Once Upon a Honeymoon

When the US entered World War II in December 1941, Hollywood joined the war effort, and there were a lot of films from 1942 that give the feeling of either being rushed into production or as though events of the day overtook the events of the film. One such movie that made a bit more sense to me as I was thinking about people in Hollywood wanting to do their part for the war effort is Once Upon a Honeymoon.

The story opens in Vienna in early 1938. As always, if you know your history this was the time when Austria "decided" (not that they had much choice) to merge with Nazi Germany in what is known as the Anschluß. The movie begins just before Austria voted itself out of existence, and surprisingly there are ex-pats who seem oblivious to what's going on. Namely, that's Kathie O'Hara (Ginger Rogers), a showgirl from Philadelphia who wound up in Vienna and fell in love with a German Baron, von Luber (Walter Slezak) and is planning to marry him in spite of the political situation.

Someone more clued in to the political situation is American correspondent Patrick O'Toole (Cary Grant), and his nominal job is to get an interview with O'Hara because of the wedding. Kathie is famously not giving any interviews, so O'Toole has to get up to all sorts of ruses. The baron, however, is wise to all of this. Meanwhile, the political merger is completed, and the baron is called off to business in Prague, capital of the then still independent Czechoslovakia. Kathie obviously goes with him, while O'Toole follows.

History tells us that the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was the next to fall, with the Sudetenland being annexed outright in the fall of 1938 and the rest of Bohemia and Moravia becoming a protectorate in early 1939 with Slovakia being a nominally independent puppet state. After all these events, von Luber goes off to... Poland! Baroness von Luber and O'Toole follow, with O'Toole finally having figured out that wherever the Baron goes, another country is bound to fall, and that the Baron is obviously a no-good Nazi. But can O'Toole get Kathie to become a good American and turn on the Baron?

Obviously, since the movie was released in 1942, you know that Kathie is going to wise up and do her part for her country, although with the number of countries that fall to the Nazis, she's also going to have to do quite a bit of moving around Europe with her husband. O'Toole, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to expose the true nature of the shadowy Baron. Along the way, O'Toole and O'Hara get mistaken for Jews and sent to the Warsaw ghetto, and then get directly get clued in to American intelligence when they're in Paris.

I read quite a few negative reviews of Once Upon a Honeymoon, and it's easy enough to see why somebody would draw that conclusion about the movie. Much in the same way that the characters have to wing it in moving around Europe, so it feels tht the screenwriters were writing as events dictated, even though everything that happened in the movie would have been a good two years before the movie actually started filming (IMDb says filming started in June 1942, which is a good six months after Pearl Harbor).

It's also definitely not the best film any of the principals involved with the movie made, although I'd also say it's decidedly not the worst. It's just a bit of a mess because it feels like the morale boost is the thing here, above and beyond any story line, which is a bit of a shame, because there are movies out there which do a much better job of giving a great story first and then the morale boost (To Be or Not to Be comes to mind).