I Married a Woman ** (1958, George Gobel, Diana Dors, Adolphe Menjou) Classic Movie Review 8483

‘What happens to the MOUSE when the CHEESECAKE bites back?’

British sex symbol Diana Dors’s performance in Yield to the Night (1956) attracted interest in Hollywood and in May 1956 she signed a contract with RKO to support George Gobel in I Married a Woman.

But Dors is sadly out of luck in Hollywood (where alas she never became a star) with director Hal Kanter’s feeble 1956 comedy I Married a Woman, in which she plays Janice Blake Briggs, the sexy but neglected fashion-model wife of over-worked advertising executive Marshall Briggs (George Gobel), who sets out to make him jealous.

Dors is certainly pleasing enough, but American TV comedian Gobel’s nervous little man act is rather unappealing and it is easy to see why his film career didn’t take off, so Dors was unlucky to be co-starring with him.

Dors plus favourite players Adolphe Menjou, Jessie Royce Landis Nita Talbot and John McGiver help to make this box-office flop watchable, but Kanter directs with no sparkle, and the screenplay by Goodman Ace is mundane.

I Married a Woman is in black and white apart from a sequence in which John Wayne puts in an unbilled cameo as himself and Angie Dickinson appears briefly. The fictional film which Gobel and Dors are watching in the cinema is a Technicolor movie called Forever and Forever and Forever starring Wayne and Dickinson as the Screen Wife.

Also in the cast are William Redfield, Steve Dunne, Steve Pendleton, Cheerio Meredith, Kay Buckley, Stanley Adams, Harry Cheshire, Mabel Rea and Julius Tannen.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8483

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