Wedding Present (1936)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Perfect cast and a good story

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Wedding Present (1936)** 1/2 (out of 4) Reporters Charlie (Cary Grant) and Rusty Fleming (Joan Bennett) are set to be married but after his messing around costs them a marriage license, she begins to think twice about it. Soon he is made editor and she quits her job, which sets off a chain of events that has her eventually engaged to another man (Conrad Nagel).WEDDING PRESENT was the second straight film that Grant and Bennett did together and it would turn out to be Grant's final picture with Paramount until his return in 1955 with TO CATCH A THIEF. A lot of people including Leonard Maltin think of this as an underrated gem but I'm not certainly I'd go that far. A lot of others have noted that the film has a lot of common things with HIS GIRL Friday, which of course would go down as one of the greatest screwball comedies ever made.For my money, this film was way too uneven to fully work and a lot of the issues come in the second half. The story has all sorts of characters thrown in and our two leads are constantly having new things done to them and I just found the majority of it uninvolving and at times rather boring. The screenplay tries to keep things moving and as I said, it's constantly throwing loops into the story but I just didn't find it all that funny no matter how hard the cast was trying.As far as the cast goes, I thought most of them did a very good job and that includes Grant. He's charming, fast-talking ways would eventually make him a legend and his performance here was pretty good. I also thought Conrad Nagel and George Bancroft were good in their supporting bits of Gene Lockhart is also very good in his bit as the Archduke. As far as Bennett goes, she too is in fine form here but the screenplay certainly didn't do her any favors.

Cary Grant and Joan Bennett are hotshot reporters for a big metropolitan newspaper in this film. They are the best at what they do, and they know it. They also are in love and plan to get married. Grant plays Charlie Mason and Bennett plays Monica "Rusty" Fleming. One of the problems for the rest of the newspaper staff – the editors and other reporters, is that these two come and go as they please. So, the editor can never find them and doesn't know if the next story will get covered or not. They always happen to make it and scoop all the other papers. One other problem they have is their penchant for pranks. Not little things, but elaborate ones. So, they get a few dozen keys and tie notes on each one. "If found, please return to Peter Stagg, City Editor …" George Bancroft plays Stagg, and we see dozens of keys being returned and a line of people waiting to turn their found keys in to the city editor. So much for fun. After Charlie saves the life of a guy who seems to be drowning, his life takes on a patron. William Demarest plays Smiles Benson, a gangland boss of some kind, whom Charlie saved. Things get hectic and frantic after the city editor quits and the publisher makes Charlie city editor. He knows all the gimmicks of the reporters, so they can't pull anything on him. Now he becomes a slave master. When Charlie puts off the wedding, Rusty finds another man. Conrad Nagel plays Roger Dodecker. Smiles comes to Charlie's aid and for a wedding present for Rusty, Charlie calls in a national calamity on the Dodecker address. Fire trucks arrive, police cars, ambulances, vans from the psychiatric hospital. It's mayhem on the street, and Rusty rushes out to cover the fire or whatever. That ends her wedding to Dodecker. Smiles has his gopher, Squinty (played by Edward Brophy) take the rap for all the false-alarm calls. It's his gift to Charlie for saving his life. "Wedding Present" had possibilities to be much better. It is funny, but it's disjointed and choppy in places. And, the plot has the hero breaking the law big time with the false alarms that could lead to serious accidents. A better screenplay would have helped it immensely. One thing that is never clear is why Smiles was in the ocean a short distance from shore. Did he swim out there in his clothes? Did he fall off a dock? A boat? The studio set this one up but didn't do a job covering it in the script. The fine cast and some of the humor make this a fun film to watch, but just once.

Screwball Comedy is one of the most popular and enduring genres that came out of the 1930s and arguably Cary Grant remains its brightest star. Long before "The Awful Truth," "Bringing Up Baby," "Holiday," and "My Favorite Wife" became part of the Grant/Screwball canon, this seminal forgotten gem showcased his emerging talent as a light comedian. The loose and episodic plot of "Wedding Present" during its early scenes establishes the rapport between reporters Charlie and Rusty, played by Cary Grant and Joan Bennett. Their coverage of the breakup of a royal wedding and an improbable rescue at sea are enjoyable chiefly because of Grant. This seems to be the first film in which he exhibits the charm, deft comedic timing, and physical grace that we associate with the Grant screen persona. Although he seemed stiff and stilted in his earlier Paramount romantic comedies (like "Thirty Day Princess"), here he seems to have finally broken through and found the character that would make him a major romantic comedy star for three more decades.The plot seems to be a prequel to "His Girl Friday," but Howard Hawks has always insisted that only by reading lines with his secretary in preparation for the 1940 version of "The Front Page" did he hit on the idea of casting a woman as Hildy Johnson. When you consider the plot similarities between "Wedding Present" and "His Girl Friday," it would not be surprising if Hawks got his inspiration for Friday's back-story from this film.The setting is a Chicago tabloid (as in "The Front Page") with Grant as a ruthless editor. Although the two reporters were never married in "Wedding Present" as they were in "Friday", they did apply for a license in the Hall of Records. Like Hilda Johnson, Rusty becomes engaged to a stuffy socialite (Conrad Nagel as opposed to Ralph Bellamy.) Other analogous characters include his snooty mother (Mary Forbes as opposed to Alma Kruger), and Grant's gangster friend (William Demerast as opposed to Abner Biberman,) who helps him frame his rival with the police.All in all, "Wedding Present" is an unheralded minor gem in the "screwball comedy" canon and would serve as a good opener on a double feature with "His Girl Friday."

One thing I absolutely love about films from the 30s is the now obsolete devices around which some films are centered. Locomotives and ships of course. They're a bit obvious. Then, they were symbols of technology and modernity. Technology as physical power — something in everyone's cinematic imagination then — now made quaint by microchips we cannot even see. And films are the worse for it.Another device is the newsroom. We don't have these today in the same way. Reporters and cops don't mix it up as they used to. We don't actually "get the story," instead get some sort of manufactured fiction that glues facts together in appealing ways.But 70 years ago there was a magical confluence of what it meant to make or discover stories, what it meant to "see," and what it meant to be an American. Mixed in there was this notion of an alert woman.Its hard to impress on youngsters beyond a cartoonish awareness that women in society and film were extremely limited in options. Homemaker, secretary, teacher, nurse. Whore. If a woman was intelligent and witty and active, she was a reporter.Seeing and discovering was sexy. Its lost today, that effect. This is post-code; "Picture Snatcher" is a better example where the sexiness is darned explicit.Imagine a film that presents a woman far beyond your experience, what you know from real life. Imagine her witty and sexually available outside marriage, at least temporarily so. Smart, full of humor and ready to play severe and grand jokes. Its impossible to do today where Angelina can fight, Tilda can control and Julianne can affect.But just imagine the cinematic power of a newsroom with such juice. The folding, of course with them writing stories and we seeing stories simultaneously. Our admiration of her just as Grant's and both of us conspiring in creating a spectacle around her.(For those who haven't seen it the story is Cary and Joan are lovers — copulation is obvious — and both are star reporters. They decide NOT to marry as not to "ruin things." He advances to control the paper (the story) and she becomes engaged to a book writer. The books in question are vapid "self-help" books that lack the vim of "real" stories. Grant, drunk and with the help of a gangster pal, conspires to give her firetrucks, policecars, ambulances, even a hearse, all responding to the house where she will wed. That's the present: life.) Oh how I wish we had such power to pull from in film today! Where's the sex in story, the newsroom of today? Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.