TOGETHER AGAIN (1944)

[Update 08/06/2023: Need rewatch this film and redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

The always beautiful Irene Dunne is the widower who is also the mayor of the a small town. With so much responsibility she hasn't had any time for romance. A fact that her former father-in-law is frequent to bring up. One night during a thunderstorm lightening knocks the head off the statue of her late husband. Charles Coburn (the father-in-law) says it's a sign from her late husband to carry on with her life. Dunne laughs it off but when she meets the sculptor who's going to make a new statue she starts to maybe believe the story is true. The sculptor (Charles Boyer) is a very handsome man and instantly in love with Dunne.

Different romantic screwball hijinks take place and even though the beginning was a little slow it really starts to pick up steam in the second half, especially when Dunne's attractive teenage daughter accidentally thinks that the sculptor has proposed to her! That part was really funny.

Not the greatest Dunne movie, but I enjoyed it and would watch it again.

LE MAGNIFIQUE (1973)

"He was devoured by a shark in a phone booth."

Super-spy Bob St. Clair makes James Bond look like a pussy! He can shoot a single bullet into a tree and kill 5 soldiers, he can fight his way out of evil villains lair without even breaking a sweat and, of course, he always gets the girl. Unfortunately, Bob St. Clair is just a figment of novelist Francois Merlin's imagination. Merlin's real life is nowhere near as perfect. He has no money, his apartment is a dump and he's divorced. He has very little control over the things that happen in his real life, so when somebody pisses him off...he throws that person into his story and lets St. Clair shoot him to pieces! The same goes for the good things in his life like his sexy upstairs neighbor, who just happens to be St. Clair's current love interest.

But things turn out to not always be perfect in St. Clair's world either, especially when Merlin gets mad at him and turns him into a bumbling idiot and then finally a limp-wristed homosexual who runs off with the villain on a two-seater bicycle!

Everybody in this movie does a great job, especially the three main actors who all play duel roles, but I think the main praise should go to director/co-writer Philippe de Broca who does an excellent job of blending the two worlds so seamlessly that the story never lets up for even a moment. I was happy and smiling from beginning to end. Not many films can do that.

Favorite moments: when St. Clair's cyanide tablet falls out of his hollow tooth and kills all the tourist in the swimming pool; when a clumsy St. Clair gets mad at his robe; when St. Clair pours the hot water on his infected finger and all of the moments with Jacqueline Bisset.  She is absolutely radiant in this movie.

Highly recommended.

THEODORA GOES WILD (1936)

How much you like this film will probably depend on how much you're a fan of Irene Dunne and/or Melvyn Douglas. Myself, I'm not the world's biggest Douglas fan. I've seen a number of his films and he does nothing for me. All I can ever think about when I see him is how somebody else would have done such a better job in his role. On the other hand Irene is pretty good considering she's working with a boring script.

Let's talk about the story. There's a huge fuss going all over the country about this new steaming sex novel called "The Sinner". It's a nationwide bestseller, but nowhere is the fuss bigger than in the small hamlet of Lynnfield. The local newspaper published the first chapter and it caused the righteous old ladies to go berserk and raise such a stink that the newspaper agreed to stop printing the story. In the midst of all this crazy behavior is Irene Dunne, a quiet woman who lives with her three cunts, I mean, aunts. She's also secretly the author of "The Sinner". She had no idea her story would cause such an uproar and she'll do anything to keep her secret.

Enter the annoying Melvyn Douglas who finds out her secret and is now using his knowledge to blackmail Dunne into employing him as a gardener in the hopes of...well I'm not really sure what he's hoping for. Things happen (I'm not going to give it all away) and soon Dunne turns the tables on him and is now blackmailing him! That sounds like it could be funny and when I rented it I was hoping that it would be, but instead I just got a few chuckles and that's it. I would have loved to see what Preston Sturges could have done with that story idea instead. Skip it.