“Holy Matrimony” is a typical job of carpentering by the producer-writer, Nunnally Johnson, who takes rather mediocre, clumsy frameworks and reworks them into adequate movies, which look nice, function well and stop just short of significant movie expression. The virtues of a Johnson-hammered film arise from a considerable talent for surface effects, which includes using extra players to advantage, an awareness and control of the environment so that it can be made either realistic or satirical, and a facility with dialogue. His productions are graced with a raft of experts like Alan Mowbray, Melville Cooper and Eric Blore. The ailments in the original scores of such things as “The Moon Is Down,” “Life Begins at 8:30” and this one, are still in after Mr. Johnson finishes with them, but they are not so noticeable.
“Holy Matrimony” is a pleasant, gray-haired comedy, which Arnold Bennett first thought up in 1905, about an English painter who palmed off his dead valet as himself so he could live quietly and unknown in London. Later he is found out on the strength of two moles he has on his left collar-bone—the papers scream “Shame! Painter not in Valhalla!” and one carries the headline “American Claims Record—105 Moles.” The painter has a tendency to confuse his assumed name of Henry Wadsworth Leek with Henry Greenleaf Leek. The picture seems to be spoofing Paul Gauguin, since in this case an English painter leaves his palmy Tahitian paradise for a quiet married life in the heart of the London suburbs with a practical, middle-aged matron. Mr. Monty Woolley plays the painter; he is still an inert performer covered by a beard, with an irascible voice that snaps the ends of his sentences off in a cold fury, even when he is conversing contentedly. Miss Gracie Fields plays his wife with much more talent. She has a good face and a good voice for movies, and only rarely does the professional impersonator show through her performance.
For a movie based on such an incredible occurrence as this one is, it is the most lethargic and restrained of comedies, which gets by on meager helpings of understated humor and quiet life, for which elderly people will go quietly crazy. It is no doubt Twentieth Century-Fox’s intention, now that they have helped lower the age of the most frequent movie-goers to 18 with Betty Grable and Flicka, to try to lift it to 58 with Woolley and Fields.
In “Holy Matrimony” the laughs are always the result of commendable secondary effects brushed over situations which are unrealized, anemic and often vague. In the Westminster Abbey episode the diversion is in the interest of the ceremony and spectacle of Abbey burying. The hat-fitting episode has a brief, beautiful parody of the way a hatter swipes the felt smooth, and then, after clamping the hat on his customer’s head, intimidates him into liking it. One of the finer episodes has the dead valet’s first wife showing up to claim Mr. Woolley, who is now living in middle-aged seclusion and paradise with Miss Fields. The scene produces nothing that is new or remarkable: the artist, who has never seen the woman, is horrified; his practical wife gets him out of the way and then convinces the other woman that Mr. Woolley is crazy, a pauper, and will bring disgrace on her and her three sons. The scene’s humor is in the spinsterish dress and posing of the family—middle-class and puritan in their coal-black Sunday best, except for a third son, who hulks sourly in the background, looking like a woodchopper in his working clothes, clearly the bastard son.
There are many scenes that make you feel the thing wasn’t grasped too well. Mr. Woolley’s breaking down and crying at his funeral seems odd, because till then he had seemed to understand his part as requiring no emotion; his refusal to admit his identity at the end is as unconvincing as was his urge to admit it earlier in the picture. It is never clear just what personality Mr. Woolley is going to try to be; he is a three-way light connection which the plot and director switch as they see fit. Nevertheless, the film is sufficiently sprinkled with laughs, like a papier-maché sundae with real nuts. Also, it is the first American movie to show paintings that were executed by a painter rather than a sign painter. Mr. Woolley’s art—Eakins-like paintings of non-surgical or non-rowing scenes—could very well be considered quite good by all the people who so considered them.
October 4, 1943