Cary Grant and Irene Dunne were the cream of the crop of silver screen romantic duos. Drawn out by the incredibly sensitive nature of George Stevens's direction, they reveal great versatility in the dynamics of their on-screen repertoire, playing a couple who meet, suffer tragedy, and experience great highs and exasperation alike. What I find funny is that I do not want to describe the story very much at all for fear of diminishing the effect of going through the experience freshly without any knowledge of it, but the film is nothing more than a film about a middle-class couple trying to start a family! That's the movie! There is nothing dull about it, either. Stevens, perhaps the ablest filmmaker of the era next to Hitchcock, saw the profundity and catharsis in it, and the receptive, insightful control and room to allow his particularly personal vision to make it feel like the experience cinema is meant to be, a chronicle ensuing the life-changing happening of falling in love, and the innate personal longing to make a family and a home with the one you worship, and the trials and grief that can be as intense, though never really more, than the pleasure and gratification it begets.<br /><br />There is not a single insincere frame in this picture. Even its story being told in flashbacks is done to remind us how significant music is as it synchronizes the soundtrack to our lives. In effect, whenever music plays in the film, and it is predominantly source music rather than underscoring, there is a magnified reaction on our parts. Moreover Grant and Dunne's urge to settle down in a traditional American lifestyle is a minor supplement to their purely individual intentions behind it. Their innocence, their artless simplicity, is refreshing. The screenwriters, Martha Cheavens and Morrie Ryskind, have unspoiled grace in their phasing of the sequence of narrative that you become interactive with the characters.<br /><br />Aside from the inimitable lovability of the beautiful, graceful, flexible, hilarious, touching and gifted Irene Dunne, Cary Grant is pitch-perfect in his entirely assured performance, especially during his moving monologue in front of a judge. The energy between the two create such endearing realism. You become aware of yourself laughing out loud with the day-to-day surprises and farcical obstacles with which they get involved.