A melodrama is only as good as its villain. This one's villain is good enough to redeem the melodrama. Drama otherwise has a hard time here. stretching its material patently thin. Alec (Cary Grant) is rich. He's unhappily married. He'd like to divorce his wife, Maida (our villainess, Kay Francis), to marry pretty Julie (Carole Lombard). Wife won't grant him a divorce. Prospects look bleak until Alec, following a drunken binge, fortuitously contracts pneumonia. (It's implied that the drinking somehow facilitated the disease, but I imagine medical science would debate that.) He cannot be cured, says the doctor sententiously, because, being unhappy, he has lost the will to live (we'll leave that diagnosis again to medical science). Someone must make him happy. Cue Carole Lombard. That's about it. What's next we never know. Alec will live, maybe. Will he get his divorce? Maybe, after Maida, as her father-in-law suggests, takes his finances to the cleaners. Or maybe not, if she continues to refuse him out of understandable pique. Tune in next week.
Only the acting could rescue a story like that. Carole Lombard gives it her best. And she is very good. But she really needs a chance to let loose, to show some ebullience. She doesn't get it playing a hapless, unsteady heroine, which her character is for most of the film. Cary Grant - I know I will be in the minority opinion - has never impressed me in dramatic roles. He was unsurpassed in comedy, touch, timing, impeccable: "His Girl Friday," "Bringing Up Baby" of course, "Arsenic and Old Lace" (though I have read he was dissatisfied with that one). In "Gunga Din," an adventure story, he plays it half way for laughs, and he's excellent. He injects lightness. He livens up the most precarious situations. When he's just serious he annoys me, even if the film is otherwise outstanding: "Suspicion," "Notorious," even "North by Northwest." He seems somehow glum, artificial. Maybe it was exactly that, artificiality. He suppresses his natural, God-given flair. The mask of tragedy doesn't quite fit. As a man dying of grief (exacerbated by pneumonia) he doesn't tug at my heartstrings. All this brings us to Kay Francis. Playing against type, she scorches the screen with malevolence. Her eyes alone convey such loathing and contempt, the wrath of a woman scorned, as one seldom sees on film. She steals every scene she is in. The intensity compares to Bette Davis' Regina in "The Little Foxes," or Mercedes McCambridge's obsessed cowgirl Emma in "Johnny Guitar." There is no higher accolade. Her performance, namely, makes "In Name Only" worth watching.
Only the acting could rescue a story like that. Carole Lombard gives it her best. And she is very good. But she really needs a chance to let loose, to show some ebullience. She doesn't get it playing a hapless, unsteady heroine, which her character is for most of the film. Cary Grant - I know I will be in the minority opinion - has never impressed me in dramatic roles. He was unsurpassed in comedy, touch, timing, impeccable: "His Girl Friday," "Bringing Up Baby" of course, "Arsenic and Old Lace" (though I have read he was dissatisfied with that one). In "Gunga Din," an adventure story, he plays it half way for laughs, and he's excellent. He injects lightness. He livens up the most precarious situations. When he's just serious he annoys me, even if the film is otherwise outstanding: "Suspicion," "Notorious," even "North by Northwest." He seems somehow glum, artificial. Maybe it was exactly that, artificiality. He suppresses his natural, God-given flair. The mask of tragedy doesn't quite fit. As a man dying of grief (exacerbated by pneumonia) he doesn't tug at my heartstrings. All this brings us to Kay Francis. Playing against type, she scorches the screen with malevolence. Her eyes alone convey such loathing and contempt, the wrath of a woman scorned, as one seldom sees on film. She steals every scene she is in. The intensity compares to Bette Davis' Regina in "The Little Foxes," or Mercedes McCambridge's obsessed cowgirl Emma in "Johnny Guitar." There is no higher accolade. Her performance, namely, makes "In Name Only" worth watching.