The Art of the First Try

I Love You Again (1940)
directed by W. S. Van Dyke
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Six years after The Thin Man, and four years after Libeled Lady, the William Powell/Myrna Loy sell-by date is still a long way around the bend. I always liked that Pittsburgh-born Powell fell in love with Jean Harlow instead of Myrna Loy, and I like that Loy and Powell both seemed to live sensible, happy lives through a series of unsensational marriages (seven, all told). In I Love You Again, neither one of them is selling a too-romantic-to-be-true Manhattan fantasy, though the scotch flows as freely as ever. Woody Van Dyke, the director - another good egg who took his considerable talent in stride - imagines Habersville, Pennsylvania (or Anywhere, USA), as the best place for a wife to realize that her husband is the man she dreamed he'd be, instead of the man he is (or was). The man he was had an amateur's fondness for taxidermy and a Republican's zest for the Rotary Club; the man he becomes doesn't pinch a dime buying his bride the right nightgown or his con-man crony the best champagne. A New Deal for the rest of us in the best years of our lives.