We’re Not Married! *** (1952, Ginger Rogers, Fred Allen, Victor Moore, Paul Douglas, Eve Arden, Marilyn Monroe, David Wayne, Louis Calhern, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mitzi Gaynor, Eddie Bracken) – Classic Movie Review 7605

Director Edmund Goulding’s 1952 We’re Not Married! is an entertaining and enjoyable film made up of separate stories about five wedded couples from Gina Kaus and Jay Dratler’s well assorted stories, varying from funny to touching, with the acting and writing (by Nunnally Johnson) well up to the mark.

Victor Moore plays the elderly justice of the peace Mr Bush, who has married six couples on Christmas Eve before his official appointment on the first of January, so that they later find out that they are not wed after all. When one of the six couples he married files for divorce, the remaining five couples are told they are not actually married and the film shows how they react.

Soldier Willie Fisher (Eddie Bracken) remarries pregnant Paysy (Mitzi Gaynor) by radio, but kind tycoon ‘Freddie’ Melrose (Louis Calhern) is pleased to get rid of gold-digger Eve (Zsa Zsa Gabor), and (in the film’s highlight) feuding radio couple Ramona and Steve Gladwyn (Ginger Rogers and Fred Allen) are happy again too.

The second couple is Jeff (David Wayne) and Annabel (Marilyn Monroe) Norris. Annabel, already Mrs Mississippi, is now free to enter the Miss Mississippi contest. Another couple, Hector (Paul Douglas) and Katie Woodruff (Eve Arden), used to talk constantly but now they are married they have run out of things to say to each other.

Look quickly for Lee Marvin as Pinky. Also in the cast are James Gleason, Jane Darwell, Tom Powers, Alan Bridge, O Z Whitehead, Marjorie Weaver, Helene Stanley as Mary, Gloria Talbott as Girl in dream sequence and Richard Buckley as the radio producer Mr H D Graves.

A sixth segment, starring Hope Emerson and Walter Brennan as an Ozark backwoods couple, was filmed but dropped.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7605

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