Saturday Night at the Movies: Is There Life After "I Do"?

Plus: The Movie The Man Doesn't Want You To See

I don’t make a habit of using this space to recommend movies currently in theaters, let alone ones I have yet to see, but I’ll make an exception today for The Sound of Freedom. This is the movie Disney didn’t want you to see. It’s a picture with the highly controversial ideological stance of … being against child sex trafficking. For some odd reason which I will leave to your imagination, the mainstream critics who get mad when you call them groomers are all super, super upset that this anti-child-sex-trafficking message is doing well with audiences. It’s even upstaging Indiana Jones and the Luby’s Early Bird Special at the box office. In the words of one very upset reviewer, the movie “pretends to be a real movie, like a ‘pregnancy crisis center’ masquerad[es] as a bona fide health clinic.” If that doesn’t get you to buy a ticket or twelve, I don’t know what will. And you can support a fantastic pregnancy center here! (p.s. I’m just joking, Luby’s is fantastic).  

A few weeks back, I praised Manhattan Murder Mystery as a fun watch. I think one of the reasons I enjoy it so much is that it is one of the last popular examples of a once ubiquitous genre: the post-wedding comedy.

We all know the outlines of the boy-meets-girl romantic comedy, it’s at least as old as Shakespeare, and Jane Austen had a thing or two to write about it as well. Even as late as the 1980s and 1990s, with John Hughes adapting the genre to high schoolers and Nora Ephron adapting it to Meg Ryan, audiences have loved watching a pair of charming people meet, fall for each other, and head for the chapel (or, er, prom).

But what if the couple don’t need to “meet cute,” because they’ve already met? What if they already know each other intimately? What if prom, and chapel, and all the other excitements of the early years of romance are long past? What if, to put a point on it, the couple in our romantic comedy is already married?

It may seem strange to us, but back in the Golden Age, this was one of the most productive settings for Hollywood comedy. It makes a lot of sense when you consider their audience, in the 1930s and 40s: lots of married people! Many of whom married young, as it was normal to do until our cultural overseers decided it was far better to lean in to the corporate rat race than to have a meaningful life. Having to rediscover that early ‘spark’ with your spouse was probably a more pressing societal concern in the days when so many married so young, in contrast to our own era when we have record numbers of people never getting married at all.

True, Astaire and Rogers will forever be the masters of the meet cute, and these were their years to shine. Yet other couples were more convincing on screen as old marrieds than young lovers. Prime among these were William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles. If you like your romantic comedy with a good mystery thrown in, the Thin Man series is for you – and yes, that is the very young Jimmy Stewart, pre-stardom, showing up as a murder suspect in one of them. My favorite Powell/Loy movies, however, were the ones without too many dead bodies. In Love Crazy, Powell fakes insanity to avoid being served divorce papers, and many hilarious hijinks ensue (I will, with effort, restrain myself from commenting on the psychiatric establishment for the moment, but let’s just say their competence hasn’t noticeably improved from the baseline of 1940s farce). My favorite, though, is I Love You Again, in which Powell plays a dull, conventional sort of fellow who neglects his wife – but then realizes, after a bump on the head grants him some timely amnesia, that he is in fact married to the divine Myrna Loy and any man would be nuts to neglect her! How will he convince her that he’s a new man, one worth loving in return? Do check it out, it’s a great one.

Powell is not the only legendary leading man who made a career out of rekindling marital romance. Bringing Up Baby is the sparkling exception to the rule; most of Cary Grant’s best work takes place long after the honeymoon is over. A movie often in discussion as one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time is The Philadelphia Story, in which Grant finagles an invitation to ex-wife Katherine Hepburn’s second wedding; it is a wonderful, profound movie about pride, forgiveness, and love, with plenty of humor and charm thrown in (to give you an idea of how great it is, consider that you get a Grant-Hepburn romantic comedy, plus a Jimmy Stewart one thrown in for free). Speaking of Grant sabotaging his ex-wive’s marriages, don’t miss His Girl Friday, which features just about the fastest, wittiest banter you’ll ever hear, as Grant pulls out all the stops - kidnapping included - to keep Rosalind Russell from walking down the aisle with anyone but him.  The Awful Truth is another classic comedy that uses the prospect of divorce to wake a couple to the beauty of their marriage, and is probably the funniest on this list (poor Ralph Bellamy is the unfortunate other man in both of those, guy couldn’t catch a break!). Yet there is more than divorce that can estrange lovers in the Cary Grant cinematic universe: how about a shipwreck on a deserted island? And this time, instead of Grant plotting against a wedding, what if it is his own upcoming nuptials that get sabotaged? That’s the plot of My Favorite Wife, in which Irene Dunne (also featured in The Awful Truth and tied with Myrna Loy for best romantic comedy wife ever), thought long dead, reappears just before Grant ties the knot a second time.

Romantic comedies seem to be on the way out, and the heyday of post-wedding comedy is long gone as we head towards a thoroughly post-marriage culture. But what a heyday it was. Next time you feel like your marriage has entered a bit of a dry spell, you can always fake insanity, hit your head in just the right spot to give yourself amnesia, or get shipwrecked on a deserted island. Or do yourself and your sore skull a favor, watch one of these hilarious, wonderful movies and let Powell, Loy, Dunne, Grant, and co help remind you why you fell in love in the first place.

Hope you enjoy them all and have a wonderful weekend! On the occasion of my wedding anniversary earlier this month, please allow me to dedicate this post to my own favorite wife.