The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) Good casting can make a trifle of a film enjoyable for ages, and that’s the point of The Bride Came C.O.D.: A fun but hardly ambitious romantic comedy elevated by having James Cagney and Bette Davis have some fun for a change. In the lagging tradition of 1930s screwball comedies (the influence of It Happened One Night is obvious), here we have an heiress (Davis) being kidnapped by a rogue pilot (Cagney) on the orders of her father, who wants to prevent her from marrying an unsuitable prospect. The inevitable eventually happens, and the rest is a foregone conclusion—but the fun here is seeing Davis and Cagney bicker all the way to a happy ending. This being said, there’s a limit to what casting can go to shore up a lacklustre script, and if The Bride Came C.O.D. is watchable enough, there’s a sense that it misses a few opportunities along the way, even when it portrays semi-crazy rich people and daredevil flyers from the heroic age of aviation. In a pattern that would repeat throughout film history, this easy audience-pleaser was tepidly met by reviewers yet went on to do good box-office business, and even today it’s obvious why.