PERFECT STRANGERS (1950)

Before hyphenating up from Writer to Writer-Director, Billy Wilder posted this notice on his office door: ‘It’s Not Enough To Be Hungarian; You Must Also Be Talented!’  The gag refers both to the large contingent of Austro-Hungarians working in Hollywood (at a peak during the Nazi Era) and equally to the number of screenplay adaptations taken from Hungarian plays.  More often than not, the freest fantasias on just the barest of outlines.  PERFECT STRANGERS being a late example of the form.  Before moving to Hollywood, Leslie (Ladislprime aus) Bush-Fekete wrote the source play for this one, a courtroom drama about romance springing up between a pair of married jurors sequestered on a scandalous murder case.  Think proto-12 ANGRY MEN, but Co-Ed.  Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur picked up on the main idea in the late ‘30s for Helen Hayes on B’way, calling it LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.  (Hayes married to MacArthur, it’s his only stage work for her.)  After a modest run, it must have been kicked around for a decade on option before hotshot Warner producer Jerry Wald dusted it off for Ginger Rogers (her character married but separated) and Dennis Morgan (him married with kids but unfulfilled) and assigned it to Bretaigne Windust, a major B’way director not really clicking in L.A.  You can see what they were going for; unfortunately, you can also see where it’s going right from the start.  Lots of lazy stereotypes on the jury panel (the Guilty/Not-Guilty split all too obvious); the murder case something of a strawman to the illicit romance.  Perhaps this was all fresher at the time the play opened in ‘39.  Still, the short docu-prologue on how they picked jury pools back in analogue days (rows of filing cabinets; hand counted forms) is like watching a tedious circle in purgatory come to life, and there’s fun in spotting the well-known supporting cast (Thelma Ritter; Paul Ford; Alan (Fred Flintstone) Reed; along with recognizable actors in almost every speaking role), making for a reasonably engaging 90".

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:   Surely by 1950 we should have had a Black or Asian or Latino person on the jury.  (This still true in 1957's 12 ANGRY MEN, come to think of it.)  Excluding background extras, the sole Black person on screen being a silent elevator operator.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Describing the stultifying middle-class routine he dreams of breaking away from, Morgan (quite good here) bemoans the twice-a-week leg of lamb dinners at his mother’s and his mother-in-law’s homes.  Back then, lamb was the cheap meat!  Chicken was pricey.  And you thought ideas about divorce have changed.