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It took 25 years of me waiting to see this divorce comedy to learn "The Awful Truth".
As a huge fan of Barbara Stanwyck's, I have been waiting for only a handful of movies of hers to appear either on video or on cable to mark off my list of unseen films. Like another recent title I had been searching for ("Ten Cents a Dance"), I was highly disappointed, yet glad I got to catch it. Barbara is an expert light comic actress when she is given a good script. Look at "The Lady Eve", which is considered one of the classic screwball comedies of all times. The year before this, she was absolutely delightful in the charming "Christmas in Connecticut", which lightened up her reputation after "Double Indemnity" cast her as a murderess. Those two films, in addition to a few other comedies she did ("Red Salute", "Breakfast For Two", "The Mad Miss Manton", even "You Belong to Me") had at least amusing stories with funny characters. A few of them actually were extremely well written. But "The Bride Wore Boots", like a similarly titled comedy she did ("The Bride Walks Out"), is a comedy lacking in laughs.
Like "The Awful Truth", this is a comedy about divorce. It opens at Christmas with Stanwyck introduced as a horse-loving Southern girl whose husband (Robert Cummings) knows absolutely nothing about horses. He's more interested in antiques, which results in her getting him a desk presumably owned by Jefferson Davis. He gets her a horse, which turns out to be a 12-year old well past his prime, too old for horse racing. Cummings, cast as a poor sap who can't seem to do anything right to save his marriage, gets into a sparring match with Stanwyck's old flame, Patric Knowles, while an extremely annoying Southern belle (Diana Lynn) sets her sights on trapping Cummings, which leads Stanwyck to divorce court. Peggy Wood, best known as the Reverand Mother in "The Sound of Music", plays Stanwyck's mother, and is the most amusing supporting character in the film, similar to Lucille Watson's character in "The Women", although more acerbic. Robert Benchley too offers a bit of his dry humour, more than welcome with the presence of Knowles and Lynn around. Natalie Wood is one of Stanwyck and Cumming's children, whom it appears aren't really all that important to their parents in an effort to save their marriage. Natalie is only amusing in one sequence where she is upset when her brother shoots the angel off the Christmas tree, something she had wanted do so herself.
There were more than a dozen comedies about divorce during the heyday of the screwball comedy, so this one (a bit late in the game) doesn't come anywhere near to the quality of those, most notably "The Awful Truth" and "Love Crazy". Stanwyck is lovely, and does her best with a rather mediocre script. It's no wonder with films like this that she concentrated mainly on melodramas and westerns for the remainder of her career. Cummings, who seemed to be alternating with Ray Milland for these types of roles, plays a total wimp here who only gets some spice when he crowns Knowles with a horse's feed bag. Actually, that horse is funnier than most of the actors here, coming back after dumping Cummings off of him during a race to urge him to get back on. The only thing the horse doesn't do is laugh at him, which is probably what he needed to do. Veteran black character actor Willie Best adds a nice touch as the stable boy, embellishing his character with less stereotypical behavior than usually given to actors like himself.
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funny amusing comedy
The performance given by robert cummings is good.He gets caught by his wife barbara stanwyck in the arms of diana lynn several times.Not by his own doing but he gets blamed anyway.Diana Lynn played a role of manipulation and did it very convincingly.And barbara stanwyck played the wife who is always one step ahead of everyone.
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Stanwyck and Cummings as the Bickersons
The film opens with Sally Warren (Stanwyck) and hubby Jeff (Cummings) out riding, and bickering over why they live in the country, instead of in the city where they had originally agreed to live. Then Lance, Sally 's old flame shows up, and honks the horn over and over, scaring the horses, causing Jeff to get tossed off yet again! (You'd think being a horse person, Lance would know better than to honk the horn over and over right near the horses...) This is a story of marriage, love, and the meaning of giving... it IS Christmas time, so Sally and Jeff get each other gifts that they think the other will like, but things take a strange turn along the way! Having Sally's old flame around only makes things worse. Robert Benchley is here for comic relief as Uncle Todd. And a young thing starts coming on to Jeff, which doesn't help either. Costumes by Edit Head, (of course) and directed by Irvinv Pichel, one of FIVE films he released that year! Good, clean fun, if you can take all the bickering. It looks like the only other project Cummings and Stanwyck worked on "together" was "Flesh and Fantasy", but they were in different chapters of that film, so not sure how much they actually worked together on that one.
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Marriage At Its Raciest!
Rich and beautiful Southern heiress Sally Warren loves horse-racing and running her horse-farm although her husband of seven years hates the four-legged mammals. Spouse Jeff Warren is a successful author, Civil War scholar, and popular lecturer on the ladies club circuit. After Jeff buys aging twelve-year old nag Albert in the mistaken belief that he’s a colt and Sally purchases a desk for her husband in the naive belief that it once belonged to Jefferson Davis, it’s obvious that they have few interests in common. The squabbling is complicated by Jeff’s jealousy of Sally’s relationship with Lance Gale, her childhood friend, neighbor, and fellow horse breeder.
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THE BRIDE WORE BOOTS
Is a silly yet agreeable comedy about a squabbling husband and wife. Sally (Barbara Stanwyck) owns a horse farm, and her husband Jeff (Robert Cummings), who writes history books, can't stand horses.
The film is mildly amusing, but the humor never really takes off, and Stanwyck and Cummings don't have much chemistry as a couple married for several years. An added hindrance is that the script makes it a bit hard to understand what drew them together in the first place.
Nonetheless, the film is pleasant company; everything about it looks beautiful, including the black and white photography, sets, outdoor locations, costumes (by Edith Head), and Stanwyck's hairstyles, and it has an excellent supporting cast.
Peggy Wood (THE SOUND OF MUSIC) and Robert Benchley are marvelous as Stanwyck's sly mother and uncle, and their scenes give the movie the fizz it's missing at other moments, whether it's Wood reading a gangster novel aloud to the children (she changes some of the words, so that a character is improbably drinking lemonade), or Benchley giving the children toy guns and promising that they don't have to eat spinach at his house. Little Natalie Wood is one of Sally and Jeff's children.
Diana Lynn plays an irritating Southern belle homewrecker; one of the film's flaws is that it's so obvious Jeff simply needs to tell her to go away and get out of his life. Patric Knowles is the dashing neighbor who wants to marry Stanwyck, and Willie Best plays Joe, the stable hand.
The film's director, Irving Pichel, was also an actor, and he has a nice role in the final minutes of the film as a steeplechase announcer. Pichel, in fact, discovered Natalie Wood; he cast her in a bit role in HAPPY LAND (1943), and he also gave her a great role as the German orphan adopted by Orson Welles in TOMORROW IS FOREVER (1946).
THE BRIDE WORE BOOTS is part of the six-film Barbara Stanwyck Collection in the excellent Universal Backlot Series. The DVD print is beautiful. I've previously reviewed two other films in the set, INTERNES CAN'T TAKE MONEY (1937) and ALL I DESIRE (1953). (Update: This film is now also available as a single-title DVD release in the Universal Vault Series.)
It's curious that the DVD box includes a still of a wedding scene with Cummings and Stanwyck which was cut from the film; it might have been a flashback, or perhaps was dropped from the end of the movie.
THE BRIDE WORE BOOTS isn't a top-drawer comedy, but it provides attractive, undemanding viewing. Sometimes, especially at the end of a busy day, sitting down and unwinding with a movie like this seems exactly right.
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MY WEB PAGE TO NATALIE WOOD
