I don't know if this movie would strike today's viewers as being so amusing. I mean, it's STILL extremely amusing today, but in 1940 some of the subjects that gags are built around were taken more seriously. In middle America divorce was rare, for example. As late as 1964 one of the reasons Nelson Rockefeller lost the Republican nomination was that he had recently divorced and remarried. We didn't have a divorced president until Reagan, 16 years later. And at one point Cary Grant is sent to gather some clothes for his wife and a psychiatrist sees him examining the dresses in her closet and posing in front of the mirror, holding up the dresses in front of him, trying on different women's hats. The suggestion of homosexuality and cross-dressing must have been outrageous at the time. Homosexuality was still "the love that dare not speak its name" and was thought by everyone in Bassett, Nebraska, to be a mental disease -- those residents who had heard of it, anyway.<br /><br />The jokes are built around a simple enough plot. Grant, believing his wife (Dunne) to have drowned 7 years earlier in a shipwreck, remarries. But Dunne shows up vibrantly alive, having made it to an island. Grant tries to hide Dunne's identity from his bride while trying to figure out what to do. Halfway through the movie he discovers that Dunne was not alone when she was rescued from the island. Also rescued was another survivor -- the robustly masculine, handsome, and athletic Randolph Scott, who is also in love with Dunne.<br /><br />That reminds me. When I said earlier that homosexuality was taken seriously, I meant it. Careers could be ruined by rumors -- whole lives could go down the drain. Grant and Scott happened to be pretty good friends and they shared a house at the time this movie was being shot. Rumors began that they were both gay, based on nothing more than their living in the same house. Both careers survived, but the rumor about Scott lingers on.<br /><br />The greatest character in the movie is undoubtedly the judge, Granville Bates. What a crabby face! What an irritable and impatient man! Someone in the courtroom opens her compact and begins applying makeup, and the reflection of the light reaches him. "Hey! Put that thing away! What are you trying to do, blind me? I won't have any of that in this courtroom. Try washing your face instead of painting it. (pause) There's such a thing as contempt of court, you know. (pause) Don't let ME get after you." The other great performance comes from Cary Grant. Nobody has ever been better at light comedy than Grant, I swear. His every statement is funny. Even his hesitations, like "Well ---" And he uses the skills he learned as an acrobat to add to his success. Watch him scuttle across the balcony of the house with his wife's dresses, his legs working like a marionette's while his head advances in a level line without bouncing at all. It belongs in the Ministry of Funny Walks.<br /><br />Randolph Scott is good too in one of his freewheeling earlier roles. His chest is always puffed out, his voice loud and resonant, his gestures flamboyant, everything that was deliberately dropped from his later roles in the Boetticher Westerns.<br /><br />I could never really get with Irene Dunne. I understand that she was a genuinely decent woman, but her on-screen appeal eludes me.<br /><br />It's a good thing that film lasts as long as it does, because they no longer make many comedies as successful as this one.