I Take This Woman ** (1940, Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, Verree Teasdale, Kent Taylor, Laraine Day, Mona Barrie, Jack Carson) – Classic Movie Review 7379

Spencer Tracy stars as a New York doctor called Karl Decker who finds it isn’t love after all when he takes this troubled society woman Georgi Gragore (Hedy Lamarr) as his wife, in director W S Van Dyke II’s uncomfortable 1940 romantic drama I Take This Woman, unusually personally produced by MGM supremo Louis B Mayer himself, who took a personal interest in Hedy’s career.

Alas lovely lady Lamarr is not able to survive the awkward, struggling script or Tracy’s strong acting competition. A troubled shoot was forced into making endless retakes, ironically so, since the eventual director was known as Woody ‘One-Take’ Van Dyke (replacing uncredited Josef Von Sternberg and Frank Borzage, who were responsible for some of the footage). Walter Pidgeon, Ina Clair and Adrienne Ames also disappeared from the cast of the final version.

I Take This Woman is the result of 18 months of expensive, problematic production; but once again the motto is if it won’t fix, don’t keep trying to fix it. The film was nicknamed ‘I Re-take This Woman’. After Von Sternberg quit because of artistic differences, Borzage took over, but the production was shelved in early January 1939 for more than 10 months, when Van Dyke re-shot nearly the whole film, with a considerably different cast.

Also in the eventual starry cast are Verree Teasdale, Kent Taylor, Laraine Day, Mona Barrie, Jack Carson, Paul Cavanagh, Majorie Main, Louis Calhern, Reed Hadley, Frances Drake, George E Stone and Charles Trowbridge.

The screenplay by James Kevin McGuinness is based on an unpublished original story A New York Cinderella by Charles MacArthur.

It cost $1,271,000 and lost $325,000. It was indeed a lost cause.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7379

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