Come Live with Me (1941)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) The casting in Come Live with Me is enough to make any classic Hollywood cinephile perk up — Hedy Lamarr and James Stewart in a romantic comedy? Well, yes — she plays a refugee with citizenship issues, and he plays a single writer in search of inspiration. It’s a match made in citizenship application heaven, and he gets enough inspiration to write a book about their non-romance. It’s all complicated by some adultery (surprisingly enough for 1941), but the key driver of the last act is Stewart saying with his usual aw-shucks “Now, it’s perfectly all right for two strangers to get married; they’ve got to know each other before they get divorced!” Blending screwball comedy of remarriage with a far lower-octane style of romance, Come Live with Me is nowhere near any top tier of film — but it has Lamarr looking beautiful, Stewart ably playing a romantic lead at the height of this romantic-premier era, and that’s more than enough to check off the essential boxes of what the film must deliver.