My Dear Secretary (1948)

just watch it!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Although it might not seem like it at first, My Dear Secretary is a great movie to watch if you're a feminist. Kirk Douglas plays a successful romance novelist known for his womanizing ways. It's the same routine every time he gets a new secretary, until he hires Laraine Day. She starts her new job with a little crush, that fades fast when she sees what kind of man he really is. He insists she work nights, suggests she move into his apartment, and when she tries to get him to work, he keeps making passes!Parts of this movie are absolutely hilarious, with the endless antics involving Kirk's roommate Keenan Wynn and their attempts to dodge their landlady Florence Bates. Parts are a little quirky, and it's easy to imagine Charles Martin's script adapted into a play. Kirk and Keenan bounce off each other's comic timing wonderfully, and it's nice to see Kirk in a comedy, since he usually made such heavy dramas. If you like quirky, slightly silly romantic comedies with a heart of gold, be sure and rent My Dear Secretary with your girlfriends.

"My Dear Secretary" is an odd film, as the first and last portions of the film vary so much in quality. The first is brisk and funny--the second is very slow and completely different. It's too bad because if the film could have maintained its pace, it would be an excellent and enjoyable picture. Instead, it's just frustrating to watch.The film begins with Laraine Day being hired as a secretary to a successful writer. She's excited by this but her excitement soon wanes as she sees that her new employer (Kirk Douglas) is a very immature and undisciplined guy. Again and again, instead of working on his book, he takes the secretary and his friend (Keenan Wynn) out gambling and on spur of the moment vacations! Despite this portion of the film being hard to believe, it was quite funny--particularly for Wynn, who provided wonderful support. However, completely out of the blue, Day (who is rather conservative) marries Douglas--a wedding that makes absolutely no sense at all. And, as if the unlikelihood of the pairing also threw the writer, the film just languished and stopped being funny. Instead, the marriage soon begins to fizzle and Douglas' attempt to write his next great novel seems to be a bust. There's more to it than this--including Day becoming a great writer herself and a divorce--but none of it made much sense or kept my interest.Rarely have I seen such an uneven film. I wanted to like it a lot more than I did and can say it's, at best, just an amiable time-passer and nothing more.

I'm starting to wonder, after reading some of the opinions here, if I watched the same film as the other reviewers but after checking my facts I am forced to the sad conclusion that I have.This witless wannabee screwball comedy has to be one of the the longest 94 minutes I have spent, and one of the most unfunny things I have seen, for ages. Now don't get me wrong, I love screwball comedies, but this boring, set-bound drivel falls so far short of the dizzy heights of Preston Sturges and Howards Hawks that it doesn't deserve (to mix my metaphors) to be thought of in the same breath as those greats. Writer / Director Charles Martin's dialogue is neither witty, subtle or interesting - and there's so much of it. He doesn't know how to end a scene either, with some ruthless cutting, especially of people exiting rooms and saying goodbye to each other, the pace of film would have been lifted and then the fact that the limited number of characters are doing stupid and motiveless things for no other reason than this is supposed to be a comedy would have been a little less obvious. Characters in this movie fall in and out of love with each other, and move in and out of apartments, at a moment's notice only to move what little plot there is forward. One moment people are desperately yearning for one person, the next they are getting married to someone else - having wooed and been wooed off screen so we know nothing about it until one of the characters tells us - "Oh, they're getting married!" (usually after someone has made a faux-pas or jumped to the wrong conclusion). If we had known that these two characters were in love or supposed to be engaged before hand we, the audience, might have enjoyed the experience of watching someone making a fool of themselves in front of them. As it is the characters just come over looking like selfish, petulant idiots and we have no sympathy for any of them.The sets are limited and the action confined to them in a way that makes the whole thing look like a badly filmed stage play. The only moments of relief from the tedium are Keenan Wynn who looks like he has wandered in from a different movie and has decided to hang around and be slightly funnier than all the unfunny stuff going on around him.Highly avoidable.

My Dear Secretary proved one thing in the career of Kirk Douglas, comedy was not his strength.Kirk Douglas has made a career of playing dramatic and egotistical heels, but in this case the director didn't keep him under control. I could not believe that Owen Waterbury could have anyone other than himself fall in love with him.Plot such as it is has Laraine Day as a student becoming enthralled with writer Kirk Douglas's lecture at her night school and then going to work as his secretary. She's a budding writer also and I think you can see where the rest of this film is going.There are some nice performances from some of the supporting players. One has to single out Keenan Wynn as Douglas's neighbor and partaker in merriment. If My Dear Secretary was done today, Wynn's character would be openly gay instead of it just being hinted at. As it is, he camps it up to beat all the Boys in the Band.