Oh ye gods, the writing sucks in this film! More stiff, over wrought ladies magazine dialogue than you can shake a Harpers Bazaar at. Fans of this movie, like critic Dennis Schwartz, call it "effective melodrama" but to me it's just bad writing. Suffering most acutely from it is Carol Lombard. While Cary Grant is at least given a few effective zingers and satiric jabs to somewhat compensate for the chick flic gush he mostly has to mouth and Kay Francis at least has the fun of playing the mother of all gold digging monster wives, Lombard, one of the greatest if not the greatest comic actress in Hollywood history, is given absolutely nothing even remotely funny to do. The result is that she gives a performance that, while not boring,...Lombard was never even close to that...is, at best, a bit on the quiet side. And a quiet Carol Lombard with lousy dialogue is an aesthetic crime for which director John Cromwell and especially his scenarist, Richard Sherman, should be made to atone. Say by having to spend eternity under hair dryers in a small town beauty parlor, listening to the clientele. C plus.
Review of In Name Only
