sharing the
dance
by Douglas Messerli
Based on a 1919 play by W. Somerset
Maugham, Wesley Ruggles’ 1940 film Too
Many Husbands is a variation of the Garson Kanin film of the very same
year, My Favorite Wife. While the
later film certainly is more adventuresome in its sexual innuendos (see My Year 2003) Ruggles’ work still
manages to hoodwink the dreaded Hays Code quite nicely by centering its focus
on a confused woman unable to select between her two husbands, present and
past.

Too Many Husbands charts even
stranger territory when Henry’s loyal secretary, Gertrude (Dorothy Peterson)
admits to Vicky that she is about to marry a man whom she does not love. When
asked why, she explains that the only men she every loved were Vicky’s two
husbands, with whom she had fantasized the same relationship which Vicky had
experienced. In short, she reveals in her heterosexual fantasies a kind covert
lesbian kinship with the real wife of these two men, a kind of focused
identification with the “other” woman—surely one of the most kinky
relationships ever represented in a otherwise standard Hollywood film. Vicky,
even more oddly is sympathetic and even fascinated by this odd tale.
The two men, in defiance of one another, keep to their conjugal bed—they are
after all both “married,” through their wife, to one another. When one
finally escapes in the middle of the night to purr out his love for Vicky, his
words fall upon the ears of the father, who has replaced his daughter in her
bed—another symbolically strange twist.
After a series of further misadventures, including private meetings with
Vicky and each man and a paper-drawing challenge (interestingly, neither man
ever suggests any physical violence against the other) wherein the one who
picks the paper with a cross will win the “bride,” neither man has gained the
upper hand. Although Henry appears to win the draw, it is revealed he has
cheated, both papers being blank. Accordingly the two men continue to romance
their “wife” at their favorite restaurant, Franks, each man attempting to catch
Vicky up into a frenetic dance, which ends with all three joyfully sharing the
experience.
The film seemed particularly interesting to view, coming immediately
after the Fassbinder film, Gods of the
Plague, I had just the day before witnessed, wherein the three central
characters share in a ménage à tois.
Of course, such relationships have been at the heart of many books and films
throughout the ages, but the fact that two major Hollywood films, Too Many Husbands and My Favorite Wife, appeared in the same
year, might say something about the fifth decade of the last century. My only
problem with Ruggle’s version was that he could apparently never quite “let
go,” allowing his film to truly enjoy the sexual implications it suggested,
whereas Cary Grant’s infatuation with the “other” man was something with which
director Kanin utterly reveled in revealing—even if his audiences might not
readily perceive it as sexual.
Los
Angeles, April 30, 2013
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