Review of I Was a Male War Bride (1949) by Jon A — 04 Oct 2007

You know, from all the fuss the preview makes of it, I pretty much went into this expecting Cary Grant to go into drag ten minutes in and stay that way until the end. This isn't what happened. He's in drag for perhaps all of five minutes just before the end; most of the movie is about the red tape the Army makes people go through--and its sexism.

I went to an Army ceremony recently. Graham's gotten home, you see, and the day he did, the Army did this thing where, instead of just letting us get to spend time with our loved ones, we had to listen to painful speeches and two prayers by the chaplain. And when one of the commanding officers was lecturing us about sex (really; it was awful), he kept having to correct himself to say "spouse" instead of "husband." This is [i]sixty years[/i] after the wacky events of tonight's feature.

In tonight's film, Cary Grant is--no, really--a French officer. No, he doesn't sound French; he sounds like Cary Grant. Who cares? At any rate, he spends the first twenty minutes of the movie fighting with Ann Sheridan. Then, he spends ten minutes going through the bureacracy to marry her. Then, he spends the rest of the picture going through the bureaucracy to go back to the US with her.

The thing, of course, is that everything is set up for soldiers and their [i]wives[/i]; soldiers and their [i]husbands[/i] are not expected. All of the paperwork is for women. In the end, he ends up in drag because they won't let [i]Mr.[/i] Rochard on the boat, so he disguises himself as Mrs. Rochard. Briefly. Just before the happily-ever-after.

The best part of this is that the movie declares itself to be based on the story by Henri Rochard. In short, Cary Grant is playing a real guy. I don't know what else Rochard did with his life; IMDB only has the one entry on him. Presumably, he went back to the US with his wife and lived a mostly nondescript wife, except for selling this one story. Wikipedia has nothing on him.

This is not Cary Grant's best film. Heck, it isn't even Ann Sheridan's best film. (Leaving aside her brief, uncredited appearance as "Streetwalker" in [i]Treasure of the Sierra Madre[/i], even!) But it is amusing, and it's also got a certain amount of sociological interest for its portrayal of Army bureaucracy circa 1945. (The movie was made in '49, but you have to figure a few years for the story to become a movie.) Not to mention the extra difficulty of a man doing what only women were expected to do. I'm just thinking there had to be more to the actual marriage than the one we see here.