Hitchcock said he did this unexpected genre piece (one of his few romantic comedies) because he admired Carole Lombard so much and she asked him. He told François Truffaut, “Since I really didn’t understand the type of people who were portrayed in the film, all I did was to photograph the scenes as written…” but you have to appreciate that for a romantic comedy it also stems from a solid concept: a couple who detest each other find out they were never actually legally married in the first place. The couple in question even have rules in their relationship, for example that neither of them will leave the room if they have a quarrel until the conflict is resolved. Sure, it’s hard to imagine how any kind of story can rise out of this, but it’s more than most rom-coms begin with…

There’s little here to recommend it but Hitchcock does what he can with the material. There’s a very fun use of sound early on which I’m always surprised isn’t done more often in movies (perhaps because it goes against how music is applied at the last minute to movies these days – the only recent examples I can think of are animated, Monster House and Bolt) – out of the blue, the husband starts whistling exactly in sync to the movie’s music score. There’s an amusing scene with a cat in a restaurant which seems like a more workshopped version of the rather darker cat/dinner scene in Rich and Strange, and that’s very much the Hitchcock that’s on display here… I find something, though perhaps not as cinematically relevant, about Hitchcock’s least “Hitchcockian” movies that seem they might somehow say the most about his concerns. It would be very interesting to one day sit down and only watch these “lesser” works of his and see what picture of him emerges. In the simplest terms what it shows is that this man who introduced some of the darkest thoughts into the 20th Century was not averse the finer, simpler pleasures in life.

This is an unbelievably light movie, really, but considering, as I said in my The Farmer’s Wife review that I don’t usually get along with this genre at all, there must be something to this one to make it perfectly watchable to me. The “jokey” hatred between the two leads here is something that, especially in my eyes, is very hard to do right (I can’t stand when people try to do it in real life… like Maria in West Side Story, I have never learned to joke that way); but there are certainly times here when Lombard and Robert Montgomery almost match the finest example of this kind of relationship: Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney’s “Bitch.” “Bastard.” exchange in Two for the Road …and that from me is very high praise indeed.

Tags: comedy, Hitchcock

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