I Was a Male War Bride (1949) - film review

In the immediate aftermath of WWII, Henri Rochard, an officer in the French secret service, is sent to the German town of Bad Nauheim to track down a lens polisher named Schindler and persuade him to work for the Allies.  Against his wishes, he is accompanied by an American army lieutenant, Catherine Gates, who still harbours a grudge after their last assignment together.  In the course of their ensuing adventures, Henri and Catherine manage to patch up their differences and decide to get married.  Unfortunately, Catherine must return to the United States and the only way Henri can go with her is by applying for entry to her country as her bride...

Although he is perhaps best remembered for his groundbreaking thrillers - Scarface (1932) and The Big Sleep (1946) – and high class westerns such as Rio Bravo (1959), Howard Hawks also directed some of Hollywood’s best screwball comedies, including Bringing Up Baby (1938).   I Was a Male War Bride is one of Hawks’s later comedies, a very enjoyable battle of the sexes farce in which a hapless Cary Grant suffers no end of humiliations when he tries to get the better of Ann Sheridan and US military bureaucracy.  The film was inspired by a true (but hard to believe) story that appeared in the Readers’ Digest.

The film was shot on location in Germany (Hawks’s first shoot in Europe), which brings not just a sense of realism but also a distinct mood of post-war relief tempered by the realisation of the nightmare the world has just lived through.  The downbeat tone may also have been influenced by the fact that many of the cast and production team - including the lead actors – fell ill during the location shoot because of the extreme cold weather.

The humour may be far more restrained than in earlier screwball comedies, but there are some brilliant visual gags and the crackling dialogue between the two lead performers could hardly be improved on.  It may not be Howard Hawks’s most worthy film, but I Was a Male War Bride is unquestionably one of his most entertaining, even if the decision to cast Cary Grant as a Frenchman is so mind-bogglingly ludicrous as to be almost surreal.

© James Travers 2008

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