June Bride

Bette Davis didn't make too many comedies, although she was quite good in both The Man Who Came to Dinner and The Bride Came C.O.D. A much odder comedy for her is June Bride.

Bette Davis is paired in this romantic comedy with Robert Montgomery, whom we meet first. He plays Carey Jackson, who works for Towne, the head of a magazine conglomerate, as a foreign correspondent based in Vienna. However, other national capitals are more interesting and newsworthy, and all of those already have capable correspondents, so Towne is closing the Vienna office, in theory leaving Carey out of a job despite Towne agreeing that Carey is quite a good correspondent.

With that in mind, Towne has a job opening for Carey at another of the conglomerate's magazines, Home Life. As you might be able to guess from the name of the magazine, this is a domestic magazine aimed squarely at the upper-middle-class housewife demographic. Carey being a man and fitting the sort of hard-drinking man of action stereotype you might expect from other foreign correspondent films, he's decidedly not thrilled about working on Home Life.

Worse, the assignment means he's going to have to work under editor Linda Gilman (Bette Davis). Gilman is known for being tough to work with, as several top writers for Home Life have gotten out of the assignment after short periods. Even more so for Carey, there's a personal issue in that Carey and Linda were an item before Carey took up the position in Vienna. Carey might still be interested in Linda, but she's moved on, accepting that she'll probably never get married (and to be fair, he more or less stood her up). So Linda doesn't necessarily want Carey working for her.

Their big assignment is a wedding for the June issue of the magazine, one that's set to represent post-war middle America, so Carey and Linda head off to Indiana with several other staff members from the magazine (including Fay Bainter, Mary Wickes, and George O'Hanlon) to meet the Brinkmans. The Brinkmans live in a house that, as the cosmopolitan New Yorkers believe, looks more McKinley and less Truman. Mom Nellie (Marjorie Bennett) and dad Whitman (Tom Tully) have two daughter, Jeanne (Barbara Bates) and Boo (Betty Lynn). Jeanne is set to get married to Bud Mitchell (Raymond Roe), and the Brinkmans have graciously (presumably for a nice fee) allowed Home Life to disrupt the family's life and home to cover the wedding=.

At this point, the movie starts to get muddled. For whatever reason, Carey doesn't just want to do a regular story and get on with life, so he starts digging into the lives of the Brinkmans. He finds out that Boo had a thing for Bud, while Bud has an older brother Jim (Ray Montgomery) who apparently won't be able to make it to the wedding because he's in the army can't get leave. That might be for the best, since Jim had a thing for Jeanne. So Carey gets the Army PR guy up in Chicago where Jim is stationed to pull strings and get Jim leave, setting in motion a plot where you don't necessarily know who's going to end up with whom, other than Linda and Carey.

Bette Davis and Robert Montgomery are both capable actors, and they have a good supporting cast here. But I found June Bride to fall suprisingly flat, which I think is largely due to the script. I felt at times as though Warner Bros. was trying to recapture the magic of The Man Who Came to Dinner, but got a pair of actors who don't have the best chemistry together, as well as a script that's less coherent because there's no Monty Woolley holding it together.

Still, some people might be interested in what is a misfire for Davis. Others might want to see an older Montgomery effortlessly pulling off the same sort of roles he was doing 15 years earlier. June Bride, having been released by Warner Bros.,