The Bride Came C.O.D.

Although this Johnny-come-lately screwball comedy has its moments, they are few and far between. With a so-so screenplay by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein (they were yet to pen their best work with Casablanca in 1942 and Arsenic and Old Lace in 1944), stars who were either too old (Davis was 33 playing a 23 year old) or ill-suited (Cagney goes at his part like a bull in a china shop) and a studio director known for gangster and swashbuckler movies The Bride Came C.O.D. is a feather in no-one’s cap.

Davis plays a flighty young oil heiress, Joan Winfield, who is about to marry a Los Angeles nightclub bandleader Jack Carson) after a four-day romance. Stuff like that was apparently big news for the hoi polloi of the day (forget about a war in Europe) and radio broadcaster Tommy Keenan (Stuart Erwin) persuades the couple to double the fun by eloping to Las Vegas. He makes arrangements for them to fly to Vegas in a charter plane owned by Steve Collins' (James Cagney). Steve’s plane is about to be repossessed by a finance company so he cooks up a deal with Joan's father (Eugene Pallette), who wants to prevent the nuptials, to deliver his daughter to him in Amarillo, Texas, unmarried for $10 a pound.

Much indebted to the It Happened One Night (1934) style of comedy in which two people start off rubbing each other the wrong way only to eventually fall in love, there are some nicely turned passages of dialogue between Cagney and Davis but there’s no charm in the relationship and the movie, which moves along at a relentless pace, relies over much on gags like the running joke about Joan falling on her backside in a cactus patch for laughs. Perhaps not so surprisingly it was a commercial success in its day but these days it’s purely for nostalgia nuts.

 

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