MY FAVORITE WIFE, 1940

MY FAVORITE WIFE, 1940

Directed by Garson Kanin, the film stars Irene Dunn and Cary Grant as Ellen and Nick Arden , Gail Patrick as Bianca Bates, and Randolph Scott as Stephen Burkett.

The core of this movie for me is the unjust treatment of a woman in the name of monogamy. It is a comedy of sex with a serious underbelly that no one was intended to consider.

Dunn and Scott are shipwrecked on an uninhabited island for seven years. Although the plot is less specific about what transpired there than in the movie remake with Doris Day and Rock Hudson, we are told that the answer is ”nothing.”

Meanwhile, husband Cary Grant, who has brought up their two children, marries anew on the very day that his supposedly dead wife resurfaces.

In keeping with the cultural norms of the period, and even today, one of these “wives” must go. We needn’t guess who. The answer is clear, although the resolution of the dilemma comes nearly at the end, after a highly comedic courtroom skit to legally resolve the case.

My beef with the movie and with our culture is in how new wife, Patrick, must suffer rejection although she has done nothing wrong. As Grant gives all manner of excuses not to consummate their marriage while she waits crying and wondering what about her repels him, I keep saying out loud, “This is wrong!”

Our moral ideas haven’t changed much in the 70 years since that movie, but we can at least now ask: why monogamy? And I’m not just being a male chauvinist either, wishing that Grant had kept both wives (which I do), I have contempt for the story of Dunn’s chastity during seven years on the island with a handsome jock (Scott), thinking only of returning to her husband.

I’m upset that we are supposed to leave the film smiling and content (yes, I know, it was only a comedy), with not a thought for the expendable wife (not the favorite). True, she didn’t have the understanding and rapport with the kids that Dunn had, but she didn’t deserve to be discarded like a piece of trash either.