OVP: Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942)

Film: Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942)
Stars: Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Walter Slezak, Albert Dekker, Albert Bassermann
Director: Leo McCarey
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Sound Recording)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

There are occasions when I'm watching old movies that I have to check and double check what year the movie was made.  This is because, thanks to a bit of knowledge regarding history, I'm well aware that a certain movie's mood and atmosphere will greatly influence what's happening onscreen.  This was something I was made aware of while I was watching the Leo McCarey dramedy (before that word became popular) Once Upon a Honeymoon.  The film, led by spry romantic comedy stars Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant (random fact: depending on what part of the country you were in depends on who got top billing for the film, though TCM listed Grant first so that's where we'll go too) seems at first to be a pretty distastefully light comedy, making light of Nazism and Rogers' Katie's naivete regarding such subjects before the film eventually meanders into a more traditional romantic output.  As a result, we get a good movie that works on both levels, but probably would have been considerably better if it'd just stuck with one.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Katie O'Hara (Rogers), a former stripper who is pretending to be a wealthy socialite in Austria in hopes of nabbing a rich husband.  She finds one in a Baron von Luber (Slezak, in his first Hollywood role), but doesn't count on the fact that he's a Nazi sympathizer that is scouting out different locales before the Nazi invade.  As a result, we get an inappropriately hilarious (there's a LOT of black comedy in this movie, which I wasn't remotely expecting from these two prim-and-proper movie stars) series of scenes where Rogers is perplexed as to why Hitler keeps invading every country they visit on their honeymoon (this was made in 1942...that's dark).

She meets in the opening scenes a man named Pat O'Toole whom she initially distrusts (thinking he's just trying to use her husband and her marriage to sell his radio show), but eventually trusts and falls in love with, realizing that she has to leave her husband before it's too late.  Before she does that, though, she's convinced by an American spy (Dekker) to try and get information from von Luber, and in the process gets the operative killed and herself trapped.  She's eventually saved in a comic moment where O'Toole starts to talk (on-the-air) about how von Luber fancies himself the next Fuhrer, and gets in trouble with Hitler.  The film ends in an extremely black comic way, with von Luber thrown overboard off-screen by Katie, with she and O'Toole convincing the ship's captain to turn the ship around, and then her telling the captain that von Luber can't swim, resulting in him exasperatingly turning the ship around again (without the usual somberness that accompanies a classic movie death).

The film's weird shifts in tone are interesting to say the least.  I kind of wished, in hindsight, that they had just gone all-in with the black comedy, a sort of Great Dictator for the romantic comedy set, though that would have been preposterous for someone as socially conservative as Rogers in particular (who was a major star at the time so no one was forcing her to do this film-I'm surprised she signed up for it).  The two leads have tremendously fun chemistry, and when they're flirting it's glorious, but the heavy-handed shifts eventually wear on the audience and you wish they'd just pick a genre.

The film received a sole Oscar nomination, for Sound Recording, which seems very weird for a movie that has no musical numbers and minimal wartime effects (there's maybe one bomb that goes off and one water scene, which is usually how these nominations are won).  As a result, we don't see a lot of credence for this except perhaps RKO was short on contenders in this category.  Either way, I'm glad I saw this oddly-toned film even if its Oscar nomination was totally unwarranted.

How about you-have you seen Once Upon a Honeymoon?  If so, what were your thoughts on its tone and nomination?  If not, what do you think of Rogers and Grant in general, and do you ever find yourself researching what was going on around a particular film?  Share your thoughts in the comments!