My Favorite Wife

My Favorite Wife (1940)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029284/]

The Gist:
A while ago I mentioned watching The Awful Truth, which I ended up using for my film paper. Namely it was because of the unique ambiguity of the morality of adultery and how that functioned with comedy to diffuse the sensitive issue. Here, we have an almost tame remake of that film with the same director and the same principle actors and a somewhat similar remarriage tale. I use the word tame because there is nowhere near the same degree of contentiousness, because adultery is seen as a quibbling issue that should not be given merit, and because the implied sexuality from the first film is nearly nonexistent here (one example: a single bed becomes double beds). By using the word "tame," you would think I prefer the 1937 film instead of this, but that's not the case. Mainly, I love this film because it trusts a genuine pathos with its characters. We are allowed to see Cary Grant mourn his wife, we see how upset his wife is when she learns Grant has moved on. It's all allowed the context of genuine emotion, so much more than its excellent but slightly more "screwball" counterpart.