I was looking through the streaming services recently, and noticed that the Roku Channel's Cinevault Classics channel (which is mostly, if not entirely, the Columbia library) had a new-to-me movie called Our Wife coming up, so I sat down to watch it. Unfortunately, the sub-channels on the Roku Channel don't seem to have schedule listings that go out more than a day in advance, so I don't know when it's going to show up again.
The Drakes -- a college-professor father (Charles Coburn), his adult son Tom (John Hubbard) and adult daughter Susan (Ruth Hussey) are on vacation taking a cruise down to Cuba and nearby Caribbean islands in the days before World War II when Americans could still get to Cuba easily. They meet composer/musician Jerome "Jerry" Marvin (Melvyn Douglas) on board, and then meet him again later on the island, drunk and looking like he's about to miss getting back on the boat. So they do the human thing, which is to look after him enough to get him back on the boat.
Except that they find his cabin is now occupied by someone else. Apparently, Jerry had a one-way ticket and the possibility of a job he was only going to take because he needed the money. Susan keeps trying to come up with a way to get Jerry to take one of the rooms in the suite the Drakes booked; as you might guess, along the way she's going to begin to fall in love with him, although that takes a little while longer than expected. Jerry repays the Drakes by letting them stay in his place in Westchester when they get back to the States.
Jerry, it turns, out, is in the middle of getting a divorce from first wife Babe (Ellen Drew), one of those divorces like in The Awful Truth where the judge has more or less signed off on it but it won't become legal until after a cooling-off period. That period still hasn't passed. And wouldn't you know it, but Babe shows up again, thinking that perhaps there's still a spark left.
Jerry comes up with an idea, which is to have Susan pretend that she and Jerry are engaged, since Jerry's divorce is going to happen anyway, what with it just not being finalized yet. This only serves to make Babe more jealous, and more desirous to win Jerry back. And she sees the perfect opportunity to do so when she suffers a fall on the stairs in Jerry's house, winding up with leg paralysis and having to stay in bed for several weeks. Susan, however, is convinced that Babe is just faking it. And Susan is going to start trying to prove it....
Our Wife is one of those movies from just before World War II (it was released in August 1941) that, had it been made a few years earlier, would have been written as a screwball comedy in the vein of something like The Awful Truth that I mentioned earlier in the post. Columbia may have tried to bill it as a comedy, but it's really more of a light drama than a comedy.
Unfortunately, the main flaw of Our Wife is that it develops slowly, with not a whole lot happening and being way too talky. Reading up on it, the movie was based on an early 1930s play, and the second half of it really belies the stage origins of the material. The material might have worked better on the live stage, and the stars here do the best they can with the material, but the whole time it feels like there's something missing. And then, the movie doesn't know how to resolve the conflict, doing so in a wacky way that I didn't think fit the rest of the movie.
Still, Our Wife isn't terrible, and fans of Melvyn Douglas will find it a mild diversion. I just wish I could point out when the next airing would be to give you all a heads-up.
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