Faithful in My Fashion

The next movie that's showing up on TCM that's currently on my DVR is the MGM programmer Faithful in My Fashon. That next airing comes up tomorrow, March 18, a 6:15 AM. So once again, with that in mind, I watched the movie in order to do a review of it here.

The movie was released in August 1946, so not long after the end of World War II, and a time when soldiers were still being demobbed. One such example of this is Sgt. Jeff Compton (Tom Drake). He went off to war four and a half years ago, spent some time in a POW camp, and is now finally going through the process of getting out of the military. He hopes to return to his old job in the stock room at a department store. So, of course, the first thing he does when he gets two weeks' leave is to go back to that store, where he meets manager Hiram Dilworthy (Edward Everett Horton) and assistant Miss Swanson (Spring Byington).

The real reason he made the department store his first place to visit after being given leave is because his old girlfriend Jean Kendrick (Donna Reed), whom he nicknamed "Chunky" for reasons that I don't think are ever explained. The two had a whirlwind romance before Jeff went off to fight and that romance ended up with Jeff giving Jean a ring that was obviously supposed to represent an engagement ring until he could return home and marry her. And the thought of marrying Jean is clearly what sustained Jeff through the years of war.

Unfortunately that's not what sustained Jean. She didn't really think of herself as Jeff's fiancée. During the intervening four-plus years, she's advanced from the stock room to being a purchaser for the department store. She's also moved to a better apartment, and gotten a fiancé of her own. She's trying to come up with some way to let Jeff down gently. But Jeff seems pretty darn certain that he not only still wants to marry Jean; he wants to do it today if at all possible. Worse, Jeff is considered a sort of war hero so hurting him by breaking off the engagement is bound to cause problems.

Dilworthy comes up with an idea. It's only two weeks that Jeff is going to be on leave, so perhaps everybody can do something to keep Jeff from finding out during those two weeks that Jean has become engaged to another man. Or at least maybe they can keep up the ruse long enough for Jean to figure out how to let Jeff down most gently. Of course, since Tom Drake and Donna Reed are top billed, you know that they're just right for each other as a couple and that they really ought to wind up together in the final reel. There's also the fact that, the movie being released not long after the end of World War II, you can't imagine a way for a returning soldier to have his heart broken in what's supposed to be a romantic comedy.

And that's the big problem with Faithful in My Fashion. It all feels way too contrived, and the sort of thing where everybody has to lie far too much for the movie to come across as nice. Why couldn't Jean be allowed to keep her position as a purchaser and let Jeff know she's been promoted, for example. That, and moving to a better apartment. Instead, we get a dumb scene of Jean trying to convince the "new" (for the past three years) tenant of her old apartment to let her live there for two weeks.

Perhaps this sort of material worked better for audiences back in 1946. I'm sorry to say, however, that Faithful in My Fashion didn't work for me 80 years on.