Silver Screen Standards: My Favorite Wife (1940)

My Favorite Wife (1940)

I’ve shown a lot of comedies to my lifetime learners
over the years, but I’ve rarely heard an audience laugh as uproariously as they
did during a recent screening of My Favorite Wife (1940), which we
watched as part of a series featuring Cary Grant. The peals of laughter prove
that Grant and his costar, Irene Dunne, can still enchant an audience with
their screwball antics more than 80 years later, even if the original
production of the picture was marred by Leo McCarey’s unexpected absence and
problems with the preview version that required last-minute corrections. You
don’t need to know about any of that to enjoy My Favorite Wife, and you
don’t need to know about the personal histories of the major players, either,
but the knowledge does add some fascinating layers to this wacky, fast-paced
romp about a couple who get a second chance at being a family.

Irene Dunne stars as Ellen Arden, whose disappearance
in a shipwreck leads her husband, Nick (Cary Grant), to have her declared
legally dead seven years later so that he can marry a new wife, Bianca (Gail
Patrick). Ironically, Ellen returns from being marooned on an island on the
same day as the declaration and wedding, which creates problems for the
confused and now bigamous Nick. Ellen pressures Nick to break the news to
Bianca but fails to mention that her companion on the island was the ruggedly
handsome Stephen (Randolph Scott), whom she refers to as “Adam.” Seething with
jealousy over his first wife, but unable to tell his second wife the truth,
Nick suffers comedic torment inflicted by Ellen, Bianca, and Stephen as they
force him to confront the situation he has inadvertently created.

My Favorite Wife
is the second of three pictures starring Grant and Dunne, following their first
successful pairing in The Awful Truth (1937), which Leo McCarey had
directed. A car accident sidelined McCarey and led to Garson Kanin stepping in
as director, but the cast and crew felt the strain of worrying about McCarey
during production. McCarey was able to return for the editing process, and he
helped create a new third act to address problems with the preview cut. None of
those issues are apparent in the final version of the movie, which showcases
both the onscreen chemistry and the comedic talent of the two leads. The movie
also marks the second and final screen pairing of Grant and Randolph Scott, who
had first met when they made Hot Saturday in 1932. Grant and Scott then
moved in together and were housemates off and on for the next decade, leading
to much speculation about the nature of their relationship. You can read a
great deal more about that in David Canfield’s 2024 Vanity Fair article,
“Cary
Grant and Randolph Scott’s Hollywood Story.” Knowing about
their shared history adds another layer of interest to the movie’s depiction of
them as romantic rivals, especially when Nick obsessively imagines the swimsuit
clad Stephen turning somersaults and demonstrating his attractive physique.

Because my lifetime learners and I live in Alabama, we
also find the movie’s cluster of Southern actors noteworthy, especially because
both The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife include scenes with
Irene Dunne speaking in an exaggerated Southern drawl. In the earlier picture,
Dunne mimics the over-the-top accent of Dixie Belle Lee, played by Lexington,
Kentucky native Joyce Compton, but Dunne herself was born nearby in Louisville.
In My Favorite Wife, Ellen causes Bianca to sniff at her assumption of a
Southern accent while pretending to be an old family friend of the Ardens, but
Gail Patrick, the actress who plays Bianca, was born in Birmingham, Alabama,
and actually studied law at the University of Alabama before embarking on her
Hollywood career. Randolph Scott was born in Virginia, grew up in North
Carolina, and attended both Georgia Tech and the University of North Carolina,
making him quite the embodiment of Southern gentility, and of the three
Southern stars in My Favorite Wife he’s the only one sporting a natural
sounding regional accent. In both pictures, Dunne seems to flirt with being
Southern while also perpetuating Hollywood stereotypes about how Southerners
talk, and that’s both fascinating and frustrating to those of us whose accents
are being simultaneously erased and parodied in classic Hollywood films.

My Favorite Wife earned three Oscar nominations, with nods for Original Story, Art Direction, and Original Score, but it went home empty-handed. 1940 was a big year for Cary Grant, with His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story also coming out that same year. Irene Dunne picked up her third Best Actress nomination for The Awful Truth, and in 1940 she earned a fourth for Love Affair (1939), but, sadly, her five career nominations never produced a win. Grant and Dunne’s third and final collaboration would be the domestic melodrama Penny Serenade (1941). Randolph Scott is, of course, best remembered as a Western star in films like 7 Men from Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), and Ride the High Country (1962), but you can find both Scott and Gail Patrick in Murders in the Zoo (1933). Patrick eventually became the executive producer of the iconic TV series, Perry Mason (1957-1966), but you’ll also find her in memorable roles in My Man Godfrey (1936) and Stage Door (1937).

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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub

Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.

Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.