I was a Male War Bride

 Howard Hawks directed I was a Male War Bride for release in 1949.   It's a peculiar comedy that Cary Grant, the leading man, regarded as his best work in that genre.  The movie makes a good double-bill with His Girl Friday (released in 1940), a similar picture with interesting feminist implications.  (In both movies, the spunky leading lady -- Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and Anne Sheridan in I was a Male War Bride -- repeatedly calls her romantic nemesis, played in both cases by Cary Grant, "a stinker.")  Both films follow the paradigm of the so-called "comedy of remarriage", a type of movie that flourished in the thirties and forties defined by Stanley Cavell as romance involving the ultimate reconciliation of a couple who were previously married or, at least, sexually engaged before the outset of the picture.  (These films evade production code standards about sex and intimacy since the characters are established to have been involved in previous sexual encounters -- therefore, the dialogue can be laced with double entendre and other highly suggestive patter without necessarily suggesting premarital sex.  I was a Male War Bride pushes the envelope on this genre implying an earlier premarital sexual relationship -- in the first scene, Cary Grant returns Ann Sheridan's underwear to her in the office where she works as a lieutenant in the army; it seems that the military context, perhaps, insulates the film in some ways from Hayes Code criticism, although why this would be the case is unclear to me.  The protagonists were not previously married in the 1949 picture, a deficit that the film repairs by having their nuptials repeated three times in I was a Male War Bride; they tie the knot in a  German civil ceremony, a Protestant religious wedding presided over by the military chaplain, and, at last, a Roman Catholic rite.  These observances, about two-thirds of the way through the picture, don't accelerate the couple's intimacy -- if anything they defer it:  actual sex is delayed until the film's final shot.)  The "comedy of remarriage" articulates a romantic partnership that is based on something more profound and, perhaps, permanent, than mere sexual attraction.  In these films, the characters have an undoubted sexual chemistry, an erotic attraction that led to the immature, as it were, first marriage; on a later encounter, colored with bitterness and anger, the couple learn to work together more successfully and, perhaps, achieve an intimacy based on something more profound than the fact they enjoy exciting sex together.

Male War Bride is based (sort of) on a true story.  In summary, a French officer is assigned a mission involving black market transactions in the ruins of post-War Germany.  The French officer, Henri Rochard (Cary Grant) finds himself ordered to work with an American female officer, Katherine Gates (Anne Sheridan) with whom he previously had an affair.  At the outset, the two despise one another thoroughly with the sort of practiced scorn that only ex-lovers can muster.  However, after a series of misadventures in the performance of their mission, they fall in love.  The couple are married, but, then, encounter a near-fatal obstacle to their marriage.  Lieutenant Gates is ordered to return to the US and a scheme has to be contrived to allow her husband to travel with her to America; Rochard applies for visa status as a "war bride" since the operative law doesn't specify the gender of the spouse.  He is granted "war bride" status but has to travel in the company of hundreds of German women and children authorized to follow their military spouses back to America.  This leads to further complications, ostensibly funny, but, actually, rather Kafkaesque and nightmarish.  All's well that ends well -- the couple end up locked in a cell on military transport vessel where they will have nothing to do but have sex until they see the Statue of Liberty, as one of them says,through the jail's tiny round hatch; this ostensibly happy ending is as nightmarish as much that preceded it.  

The film is divided into four parts.  In the initial short scenes, Rochard encounters Lieut. Gates and the two quarrel bitterly -- they both appear to detest one another.  In the lengthy second part of the film, the couple perform their mission in rural Germany; they are charged with finding a optician who specializes in making lenses for the scientific market -- the man is impoverished and has gone underground where he is marketing his lenses as contraband on the Black Market.  Lieut. Gates, who is the more accomplished of the two protagonists, finds the man and persuades him to work for the Occupation forces.  (He is pathetically grateful and thanks the two soldiers profusely for restoring his honor to him.)  In the third part of the film, the couple, now in love, seek formal permission to marry, an enterprise vexed with all sorts of administrative snaggles that are supposed to be funny, but that are rather disturbing.  (For instance, one of Lieut. Gates male admirers, jealous of Rochard, simply hides the application to make sure it will not be processed.)  After these hurdles are overcome, the couple are married.  But additional bureaucratic obstacles arise -- the American female soldier is ordered to return to the United States and her husband has to travel with her under the auspices of the law relating to War Brides.  This part of the movie is also distressing, with something of the quality of a bad dream -- Rochard can't find any place to sleep and, increasingly exhausted, he wanders through a world of displaced German women and their children, ostracized by both the brides and the male soldiers, including two notably nasty naval officers; simply put no one knows what to do with a "male war bride."  In the short final sequence, Rochard, who has come on board the vessel to the U.S. in drag, is thrown into the brig.  Lieut. Gates now also known as Mrs. Rochard visits him in his small uncomfortable looking jail cell; Rochard throws the key to the cell out the window into the sea, materializing in a cringe-inducing way the notion of marriage as imprisonment; the couple are literally locked together in the cell.  

As with His Girl Friday, some really unpleasant and alarming imagery lurks around the edges of this rom-com romp.  The movie was shot in the ruins of Heidelberg and at the shipyards in Bremerhaven from which real war brides apparently were dispatched to the United States.  The glimpses of German cities in ruins casts a shadow on the picture.  Indeed, the odyssey through the wrecked country that comprises most of the film's first half is the best part of the picture, weirdly compelling and atmospheric.  We see sullen crowds of people standing on river banks awaiting crude ferries; all the bridges have been destroyed and Hawks shows their skeletal remains dangling over rivers.  The towns are full of sinister black marketeers and crowds of occupying soldiers loiter on street corners.  The trip cross-country features a perilous trip by rowboat and, then, scenes in which a motorcycle and side-car are navigated over rough country in the dark of night complicated by a rainstorm.  Cary Grant gets hoisted over a speeding train at a barricade by the tracks and, almost, rows his boat over a dam.  He gets locked in Lieut. Gates room in a village inn when a door knob falls off and sneaking out of the chambers on a window-sill, he falls about twenty feet.  All of this is played for slapstick, but it's rather upsetting in fact -- particularly, the imagery of being locked in a small room with his love interest, a motif that will re-occur at the end of the movie.  The couple's travels, squabbling all the way, through the ruins of post-war Germany is similar to the adventures of Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in It Happened One Night, but with a more menacing edge.  It seems actual displaced persons were used as extras in the Bremerhaven scenes:  we see crowds of women in dowdy ragged clothing, crying infants, and disoriented, traumatized children.  None of these people seem to be acting and the authenticity of these scenes with refugees give the last quarter of the movie a disturbing force.  Cary Grant spends about a third of the movie looking for a place to sleep and becomes increasingly exhausted and delirious as the film progresses -- he tries to sleep in a chair when he is locked in the village inn, but can't figure out how to get comfortable, a dilemma that the film depicts in detail.  Later, he has to sleep in a bathtub with the faucet gouging into his back.  In the final fifteen minutes, he wanders the desolate streets of Bremerhaven looking for a place to rest but is turned away everywhere he goes.  In certain respects, I suppose, the film is true to the experience of refugees and displaced persons and this gives the film an ominous aspect.  From before recorded history, the victors in war carried off with them the women of their defeated enemies; I was a Male War Bride skirts this issue, a theme that darkens the film considerably.  The film is not funny and the tensions between the two romantic protagonists are evident.  But it's certainly an interesting movie.