You Can’t Fool Your Wife (1940)

(On Cable TV, October 2021) Roughly as ordinary a product of Classic Hollywood as it’s possible to get, You Can’t Fool Your Wife is your average potboiler comedy—made by studios to showcase a rising star (Lucille Ball), with straightforward execution in service of a slight story. The film barely makes it to 68 minutes and relies on familiar comedic devices. As the story goes, a loving couple finds itself in a rut after a few years of marriage—not helped by an overbearing mother-in-law and some trouble coming from his office. It takes a long time for this dreariness to become funny—past the halfway point, past an ugly separation, past the point when it should feel like a comedy rather than something too dispiriting to be fun. But the comedy does begin in earnest in the second half, as the estranged wife embarks on a program to regain her husband by passing herself off as someone else at a party. It eventually works itself up to an amiable watch, albeit tempered by some outdated social mores that are not executed well enough to be charming. Ball herself is cute but not quite striking here—a trademark of her early roles. But in the end, You Can’t Fool Your Wife probably would have sunk in deserved obscurity if it didn’t feature her—it’s very ordinary, outclassed by much better similar films and not completely successful in its execution.