Mon 17 May 2021
A Movie Review by David Vineyard: THE WIFE TAKES A FLYER (1942).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[9] Comments
THE WIFE TAKES A FLYER. 1942. Franchot Tone, Joan Bennett, Allyn Joslyn, Lloyd Corrigan, Cecil Cunningham, Hans Conreid. Screenplay by Gina Kaus (her story) & Jay Dratler, with additional dialogue by Harry Segall. Directed by Richard Wallace. Available for viewing online on several sites, including this one.
With World War II coming at the end of the heyday of the screwball comedy of the Thirties, it was only natural that the new war movies would cross genres with the popular romantic comedies of only a year or so before, and perhaps natural too that the fit and the public reaction would be mixed.
While Lubitch’s To Be Or Not To Be with Jack Benny was the hallmark of absolute genius for the genre not everything worked quite so well, and even that classic met mixed reactions when it came out.
Even before the war there had been some uncomfortable if admirable attempts at mixing the two like Mitchell Leisen and Billy Wilder’s Arise My Love, a romantic comedy that turns quite dark and serious as the war intrudes or Leo McCarey’s Once Upon a Honeymoon with American stripper Ginger Rogers married to Nazi provocateur Walter Slezak encountering American radio journalist Cary Grant (who at one point comes close to being sterilized in a Concentration Camp) and ending with a jolly turn as Slezak falls overboard on a passenger liner on the way to practice his provocations in the States giving Grant, Rogers, and the ship’s Captain pause to debate whether they should rescue him … they don’t.
These films are a slightly different genre than out right comedies like All Through the Night or various versions of comedic stars battling comic opera Nazi’s (Cairo even does it to music as bumbling Robert Young sinks a German sub while American spy Jeanette MacDonald warbles), and as the genre goes none are stranger than 1942’s The Wife Takes a Flyer.
Allyn Joslyn is Major Zellfritz, a total Hitlerian idiot replete with a Sergeant whose only job is to massage his arm as he tires of Heil Hitler-ing. Along with every other Nazi in Occupied Holland he is out to find a flier shot down the night before who saw secret Nazi installations. His search leads him to the home of the Woverman’s whose daughter in law, the beautiful Anita (Joan Bennett) is divorcing their son who is due back from the sanitarium that evening.
Zellfritz is instantly smitten and moves himself in, which would be bad enough save that the missing flier, Christopher Reynolds (Franchot Tone), has just shown up hiding in the cistern, and in desperation gets passed off as the returning husband the insane Hendrik (Hans Conreid), and Reynolds is instantly smitten with Anita too.
Reynolds is playing madman and flirting, Zellfritz is blocking him and madly jealous, the Woverman’s (Lloyd Corrigan and Barbara Brown) only want to keep the Nazis from realizing they are hiding an Allied flyer, and Anita only wants her divorce the next day and to get out of the madhouse.
Meanwhile rather than be released Hendrik has broken out.
Oh, and of course Reynolds needs to make a clandestine meeting and arrange to get out of Holland so he can report on the secret installations he saw. But first the has to sabotage Anita’s divorce because he is so smitten with her he doesn’t want her to go away.
Before it’s over there is divorce proceeding where Reynolds goes completely nuts, Anita moves in with a home full of man crazy older ladies who get enlisted in Reynold’s mission, a public trial (for an assault the real Hendrick perpetrated) where Reynolds joins the Nazi Party, and all the time he and Anita are falling in love.
At no point does anyone address how American flier Reynolds and the other flier he meets up with happen to speak Dutch well enough to pass as natives among the Dutch or the Germans.
Granted screwball comedy operates on a different level than the mundane reality we all live in, but this film is almost surreal in its disregard for any kind of linear storytelling or human behavior. In most screwball comedy there are at least a handful of normal people to react against and poke fun at. Here everyone but Bennett is completely nuts, and even her character seems totally indifferent to WW II.
And that doesn’t even address Allyn Joslyn’s performance as Zellfritz, a broad even cartoonish interpretation that makes Sig Ruman look restrained. His face screwed up as if he had been sucking on alum, his walk strangely stiff, and his behavior better suited to a Daffy Duck cartoon than a human it is the ultimate comic opera Nazi in a genre where comic opera Nazi’s were the standard.
The problem is that at no point are any of the Nazis in the film even vaguely threatening. Granted To Be Or Not To Be was broad, but this never quite rises to that level of genius and instead is just strange, an odd relic of two genres that weren’t really compatible colliding head on and ultimately not making a lick of sense. It is fun, with that cast of actors it would almost have to be, but if you engage your brain at all you may find it slightly bruised by the effort to make sense of the goings on.
It’s hard to believe that no one at any point during the filming of this did anyone speak up and ask what the hell was going on.
Maybe they were afraid someone would tell them.
May 17th, 2021 at 8:07 pm
With that cast, I’d like to think this should have been a lot better than you say it is, David. But even though you can watch it online easily enough, there’s only one other external review of it on IMDb. I think that’s enough to qualify it as a Forgotten Movie.
May 17th, 2021 at 8:39 pm
It has its moments, but its hard to reconcile the War with this particular brand of screwball comedy, and it lacks the brilliance and the heart that makes TO BE OR NOT TO BE work.
It’s not a bad film, but it is one that never quite reaches the heights of antic genius that might make it work, and Joslyn’s performance is so eccentric you have to see it to believe it.
Where TBONTB walks a fine line between antic genius and the reality of Nazi occupation in Poland, this dances all over it with big flat and none too graceful feet.
Tone, Bennett, and Conreid are all pretty good despite the difficulties, but whatever Joslyn is doing is difficult to understand unless he had been watching too many cartoons.
May 17th, 2021 at 10:34 pm
These days, few people are aware that Allyn Joslyn played Mortimer (the Cary Grant part) in the original Broadway production of Arsenic And Old Lace.
I’ll venture the guess that Joslyn was directed to play to the balconies at that point – and since this would be just a few years before he did this movie … well, I’m just doing the ’40s math.
Years afterward, Allyn Joslyn closed out his career with the pilot film of The Addams Family; by 1964, he was using the brakes pretty well.
May 17th, 2021 at 11:34 pm
It is no fault of his, of course, but Allyn Joslyn is one of those few actors who face does not come to mind whenever I see his name in something I’m reading. I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this, but I find it strange.
If ever I decide to watch this movie, it will not be because either Franchot Tone or Allyn Jostyn are in it. Do you need any more guesses?
May 18th, 2021 at 12:13 am
Allyn Joslyn had a nice part in Only Angels Have Wings, and there was nothing wrong with the film or with him. The Wife Takes A Flyer is over the top, as it was designed to be, and Bennett is sane because she is supposed to be doing Bud Abbott.
May 18th, 2021 at 7:28 am
‘Five Graves to Cairo’ had a light, comedic touch mixed with a wartime frolic.
May 18th, 2021 at 12:51 pm
Director Richard Wallace has attracted no attention, from a hundred years of film historians surveying Hollywood output. His name is not in the index of such massive films histories as those by Thompson & Bordwell, or David Cook.
My records show I mildly enjoyed two films directed by Wallace, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (based on a Kelley Roos novel) and THE MASQUERADER. I’ve never made any studies of these films, and make no major claims for them at all. My one view of THE FALLEN SPARROW was something NOT enjoyable.
By contrast, Lubitsch is the center of a massive literature – deservedly so.
May 18th, 2021 at 7:39 pm
Joslyn is wonderful in many films even as lead in a few B films including a pretty good mystery programmer. He was a fine comedic character actor and as pointed out above more than solid in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.
I don’t doubt he played the role as written and as directed here, right down to the obvious gag of THE END on his BVD’s, but the film never gels as it should. I don’t fault him or any of the cast for the film, for that matter I’m not too hard on the screenwriters and director, the whole idea of the film was flawed and once it was okayed by the studio and producer everyone put their considerable talents into making it, but it just isn’t what it could or even should be, and I suspect with that flawed concept never could be.
There are films like this that for some reason just don’t work. Mike Grost mentions FALLEN SPARROW and it’s a good example of every element being there, and it just doesn’t work.
There are good things in this. Bennett is gorgeous and plays well off Tone and the madness around her, Tone has considerable charm and you wish he and Bennett were in a better picture together. The only actor who hits the right note for the film is Conreid, who shines in his brief moment as a sort of sane madman, a contradiction that seems oddly right for this film.
May 18th, 2021 at 7:55 pm
David, The Fallen Sparrow is a product that could have jelled, plenty of talent and an intriguing idea, especially for the period. But, as you point out, it does not. On a personal note, despite real brilliance in her Fordian films, especially How Green Was My Valley, Bennett has it all over O’Hara, and I do not mean in the looks department.