This Man is Mine |
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Director Starring |
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This lightweight comedy retains most of its stage roots, hampered by a slight script and story. Dunne, Bellamy and supporting cast really make the most of the material, though. It’s a strange thing about Dunne’s early career, up to about 1936, say, where things really took off for her and she blossomed into a superlative actor with undeniable presence. I have always found her work pre-Show Boat to be a bit cool, somewhat reticent; many of her signature traits are there, but muddled, incipient. What’s interesting about Madame Blanche last night and This Man is Mine now — and I’d include Back Street, too — is that there seem to be specific early films in which she absolutely glowed, radiated her delightful Dunniness, and it sort of throws me for a loop. I wonder what a difference a good director made for her then, before she had come into her own. Anyway, in these two most recent viewings she was enormously expressive and affecting — imagine being affected by a third-rate soaper like Madame Blanche, but she makes it work — and enormously sexy. Talk about shocking: she has a cabaret number in Madame Blanche that makes that Show Boat shuffle look tame. Anyway, yeah, TMIM is nothing particularly special, and thematically I take a lot of umbrage (as a wife, she takes far too much from her straying husband, and then after a short — but delicious — vengeful streak takes him back like nothing… of course, these things happen), but yeah, a nice frothy watch.
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