Mr. & Mrs. Smith

The Americanism of the title belies the European view of precarious relationships, the introductory snapshot of the aftermath of a squabble (unshaven fellow playing solitaire while the woman sulks under the bed sheets, silence and clutter) also opens L'Eclisse. "A marriage like other people's" is to be avoided, "doubt, distrust" are unwanted sentiments when one has a shaving razor to your beloved's throat. Mr. vs. Mrs. Smith, "a little technicality" is all it takes, suddenly they're unmarried and the wife (Carole Lombard) becomes a desirable single in the eyes of the husband (Robert Montgomery). "From now on, we are just friends." "That's not necessary." A decade after Rich and Strange and in the same year as Suspicion, Alfred Hitchcock's peculiar conjugal screwball. The romantic image cannot be revived, the lyrical restaurant where the proposal once took place is now a greasy spoon with staring street urchins and a cat that won't try the soup. He retreats to the Beefeaters Club and falls in with the blithe bachelor in the sauna (Jack Carson), the blind date at the nightclub gets to the point where he prefers to give himself a bloody nose. (His POV afterward provides a diagonal row of disapproving swells.) Meanwhile, she's stuck and soaked at the amusement park ride with the "hillbilly ambulance chaser" (Gene Raymond), who struggles to remain vertical following a second glass of hooch. "My only fear is that I may not act like a gentleman." The genre's anarchic energies are straitjacketed by the constructions of a director terrified of chaos, the comedy is purposefully dry and baleful throughout. All is sorted out at the ski lodge with an x-image to mark the spot, not so much the harmony of reunited lovers as the discord of crossed swords. With Philip Merivale, Lucile Watson, William Tracy, Esther Dale, Charles Halton, Emma Dunn, and Betty Compson. In black and white.