If you've watched enough romantic comedies from before World War II, you'll probably have seen Ralph Bellamy as the man who repeatedly winds up second-best in the end, with the leading man and woman ending the movie (back) togehter. Recently, I saw a movie that had two women fighting over Bellamy, although it's a drama, not a romantic comedy: This Man Is Mine.
Bellamy plays Jim Dunlap, who has been married for several years to Tony (Irene Dunne) and seems to be in a happy marriage and independently wealthy: nobody seems to work, while Tony is able to indulge her hobby of painting landscapes by putting up a new canvas for Jim's birthday. (I immediately thought of Chekhov's gun, but the picture does become a real plot point later in the movie.) Tony's best friend Bee McCrae (Kay Johnson) pops in with some bad news: Bee's sister in law Francesca (Constance Cummings) is going to be coming back to town having secured a divorce in Reno, this being the days before no-fault divorce where that was the jurisdiction for one party to a divorce to head to get dissolve the marriage.
This is bad news because before Jim married Tony, he was engaged to be married to Francesca. She jilted him at the altar for reasons that aren't quite made clear, although it seems that Francesca has a habit of pursuing one rich guy after another. But Jim being left at the altar was a big scandal at the time, and even though it's been six years, the sort of set the Dunlaps and McCraes hand out with are certain to remember it. There's also the question of whether Jim still has any feelings for Francesca. But they can't stop Francesca from showing up, and she is supposedly family to Bee.
Francesca comes along, and sure enough, she starts trying to put the moves on Jim. And Jim seems OK with all of this, which frankly makes no sense. Jim goes off on a car ride with Francesca; their car breaks down; and when they show up together later everybody thinks Jim is going to leave Tony for Francesca. This despite Francesca's claims that she only wants Jim for one night to prove to everybody that she could still have him.
Jim and Tony bicker about it, with Jim eventually leaving to stay at his club, one would guess. Tony, however, comes up with a brilliant idea. Instead of going to Reno to obtain a divorce, she says at first that she's not going to do anything for six months to see if Jim and Francesca are still going to be an item. Then, she come up with an even more brilliant plan, which is to file for divorce, but in their current residence, which means she can only file on grounds of infidelity and get a ton of money from Jim and Francesca as alimony.
So how is all of this going to be resolved? Unfortunately, the ending the screenwriters pick isn't a particularly satisfying one. Even though the movie was released in April 1934, a couple of months before Joe Breen started really cracking down, the ending in This Man Is Mine feels like the sort of cop-out that writers would have had to come up with in the second half of the 1930s. This Man Is Mine is also based on a stage play, and it feels like the screenwriters did nothing to try to open the play up. (OK, there is one garden scene.) Maybe in 1930 that would have worked, but by now it doesn't. The only highlights are future B western star Charles Starrett as Bee's husband, and Sidney Blackmer in a small role as another wealthy man being pursued by Francesca.
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