The Lady in Question (Columbia, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last film I wanted to catch up with on moviemagg was The Lady in Question, a 1940 farce from Columbia starring Brian Aherne as André Morestan, owner of a French shop selling bicycles, record players, and records. My husband Charles and I watched this on Turner Classic Movies on Sunday, March 30 as part of a double bill with the 1927 silent classic It, written by Hope Loring and Louis M. Lighton based on a story by Elinor Glyn – a 1920’s celebrity who appears as herself in the film and who also wrote a novel called It, though the plots of the book and the movie are totally different and Glyn said the book It was “a character study of a story which the people in the picture read and discuss.” I’ve already written about It from the Balboa Park Silent Movie Night showing in 2008 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2008/08/it-paramount-1927.html), and that pretty much reflects how I feel about it now. The Lady in Question gave Aherne the sort of role he’d long wanted, a middle-aged father figure with two teenage children, Pierre (Glenn Ford, who was 24 when he made this but still looks like he just graduated from high school) and Françoise (Evelyn Keyes). André’s life takes a dramatic turn when he’s summoned to serve on a jury, and while at first he’s just an alternate he’s seated as a full juror when one of the panel has a heart attack and has to withdraw from the trial. The defendant is Natalie Roguin (Rita Hayworth, just coming into her own as both an actress and a sex goddess), who’s accused of killing her former boyfriend. She claims she acted in self-defense after the much older man she’d met on the street turned violently against her one day. In the first half-hour, this film eerily anticipates 12 Angry Men as André manages to persuade the other jurors to acquit Natalie. Then, since Natalie has been homeless since the man’s death, André agrees to take her in and put her to work in his store, but tells her to use the alias “Jeanne” so people don’t associate her with the notorious Natalie Roguin. André’s wife Michelle (Irene Rich) is naturally not happy about this arrangement, not so much because she doesn’t trust her husband but she’s worried about “what people will say.” She’s also upset by Natalie’s clumsiness and how much money it’s cost the store for all the items she breaks.

As for Pierre, he falls instantly in love with Natalie – all the others accept her as “Jeanne,” but because Pierre attended some of the trial sessions so he could watch his dad be a juror, he knows very well who she is. Meanwhile, Pierre’s sister Françoise is dating a man named Robert LaCoste (Edward Norris), though when he also makes a pass at Natalie we know, even before she does, that he’s no good. There’s also a running gag with a male customer who keeps returning the tandem bike he’s bought at André’s shop and exchanging it for a single, then returning to ask for the tandem back, based on the ups and downs of his love life. At one point André takes Natalie back into the storeroom of the store to talk to her privately about her situation, and Pierre sees them through the storeroom window. Instantly Pierre thinks the worst and gets jealous of his dad, but ultimately it all ends with all three couples on tandem bikes: Pierre and Natalie, André and Michelle, and Françoise with the man who kept trading bikes and has finally become her lover at long last. There’s also a quarrelsome juror who keeps coming around to André’s shop and pestering him because he thinks Natalie was really guilty, but eventually new evidence is discovered: a letter in the victim’s own handwriting stating that he intended to kill first Natalie and then himself. The Lady in Question was directed by Charles Vidor – who six years later would reunite with Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford for a far more famous and sexually charged movie, Gilda – from a script by Lewis Meltzer based on a 1937 French film called Gribouille (which Google Translate renders as “Scribble”), released in the English-speaking world as Heart of Paris, directed by Marc Allégret from a story by Marcel Achard and Jan Lustig and starring Raimu, Michèle Morgan, and Gilbert Gil in the roles played by Aherne, Hayworth, and Ford, respectively. While the French version might be more entertaining if only because we’d be hearing the actors playing French people actually speaking French instead of English with bad French accents, The Lady in Question is a quite charming little film. In his intro, Ben Mankiewicz said that Brian Aherne actually fought for the role as a change of pace from all the romantic leading men he’d been playing – quite the opposite from most leading men, who would insist on playing the young, sexy lover long after they were too old to do so!