for the second and last time with James Cagney. During the mid Thirties she and Cagney did a film called Jimmy the Gent which was not memorable for either of them. The Bride Came C.O.D. was far better material.

Davis is a young heiress who is being pursued by bandleader Jack Carson and columnist Stu Erwin who wants the story of their elopement. Cagney owns a small charter aviation company and the finance company man in the person of Ed Brophy is pursuing him. This is after Carson has chartered Cagney's plane.

Knowing that Davis's father Eugene Palette wants the marriage stopped at any cost, Cagney hits upon a mad scheme to kidnap Davis and fly her to Palette. He does it, but her antics forces a crash landing in the desert near a ghost town, inhabited only by Harry Davenport.

It gets pretty wild after that with everyone in the cast and his brother descending on that ghost town for their own agendas. Cagney and Davis worked very well with each other and Cagney was one of the few actors she didn't have a disparaging remark about.

It's entirely possible that players more experienced in the screwball comedy genre might have made The Bride Came C.O.D. a classic. But Cagney and Davis and the marvelous cast of some of the best supporting players around, made a pretty funny film in any case.

Enjoyable screwball comedy with Bette Davis and James Cagney, helped out by a great supporting cast that includes Eugene Palette, Jack Carson, George Tobias, William Frawley, Harry Davenport, and many others. WB movies back in the day were more often than not defined by their supporting players. They had a premium stable of actors to choose from and many times they're more enjoyable to watch than the leads.

Davis has a lot of fun with this role and, while her comedic talents were always so-so, she shines here. This is also one of the movies where she looks prettiest and curviest. One dress in particular fits her just right.

The movie isn't perfect. It drags a bit more than a screwball comedy should. Davis and Cagney, while having nice comedic timing, don't really have much romantic chemistry. So the inevitable conclusion to a film like this might be a bit hard for some to buy. Still, I recommend it to any Bette Davis or James Cagney fan. Also to any fan of WB films from the 1930s and 40s.

Bette Davis and Jimmy Cagney had been teamed once before in "Jimmy the Gent", also a comedy. That picture and this one are two of the relatively rare Bette Davis comedies. Jimmy the Gent was pleasant and fast moving, and featured the two stars relatively early in their career's. Here, they are both at the top of their game, and they elevate the mediocre material into something fast paced, fun, and easy to watch. It's a real pleasure to see two of the screen's greatest stars together. Nothing great, but definitely worth seeing for fans of the stars or of screwball comedies of that era.

Sure it had been done once or twice before, and it was done a dozen times following... but this one is a classic on merit alone.

Davis and Cagney were the top two Warner's actors at the time and had fought their own respective legal battles with the studio in the years prior, as well as being very good friends.

This film catches them at the tops of their game, just being allowed to be silly and have fun in a movie no one really expected much out of.

The formula works and though the pacing isn't the best, hang-in because it's worth it.

Saturday afternoon popcorn film.

I quite liked THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D. It's an obvious riff on the screwball structure established by the much superior IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, but Cagney and Davis really make it so much better than it could have been without their personas and chemistry there to liven things up. If you love the Warner Bros. acting stable of this period, then you're in for a good time.

The plot isn't clever or original, but I laughed quite a lot. Considering how hard it is to get me to laugh aloud when watching a movie, that alone makes this an achievement.