☆ ☆ ☆
Double Wedding (1937) – R. Thorpe
Truly, Myrna Loy
and William Powell made a great team, particularly in The Thin Man detective
series, but also in a variety of other screwball comedies. Unfortunately, Double Wedding is not one of
their best – it falls strangely flat (over on imDb, a piece of trivia notes
that Jean Harlow, girlfriend of Powell and friend of Loy, died of uremic poisoning
during the shooting of this film, which had to be halted to allow the stars to
mourn). Nevertheless, you could see how
the script could work: Loy plays an uptight businesswoman who is micromanaging
her sister’s engagement to a very wooden John Beal; Powell plays a
free-spirited wannabe movie director with whom the sister falls in love. Of course, soon enough you can see the
romantic tension between Loy & Powell and in no time he is orchestrating
things so that they end up together. However, she never quite figures this out
until he is about to marry her sister (Florence Rice). Some wacky character actors join in the
expected fun and confusion. Except, as I said, it is all a bit flat: Loy never
quite attains the proper level of comic disdain and Powell seems to
overcompensate as a result. The laughs don’t flow freely but you can sort of
appreciate that maybe they should have.
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