In the only film that they did together former married couple Henry Fonda and
Margaret Sullavan teamed together for Walter Wanger in a nice screwball comedy
The Moon's Our Home. Both come from different worlds and both use pseudonyms in their professional lives.
Sullavan is a temperamental movie star not totally unlike the real Sullavan was
reputed to be. She was not a fan of the studio system of the day and wasn't
shy about letting people know it. Fonda is a novelist who uses a pen name like
Samuel Langhorne Clemens did. For this to work you have to believe that
Sullavan wasn't much of a reader and Fonda disdained the cinema.
Both however had the habit of using their rather pedestrian real names of John
Smith and Sarah Brown when they wanted to just get away. And the two do meet in a New York taxi under those real names and Fonda offers her a chance
to go to a nice New Hampshire rural inn he always holidayed at. She takes him
up and the romance begins.
It could happen that way. When Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were courting it was a fact that Monroe knew he was an ex-ballplayer but had no
concept of his legend in his field. We do lead compartmentalized lives and have our set interests.
The former marrieds get some nice support from Spencer Charters and Margaret Hamilton as the inn proprietors, Walter Brennan as a deaf justice of
the peace, Charles Butterworth who is the silly playboy ever ready to marry
Sullavan and Beulah Bondi and Henrietta Crossman as her aunt and grandmother respectively. Bondi has a classic scene with Butterworth as she
gets him away from Sullavan. And Butterworth is always fun delivering those
wonderful dead pan lines.
Whatever chemistry the stars had that made them both take the first steps to
marriage and to each other, Fonda and Sullavan had enough left to turn out a
good typical screwball comedy of the Thirties with The Moon's Our Home.
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