John Loves Mary (1949)

Based on the Broadway play of the same title by Norman Krasna, John Loves Mary is perhaps best noted for being the film debut of Patricia Neal. Neal plays Mary McKinley, the daughter of a US Senator (played by Edward Arnold) who is just ecstatic that her long time beau John (played by Ronald Reagan) is finely returning home from war service so they can get married (John is apparently some kind of expert in the disposal of sensitive army surplus, so that's why he was kept over seas long after the war actually ended). John however has secretly married Lilly Herbish (Virginia Field) a British stage performer who John's war buddy Fred Taylor (Jack Carson) loved but lost track of after D-day. As Fred saved John's life, and as it was  very difficult to get a foreigner into the United States at the time, John married Lilly to get her into the country, with the intention to then go to Nevada and divorce her so that she and Fred could get married. However John should have kept in better touch with Fred because in the mean time Fred has gotten married to an American girl and the two are expecting a baby. So its a screwball type comedy of errors as John and Fred try to figure out how to deal with Lilly, while keeping her a secret from Mary and her family who are planning  a quick wedding for her and John.

The film fells very stagy, both in ridicules plot and in the way it was filmed, its mostly just a few sets, the movie never really opens up to take advantage of the fact that it doesn't have to be bound to a few sets. I've just about had it with these seemingly stage bound productions of the 30's and 40's, I've honestly seen so many of them that they are now kind of hard for me to stomach. The big difference here is that John Loves Mary is a comedy, not a drama like most of the Broadway adaptations I've seen, so that made this a little more bearable. Still its more of a stage play then a movie, and its shtick got repetitive. I don't think it would have taken that much more work to really open this story up and make it more interesting, but I suspect the studio wanted to keep it to a small and tight budget. At times amusing, but mostly just okay, the cast really did try, and for a while it worked, it just went on too long. **1/2