Bedtime Story

We're getting to the end of the year, so I'm doing a couple of posts on movies that are about endings in one way or another. First up is Bedtime Story, which isn't really about bedtime at all.

The movie opens up with the end of a stage play, like quite a few movies dealing with theater actors (The Guardsman comes to mind here). The stage star here is Jane Drake (Loretta Young), getting rapturous applause for her latest role. As she gets her curtain call, she informs the audience that it's the last time for her to play that role, and indeed it's going to be the last time the audience will see her in any role, as she's going to be retiring to a farm in Connecticut with her husband, Lucius "Luke" (Fredric March), a playwright who wrote the play.

Sadly, Luke was not able to make it to the final performance, and we quickly learn it's because he had different ideas about the direction his, and by extension Jane's, career was going to take. Luke has been working on a new play, and it goes without saying that he wrote it with the intention of giving Jane another big role to star in. Not only that, but he's hoping to build a new theater on Broadway just for Jane. Jane, however, is horrified when she learns that the money for the new theater is coming from Luke's having sold the farm in Connectict. Her response is to take a train to Reno to do the several weeks of separation necessary to be able to file for divorce.

Luke still wants to do the new play and wants Jane to star in it. With that in mind, he fakes a story about having lost it to one of those newspaper gossip columnists, knowing it will be printed in Reno. Sure enough, Jane returns, but she learns that it was all a ruse to get Jane to come back and do the play when the couple's best friend Eddie (Robert Benchley) comes to their apartment with a new young actress, Virginia Cole (Eve Arden), who would be just perfect for that starring role if it weren't for Jane. So Jane heads back to Reno.

Meanwhile, Jane had an old flame in the form of a banker, William Dudley (Allyn Joslyn), who was always in love with her and still is. So he shows up in Reno to try to start a relationship with Jane again. Eventually, Luke also shows up in Reno to try to get Jane to come back to him and do the play. There's still the question of whether all the conditions necessary to obtain the divorce have gone through, leading to the mildly madcap ending....

Bedtime Story had the great bad luck of being made in 1941 and not being released until Christmas 1941, three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the US into World War II. The movie fits very well into the genre of the more upscale romantic comedy, but audience tastes were changing with the US now being at war. That, and the story here had been done enough that in Bedtime Story it's beginning to feel formulaic.

That's not to say that Bedtime Story is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's well made, and March and Young show that both of them can do comedy. Of course, having support from people like Benchley and Arden is a great help. It just feels like the movie could have been better and more original.