My Favorite Wife (1940)

Seven years after being lost at sea, Nick Arden (Cary Grant) has his wife Ellen (Irene Dunne) legally declared dead and gets re-married to Bianca (Gail Patrick). Just as Nick and Bianca are heading off on their honeymoon together, Ellen arrives back at home. It turns out she had spent the past seven years stuck on a deserted island and finally been rescued. On the trip home, Ellen had time to mentally prepare herself for all the things she expected to change in her absence, but the one thing she hadn’t expected is that Nick may have re-married. When she hears where Nick and Bianca have left for their honeymoon, she goes to see find them.

Obviously, Nick is stunned to see his first wife waiting for him at the hotel. He doesn’t have a clue about how he should explain a situation like this to Bianca, so he does his best to hide it from her, which brings out some very odd behavior. Bianca is considering leaving Nick and wants to get him professional help. But then this situation gets even complicated when Nick gets a visit from an insurance adjuster who informs him that Ellen wasn’t alone on an island all that time, she was there with a man named Stephen Burkett (Randolph Scott).

Desperate to assure Nick that nothing happened between her and Stephen on the island, Ellen convinces a bland-looking shoe salesman to pose as Stephen and meet with Nick. However, Nick has already done his homework and knows the real Stephen is far more attractive. Just as Nick finally tries to tell Bianca the truth about what’s been going on, she doesn’t believe him until he is suddenly arrested for bigamy and the whole crazy incident gets dragged into a courtroom.

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne really deserve more credit for being a great on-screen duo. They may not have made as many movies as Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy or Myrna Loy and William Powell, but The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife alone are amazing enough for me to put them in that league. It might be easy to think of My Favorite Wife as not being particularly original since it went on to be re-made as Move Over, Darling (and almost re-made as Something’s Gotta Give with Marilyn Monroe, Cyd Charisse, and Dean Martin) and Too Many Husbands has a very similar plot, but My Favorite Wife manages to shine just a bit brighter than the others. While Too Many Husbands felt like a one-note movie that got old fast, My Favorite Wife never felt stale. Simply, it’s a fantastically madcap romantic comedy and that’s all it tries to be.

The Uninvited (1944)

Have you ever gone someplace on vacation and wished you could impulsively buy a house and live there?  Well when brother and sister Rick (Ray Milland) and Pamela (Ruth Hussey) Fitzgerald take a vacation on the Devonshire Coast, that’s just what they do.  While walking with their dog one day, the dog starts chasing a squirrel and they lead Rick and Pamela to a beautiful, old, abandoned house.  They take a look around the house and fall in love with the place.  Both of them would love to buy it, and although Rick has some reservations, Pamela insists that they should go through with it ASAP.  They go to see the house’s owner Commander Beach (Donald Crisp) to make an offer on the place, but when they arrive, he isn’t at home.  Instead they meet Stella Meredith (Gail Russell), his granddaughter.  At first, Stella is very friendly with them, but she suddenly turns cold when she finds out why they were there.  The house they want to buy had once belonged to her mother, who died on the property when she was very young.  When Commander comes home again, Stella begs him not to sell the house.  But ultimately, he’s so desperate to be rid of the place since the maintenance is so expensive that he gladly accepts the Fitzgeralds’ very low offer.  Well, that and he believes the house is haunted.

When the Commander mentions that some of the house’s past occupants had complained about the house being haunted, Rick and Pamela aren’t fazed at all.  They’re eager to move in and go back to the house to look around some more.  This time they find a large artist’s studio with a great ocean view that for some reason, Pam thinks is the one ugly room in the house.  Even though Rick thinks it’d be a great space for him to work in, there’s no denying that the room has an eerie chill in there.  Plus they notice their dog refuses to go upstairs for some reason.  The next day, as Rick is getting ready to go back home to get their things, he hears more rumors about the house being haunted from the local store clerk.  Before he leaves town, he runs into Stella, who apologizes for being rude to them before.  Rick has no hard feelings toward Stella, actually he’s attracted to her, and the two of them end up spending the afternoon sailing together.  The two end up becoming friends and before he leaves town, he invites Stella to come by the house to visit Pamela while he’s away.

Rick returns to find that Pamela has done wonderful job of getting the house in shape while he was away.  But that night, Rick and Pamela hear some mysterious sobbing and begin to think that maybe, just maybe, there was some truth to the rumors about the place being haunted.  They start trying to find out more about the history of the place and deduce that it must be haunted by the ghost of Stella’s mother.  The Commander is truly upset by this idea and doesn’t want Stella to have anything to do with the Fitzgeralds, but one night, she sneaks over to their house anyway.  Stella senses a spirit in the house and believes it to be her mother, but while Rick is playing a song for her on the piano, Stella suddenly starts running toward the cliff that her mother had fallen off of.  Rick stops her in time, but Stella has no memory of how she got there.  Before they get back inside, they hear their maid Lizzie screaming about something.  She had seen a mist in the shape of a woman in the studio and when Stella goes to investigate, the room turns suddenly cold and she faints.  They send for Dr. Scott (Alan Napier) to check on her and he spends the rest of the night telling them about how Stella’s father had an affair with a woman named Carmel and Carmel was the one who pushed Stella’s mother off the cliff.

When Dr. Scott says Stella is well enough to leave, they decide that it’s not safe for her to come back.  But knowing that Stella isn’t going to want to stay away from the house, they decide to stage a séance and fix it to make her believe that the ghost of her mother wants her to stay out of the house.  During the séance, Rick and Dr. Scott do their best to make the Ouija board say what they want it to, but a ghost does take over and tells Stella that she should stay.  Not only that, it also becomes clear that there are two ghosts, not one: Stella’s mother and Carmel.  But their séance is interrupted by the Commander who has come to take Stella away.  The next day, Rick starts talking to Lizzie about how they want to know more about the incident between Stella’s mother and Carmel, but all the people directly involved with the incident are now dead.  Lizzie mentions that Miss Holloway, a close friend of Stella’s mother, is still alive and is running a sanitarium.  Rick and Pamela go to see Miss Holloway, but what they don’t know is that the Commander had brought Stella to Miss Holloway’s.  But when they find out, they try to go back for Stella only to find that Stella has been sent back to the Fitzgeralds’.  When they get back home again, they find that one of the ghosts has something important to tell them.

When it comes to horror movies, I tend to go for movies that are creepy and eerie rather than gory so The Uninvited was right up my alley.  I was impressed by how much it seemed like a real ghost story.  This story was something like you would hear on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries or one of the many ghost-related shows the Biography channel plays every Saturday.  But The Uninvited is far superior to any Unsolved Mysteries reenactment.  I loved the acting and the general atmosphere of the movie.  This is a perfect movie to watch on a cool, rainy October night.  It’s a perfect Halloween movie and I’m not sure why it took me this long to get around to seeing it.