Without Reservations

Another movie that I watched recently so I could get it off my DVR is light comedy Without Reservations.

Claudette Colbert plays Christopher "Kit" Madden, a woman who has recently written a big important novel that also philosophizes about the new world we should create in the aftermath of World War II, called Here Is Tomorrow. (Without Reservations was released in 1946, when that topic was highly relevant.) The novel has been so successful that Hollywood producer Baldwin (Thurston Hall) has bought the rights to the book in order to turn it into a movie starring Cary Grant and Lana Turner: the non-philosophical part of the book is, at its heart, a romance between a Marine pilot and a woman.

So Kit has to go out to Hollywood to do the screenplay, a la Dick Powell's character in The Bad and the Beautiful. Now, as successful as her book was and as urgently as Baldwin wants her out in California, you'd think she could have taken the plane. But no, the studio got her train tickets, and couldn't get her a compartment because they were all booked. So she gets on a regular Pullman car, which turns out to be fortuitous. Kit hasn't liked the idea of casting Cary Grant in the male lead since she, having written the book, thinks the character should be played by a new face. And wouldn't you know it, she's going to find that new face on board the train.

Her seat on the train is next to two Marines who have to go to San Diego, Dink (Don DeFore) and Rusty (John Wayne). They both find Kit charming, even if they don't know she's written the wildly successful book everybody's talking about. And Kit thinks Rusty would be perfect for the part of the male lead. Kit telegraphs Baldwin about Rusty, and he responds that she shouldn't lost Rusty at all costs.

Anyhow, as I said, Rusty and Dink don't know Kit is the author of the book, which turns out to matter because when they start discussing the book, Rusty takes a decidedly different point of view from Kit. Kit is decidedly on the left and has written her characters that way, while Rusty takes his views from John Wayne's "national greatness" brand of conservatism. So when the time finally comes to ask Kit her last name, she makes something up, ot letting them know she's the author of the book Rusty hates. You just know they're going to find out later.

They have to change trains in Chicago, and it turns out that they've got different trains out to the west coast, so Kit comes up with an idiotic idea, which is to miss her train despite having had her baggage forward on the train she's missing. That, and she gets on the one Rusty and Dink are taking, without having purchased a ticket! The ultimate result of it is that the three of them get thrown off the train and have to make it out to the west coast in other ways, a la It Happened One Night, a movie with which Without Reservations bears no small resemblance. And sure enough, along the way, Rusty and Dink discover Kit's true identity.

Without Reservations is a fairly undemanding movie. I briefly mentioned the resemblance to It Happened One Night, but I also found myself thinking about The Palm Beach Story, and any number of other cross-country movies. Even though the subject material has been done to death, Without Reservations still works largely thanks to the strength of the cast. Granted, it loses some of its steam in the last half hour after the Marines find out Kit's real identity, and you know how it's going to end up. But Colbert and Wayne make a surprisingly appealing couple, and the supporting cast does even better. Notable is Anne Triola as a "beetle", an obnoxious other woman whose job it is to drive the action along. There are also cameos from Jack Benny and Cary Grant, but not Lana Turner; the movie was done at RKO and Turner was under contract at MGM.

Without Reservations is available on DVD, and if you want a movie you can just sit back with a bowl of popcorn and enjoy, you could do worse than this one.