WE WERE DANCING (1942)

One of Norma Shearer's last movies, and a sad one to come at the end of a solid career. The problem has nothing to do with Shearer, who is fine; the movie is sunk by weak material (an adaptation of two short plays by Noel Coward which do not meld together very well) and bad timing (the high society/screwball trappings were out of date by the beginning of WWII). Shearer plays a Polish countess (without a trace of an accent) living in America and apparently on the verge of becoming down-and-out, or at least as down-and-out as former royalty ever gets in Hollywood movies. Melvyn Douglas is a Viennese "professional guest" (also accent-free) who gets along by being a charming houseguest in the homes of rich people. The two meet cute at a party the night before Shearer's wedding to rich Lee Bowman. The opening of the film is, in fact, quite fun: without knowing anything in the way of context, we see Douglas grab Shearer, a total stranger to him, on a moonlit patio and dance with her. Rather improbably, she is (almost literally) swept off her feet and agrees to run off and marry him that night. The two get by for a time as "guests," but the fact that they are a couple makes them less interesting to the big-city rich and famous and they wind up scraping the bottom of the barrel, accepting invitations from Midwest hoity-toitys (horrors!). After she threatens to leave him, he finally decides they should head to New York to find honest work, but one last house party tempts him, and there he meets up with an old flame, Gail Patrick, with whom he is caught in the closet doing some canoodling. Up to this point, the movie has been light and fun, but from here on in, it's like watching paint dry. In a nutshell, they divorce, he schemes to get her back, and, by golly, he *does*. This would have been much more fun as a Lubitsch pre-Code film (it has touches that bring to mind TROUBLE IN PARADISE), but the director, Robert Z. Leonard, is no Lubitsch. Shearer is an asset, but Douglas isn't charming enough by half; in fact, though Bowman is a rather lightweight actor, I think things would have worked much better if they had switched parts. After the halfway point, my sympathies were with Bowman and never went back to Douglas, so the "happy" ending, with Shearer and Douglas once again dancing off in each other's arms, was not particularly happy for me. Familiar faces in the supporting cast helped me stick with it: Marjorie Main as a judge, Reginald Owen as Bowman's uncle, Alan Mowbray as another professional guest, Connie Gilchrist as one of the Midwestern hostesses, and Florence Bates and Norma Varden in small speaking roles. The "dancing" part of the movie came from one Coward playlet, and the guests plot from another; as separate short episodes, they might have worked, but stuck unnaturally together, they don't. [TCM]