by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Saturday Charles and I
screened a download from archive.org called Together Again, a 1944 movie co-starring Charles Boyer and Irene
Dunne which seems to be called that less because it has anything to do with the
plot (the story, written by Stanley Russell and future blacklistee Herbert
Biberman and turned into a script by Virginia Van Upp, who also produced, and
F. Hugh Herbert, does not cast Boyer and Dunne as former lovers who reunite) than simply because
it was their third film together, after Love Affair (the original 1939 version of the story that
became the 1957 film An Affair to Remember with Cary Grant in Boyer’s role and Deborah Kerr in Dunne’s) and When
Tomorrow Comes (also 1939). The plot
casts Dunne as Anne Crandall, who took over as mayor of the small town of
Brookhaven, Vermont following the death of her husband five years earlier. In
fact, the Crandall family founded Brookhaven and the town has never had a mayor who hasn’t been a
Crandall. What’s more, though Anne isn’t a blood Crandall she’s living in her
husband’s old house with two people who are: her former father-in-law, Jonathan Crandall, Sr.
(Charles Coburn, a bit less
crotchety than usual), and her stepdaughter Diana (Mona Freeman). Diana has an
age-peer boyfriend named Gilbert Parker (Jerome Courtland) but she’s having the
usual squabbles with him, and Jonathan Sr. wants to find Anne a replacement
husband so she’ll give up the mayoralty and assume the true destiny of a woman:
to stay at home, forsake her ambitions and just … well, you know.
For the first half of the movie the plot
premise’s inherent sexism is kept at least somewhat under control, but it
flares up big-time when a well-timed lightning bolt knocks the head off the
statue of Anne’s late husband, Jonathan Crandall, Jr., that dominates the town
square. Jonathan, Sr. tells his former daughter-in-law to take that as a sign
from heaven that she’s supposed to leave Brookhaven and go to New York City to
recruit a sculptor who can redo the statue — though what he’s really hoping is that she’ll meet the man of her dreams,
leave Brookhaven permanently and restore the town’s politics to the male gender
even if that means it will no longer be run by a Crandall. Anne’s principal
political opponent, Witherspoon (Walter Buchanan), is the editor-publisher
of Brookhaven’s principal newspaper and is always on the lookout for stories
that will make her look ridiculous. When she goes to New York she has an
appointment to meet sculptor George Corday (Charles Boyer — well, they had to
give his character a French name to justify his real-life accent!), who makes
the mistake of assuming she’s the life model whom he’s called to pose in the
nude for another sculpture he’s working on — and of course he makes the
predictable sexist cracks about running a city not being a suitable job for a
woman. Corday takes the job of rebuilding the Jonathan Crandall, Jr. statue and
moves into the back house (which is so old it’s still called the “carriage
house”!) of the Crandall estate, where he basically makes a pest of himself and
keeps trying to make Anne interested in him — only through a series of
complications the writing committee does little to make interesting, Anne’s
stepdaughter Diana forms a crush on George and makes it clear that if her
stepmom isn’t interested in him, she is.
The plot progresses (like a disease) into a bizarre situation in
which Diana is about to announce her engagement to George, and Anne feels
somehow obligated to accept Diana’s age-peer former boyfriend Gilbert (ya
remember Gilbert?) as her fiancé — and in the film’s unintentionally
funniest line, at one point George turns to Gilbert and says, “If this keeps up
I’ll have to marry you,” a line
that plays quite differently in this age of same-sex marriage than it no doubt
did in 1944. It ends as the iron laws of Hollywood sexism required it to end in
1944; no sooner has the new statue of Jonathan, Jr. gone up than it crashes
down again, George confesses that he deliberately sabotaged his own statue in
order to break Anne out of her rut and get her to leave Brookhaven with him. (I
was at least hoping for a not quite as sexist finish in which Anne would agree
to marry him as long as they lived in Brookhaven and she continued to be mayor
— much like the ending of George Seaton’s The Shocking Miss Pilgrim from two years later, in which rival entrepreneurs
Betty Grable and Dick Haymes pair up at the end but do so as professional and
personal equals; just how Seaton got away with that ending when just about
every other message to women from the mass media said, “O.K., you’ve had your
fun. Time’s up. You’ve got to quit all those cool jobs you were working during
the war and let the guys who are coming home from the service take them back”
is a mystery to me.) We last see Boyer and Dunne as silhouettes formed from
lightning in the night sky, suggesting that God him/her/itself is ordaining
that Dunne’s character give up her career for her man.
Together Again is a better movie than I’m making it sound in
these notes — it’s really one of the last gasps of the screwball style, a
highly professional cast gives it their all, director Charles Vidor stages it
efficiently (though his greatest films, the little-known 1933 “B” Sensation
Hunters and the well-known Rita
Hayworth/Glenn Ford vehicle Gilda, are both noirs and
suggest he had a darker sensibility than Columbia usually let him indulge) and
a thoroughly professional cast turns in acceptable if not great performances. I
especially liked that Irene Dunne got a chance to sing in the film — she’d
auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera as a mezzo-soprano and had made several
musicals, and here she does the tango “Adios, Muchachos” (written in 1927 by
Argentinian pianist Julio César Sanders and adapted in the early 1950’s for
Louis Armstrong with an English-language lyric as “I Get Ideas”), which has
already been established as “their song” for the Boyer-Dunne couple. Charles
was impressed by her excellent Spanish diction; it’s true that aspiring opera
singers have to learn a lot of languages, but there still aren’t many repertory
operas in Spanish (though Spanish and Italian are close enough that knowing one
probably gives you a leg up on learning the other). Through much of the movie I
was wondering what it might have been like with Katharine Hepburn in Dunne’s
role — she probably would have hated the ending (though she went along with
similar taming-of-the-shrew finishes in many of her MGM films) and it seemed
like Dunne was copying some of Hepburn’s twitches even in an overall more
reserved, less strident presentation. But the real mystery of Together Again is how such a sexist movie could have come from
producer and co-writer Virginia Van Upp, who was not only a pioneer in women’s
equality in Hollywood but was sufficiently aware of Columbia president Harry
Cohn’s penchant for hitting on any even remotely attractive woman (Cohn was
essentially the Harvey Weinstein of his time) that she had it put into her
contract as a Columbia producer that she would never be required to attend a
meeting on Cohn’s yacht.
