spaghetti and meatballs
by Douglas Messerli
Charles Martin (writer and director) My Dear Secretary / 1948
Between rejecting his advances and her attempts to reform him, Gaylord
pens her own best seller, outdoing her former employer. He has no choice, since
she has hooked him as well, but to marry her and reform. End of story?
Fortunately not.
While these two carry out their timid romance, a whole cast of character
actors rush in to make this film a comic delight. Most notable among them, is a
sort of live-in butler-friend, Ronnie Hastings (Keenan Wynn). Writer and
director Martins is quite obviously unsure of how to define his relationship to
Waterbury; is he a kind of sardonic sponge, taking advantage of an old
friendship or a sort of would-be lover, cooking, ironing, and housekeeping for
his bachelor partner?* It hardly matters, for he is a failure at whatever he
attempts except for the constant campy humor he dishes up to nearly everyone he
meets, particularly the outrageous landlady, Horrible Hannah Reeve (played with
perfection by Florence Bates). Instead of paying the rent, Waterbury awards her
with Hasting's barbs:
Mrs. Reeves: I
guess I'll run along.
Ronnie Hastings:
Must you go? I was just poisoning the tea.
Taxi-drivers, bookies, ex-lovers, a wannabe actress, and a detective run
in and out of the Waterbury apartment to bring further comic mayhem into this
pallid romance.
None of this makes sense except as a kind of desperate attempt to keep
the implausible relationship of the two leads from view. And it almost works. The
director himself seems to be of two minds, bouncing his gifted cast back and
forth between a slightly moronic romance or a series of comic riffs. Wynn's
character is fortunately there to point out the inevitable choice:
Ronnie Hastings:
Is it informal, or shall I bathe?
Or, as he later describes the role
the aspiring actress, Dawn O'Malley, would play, based on Waterbury's
non-existent book: "You have to be insincere and be a moron."
Better that direction than taking the pious Gaylord and her marriage to
Waterbury seriously. Or, for that matter even her own literary success. Fortunately,
the comedy boils over the soggy romance:
Ronnie Hastings:
I made a wedding breakfast...spaghetti and
meatballs.
Los Angeles, June 11, 2012
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2012).
*The fact that Waterbury's romantic
interest has a male nick-name, Steve, and a last name that suggests quite the
opposite of a heterosexual relationship, Gaylord, further spices the pot
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