Garson Kanin | My Favorite Wife / 1940

the man on the flying trapeze

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bella and Samuel Spewack (screenplay, based on a story by Leo McCarey, Garson Kanin, John McClain, and Bella and Samuel Spewack), Garson Kanin (director) My Favorite Wife / 1940

 

     In some respects related to Leo McCarey’s brilliant 1937 comedy The Awful Truth—particularly in its last scenes—Garson Kanin’s 1940 film My Favorite Wife, produced by a wheelchair-bound McCarey, who planned to direct it until he suffered an automobile accident in late 1939, uses Cary Grant’s bisexuality to subvert the moralistic concerns regarding sexuality required, evidently, by the Production Code and the studios.

     On the surface, of course, Grant as Nick Arden is portrayed as a virile heterosexual: having lost his first wife, Ellen Wagstaff Arden (played by Irene Dunne), to a shipwreck, he is in the process as the movie begins of marrying for a second time. In these first scenes, some of the most humorous of the film, we discover that Ellen, an anthropological photographer, apparently has been drowned seven years earlier when the ship on which she was traveling sank, leaving behind the husband and her two young children behind. After much judicial confusion, the judge declares the first wife dead, freeing Nick to marry Bianca Bates, who has spent most of the proceedings narcissistically peering into a pocket mirror.

      Soon after, we discover that Ellen, his first wife, is not only still living, but has been rescued from a deserted island by a Portuguese freighter. Notably, she is dressed in men’s clothing, in quite the opposite manner from the femme fatale Bianca; indeed, her children wonder aloud whether she is a lady or a man. As if we needed further evidence of Bianca’s character, Ellen’s mother-in-law, after announcing that Nick has again married, admits to disliking her son’s new wife. The sexually neutered Ellen, who has been “running wild,” as she later admits, is clearly a more appropriate partner than the selfish catlike Bianca—a woman whose major complaint seems to be that Nick will not wear the tasteless leopard housecoat for which she has spent “all afternoon” shopping!

      Given the hypocritical moral values of the film industry, wherein sex is perceived as being linked only to marriage, Ellen can still save the day if she prevents the connubial couple from bedding down together. Off she rushes to Yosemite Inn—the same hotel where she spent her first married night—to reveal herself and in so doing restore her lawful rights. Indeed, the comic high jinks which follow produces much of the desired effect. Upon discerning that Ellen is still alive, Nick refuses the advances of his new bride as he attempts to escape their conjugal nest. However, we soon discover, Nick is also quite terrified of her “high-strung” personality—presumably meaning her temper—and has a difficult time in breaking the news that his former wife has returned from the dead. Although he avoids sex—the couple drive back without stopping until they arrive home, presumably in Los Angeles—he has been unable to extricate himself from Bianca’s clutches.

      In short, the writers, Bella and Samuel Spewack, have separated the two women through the comic use of a series of sexist stereotypes. Bianca is not only a beautiful woman, but represents all women: Like the younger daughter in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (a character which the Spewacks would revisit in their 1958 musical with Cole Porter, Kiss Me, Kate) she is a young, cunning, bitchy, selfish woman. Ellen Wagstaff Arden, on the other hand, in her devotion to a career—she has, after all, left her children alone to pursue her vocation—in her use of her maiden name, in her hyponymic first name (Ellen, Allen), along with that first costume, compared by the writers to a man, and in her sensibility which is, we gradually discover, closer to Nick himself, we almost immediately perceive she is related to the male being which we begin to perceive Nick is more comfortable. We soon discover, moreover, that Ellen shares Nick’s verbal abilities—Nick is a lawyer—and, just as he has not yet told his new wife the truth, she has held a secret from her ex-husband.

     An inexplicable late-night visit from an insurance agent who has heard, through the grapevine, more about Ellen than Nick has, reveals that his ex-wife’s deserted island was shared with another man whom she called Adam and, who in turn, called her Eve. So begins the “true” story of My Favorite Wife: Nick’s fall from connubial grace and his expulsion from the proverbial garden—the forest Arden.

     From Nick’s first moment of knowing of the man in Ellen’s “deserted” life, Stephen Burkett haunts him. In the context of the literalized heterosexual comedy, of course, the haunting appears to take the form of jealousy. But more careful observers will immediately perceive that there is something deeper going on here. The joke that poor Adam is a kind of neutered being who hangs out at the YMCA (code for “pansy”) is somewhat dispelled when Nick discovers he is living in the swank Pacific Club. Upon a visit to that establishment where he pages his prey, Nick encounters instead a stunning hunk of a male—a nearby woman admirer asking Nick if the man about to acrobatically leap into the pool is Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller—of whom, as Grant’s eyes pop out in wonderment, his entire body rising up as if in sudden erection, he too is clearly in awe. The fact that the actor playing this superman, Randolph Scott, had been Grant’s roommate and rumored lover for eight years by the time this movie was filmed—the two men would continue to live together for two more years after the film, representing a ten-year relationship—and that two can be seen wearing matching pinky rings throughout the movie may not have been perceived by the audiences of the day, but was certainly an issue in the film’s remaining conceits. *

     For almost immediately after this encounter, Nick’s mind is consumed by Burkett, transforming even his vision by the constant presence of an acrobatic figure, like an angelic putto, floating before his eyes. His wife’s attempt to further deceive him by trotting out a nebbish shoe salesman claiming to be Burkett, results in a series of activities in which the two attempt to get even with one another.

     He suggests lunch at the Pacific Club, where Burkett-Adam reveals himself, and Ellen Wagstaff Arden is bested, her hopes of reclaiming Nick becoming “all wet” as she falls into the pool.

     In need of clothes, Ellen insists the two men—whose companionship is necessitated, in terms of the heterosexual comedy, by their refusal to leave the other alone with Dunne—return to Nick’s house to retrieve them. There looms the jilted Bianca, who has hired a Freudian psychiatrist to explain her husband’s condition.

     “The love impulse is often confused,” he proclaims, evidenced, clearly, by his observation of Nick posing before the mirror in a woman’s hat and a woman’s dress held up against his bodily frame. “It’s not for me, but for my friend. He’s waiting in the car!” Nick as Grant explains, while the character of Burkett, Grant’s real-live lover waits below.

 

      Like the writers of Bringing up Baby, who telegraphed Grant’s homosexuality in his donning of a feathered robe, the Spewacks use the possibility of a man (or men) in drag as representing a sexuality of which the movie itself cannot speak.

     Again, it hardly matters, given the terms imposed upon the film, that the gender will be corrected in time for the last frame, for the observant audience members already now know “the score.” Bianca—the epitome of “womanhood”—is no longer in the picture. The battle for both husband and wife is now between the handsome hunk (Scott)—who, if we are to literally believe Ellen’s story, that he did not engage in sex with her for their seven years of island existence, even more clearly brings his sexuality into question—or a figure of somewhat confused sexuality (either Grant or Dunne). To ease the necessary story back upon its track, Burkett is sent scurrying on his way to the paradise of isolation he left behind.

     But even the plot’s attempts to return Nick to his rightful location in a bed next to his wife’s bed (a requirement, once again, of the hypocritical prigs of the day) demands that he be transformed from Nicholas the man into Nicholas the Saint, as he dons the holiday costume of Santa Claus. Presumably, since the two have already produced their beloved and loving children, they shall remain happily chaste ever after.

 

* Another minor clue that Grant is somehow connected with Scott shows up in Ellen/Dunne’s choice of an explanation for her remaining in Bianca’s house; she explains that she is an old friend of the family from Virginia, and for several scenes puts on an exaggerated accent that supposedly represents her upbringing in the South. In truth, Dunne was born in Kentucky; Randolph Scott was a Virginian.

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2003

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2008).