Word: granting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Minnesota, which claimed the largest state-fair art show in the country, gave its first prize in oils to a poster-slick abstraction of a stage set that might have come out of a studio in midtown Manhattan. Iowa's prizewinner (in the '30s Grant Wood once won three firsts in a row) was a somber doorway that could have opened into a house on almost any Main Street in the land. California's winners, hung in a monster open-air cabana over beds of dazzling yellow marigolds, were low-keyed oil portraits with little sunshine...
Buried in the stuffing is a situation dear to the hearts of farce writers: the plight of a manly newly wed (Gary Grant) who is prevented by twists of the plot from getting to bed with his bride (Ann Sheridan). Here the situation is rigged on a fresh but frail device that crumbles under ponderous handling. To join his WAG Lieut. Sheridan, whose outfit is leaving Germany, Frenchman Grant must be deployed as an "alien spouse" through the U.S. Army's channels for delivering European brides to their G.I. husbands...
Even by overworking Grant's predicament to the last adolescent titter, Male War Bride's three scripters have been unable to stretch it to the picture's length. By evident default, fully half the film must first detail the couple's courtship, a fixed bout in the battle of the sexes...
Filmed on German locations, Male War Bride uses well-photographed landscapes as backdrops for its pratfalls and manages somehow to turn occupied Germany into a comic-opera set, peopled by quaint peasants and toy soldiers. With no dialogue worthy of deft Comedian Grant, it makes its major bid for comedy by turning him into a female impersonator...
...friend was trying to find a job for him and a place to live, so that he could put in a formal application for parole. Wrote Gara to the minister: "The days now go rather rapidly, but the weeks creep and the months seem very long . . . But God does grant me the strength sufficient unto each day, and I feel that, so far at least, I've not succumbed to the temptation of bitterness. But, believe me, it is a terrific struggle...