Too Many Husbands

Released the same year as the more famous (and rightly, though there’s room for both!) My Favorite Wife and bearing a similar premise with genders reversed, this screwball comedy finds Jean Arthur with one husband too many when Fred MacMurray, presumed drowned a year earlier, shows up very much alive. Six months after he disappeared (an interesting contrast to Cary Grant’s faithful seven years in MFW ) she took up with his best friend and business partner Melvyn Douglas, and now the two must compete to win her once and for all. In moments when she’s not under pressure to choose, though, she finds there’s no such thing as having too many husbands: one morning she’s lamenting with the husbands’ secretary (who had loved and imagined herself with both!) about short honeymoons, and by nightfall she’s lavished with attention and promises from not one but two men! Plenty of bedroom farce antics, playground athletic contests and delightfully saucy dialogue follows until she figures out how to have it both ways. All three leads are terrific, and the film is boisterous and consistently funny. Evidently it was as big a box-office draw as MFW in its day and deserves to be better-known in ours.