Film review: I Was a Male War Bride (1949)

 

I was hoping this would be of the quality of other Howard Hawks films like Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire, or perhaps The Big Sleep, but sadly not.  It has its charms, but it's trying a bit too hard.  And Cary Grant has an occasional tendency (particularly in weaker comedies) to mug and resort to various tics like muttering under his breath and doing double-takes.  Plus, while I'm sure Ann Sheridan has her charms, she just looks too matronly here, and is a bit too self-assured.  Someone a bit more wild would've been better.  Here's the premise: she (First Lieutenant Catherine Gates) is in the US Army in post-war occupied Germany, and he (Captain Henri Rochard) is French and in the same circumstances.  (Weirdly, he never even attempts a French accent, and calls himself "Henry", but pronounces "Rochard" in the appropriate French way, even correcting Americans when they mangle it.)  The film jumps right in with them already knowing and feeling antagonistic towards each other 

because he's worked with her in the past and tried to make moves on her, but they're put together for one last job.  This involves going to the village of Bad Neuheim and locating black marketeer Schindler (presumably unrelated to he of The List) and persuading him to move to France and pursue legitimacy.  Their first problem is that all of the cars in the motor pool are checked out, so they have to go by motorcycle, and because she's the only one with the relevant license, she gets to drive!  (There's an odd mixture of progressiveness and regressiveness in this one.  Grant is happy to be a Male War Bride, and Sheridan plays a very competent officer, but a lot of the humor is in the ridiculousness of people transgressing gender roles.)  After having to load the bike and sidecar into a boat and almost going over a weir, and getting soaked in the rain, they make it there, and take separate rooms.  But he rubs her back, and, despite her thinking the worst of his intentions, tries to leave but the door handle falls off!  So she finds him in the morning... and more pratfalls.  Then he tries to find Schindler after instructing her that she is not to acknowledge him if she sees him, but is then arrested and she practices malicious compliance.  Eventually they find Schindler and on the ride home, after a crash into a haystack, they decide to get married.  

And that's just the first half!  The rest of it is rather infuriating battles with army bureaucracy about getting him back to the US with her as her unit is recalled.  There's a LOT of him being refused accommodation (he can't sleep with her because he's (by now) a civilian and she's in the army, and he can't bunk with the "other" wives, because, well obviously) and he just trudges hither and yon getting more and more tired and irritable, and it just made me tired and irritable.  (I even had dreams about it!)  And then on the ship ride back he has to disguise himself as a woman, using a horse tail as a wig

(was this the film that prompted Tony Curtis's Cary Grant impersonation in Some Like It Hot?).  Overall, a lesser effort, but I'm sure there are worse Cary Grant films if you're a completist.