Bedtime Story (1941)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) As far as innocuous late-era screwball comedies go, Bedtime Story isn’t fun as much as it’s bland—familiar actors doing their shtick, characters from the stock repertory of genre archetypes, a plot built around a predictable comedy of remarriage, and so on. Fredric March and Loretta Young have starring roles as, respectively, a playwright and an actress—she wants to retire to the countryside, but he wants to keep working, and he wants her to star in his next play. (Twenty-first century viewers, however, may be more interested in Robert Benchley and Eve Arden in supporting roles.)  It’s all meant to be fun and frothy and innocuous at the end, except that from today’s perspective there are some very dodgy things going on in the male character tricking and manipulating his wife into doing his bidding, not to mention the not-so-fun aspects of her divorcing him and remarrying another man, something that the film presents him as justified in stopping. Such plot devices were distressingly common in screwball comedies, though—even the better ones—so think of them as the price to pay (if you want: no one’s forcing you) in order to appreciate the results. Otherwise, Bedtime Story doesn’t really break new ground or leave much of an impression.