Tonight's Movie: The Bride Wore Boots (1946)

THE BRIDE WORE BOOTS is a silly yet agreeable comedy about a squabbling husband and wife. Sally (Barbara Stanwyck) owns a horse farm, and her husband Jeff (Robert Cummings), who writes history books, can't stand horses.

The film is mildly amusing, but the humor never really takes off, and Stanwyck and Cummings don't have much chemistry as a couple married for several years. An added hindrance is that the script makes it a bit hard to understand what drew them together in the first place.

Nonetheless, the film is pleasant company; everything about it looks beautiful, including the black and white photography, sets, outdoor locations, costumes (by Edith Head), and Stanwyck's hairstyles, and it has an excellent supporting cast.

Peggy Wood (THE SOUND OF MUSIC) and Robert Benchley are marvelous as Stanwyck's sly mother and uncle, and their scenes give the movie the fizz it's missing at other moments, whether it's Wood reading a gangster novel aloud to the children (she changes some of the words, so that a character is improbably drinking lemonade), or Benchley giving the children toy guns and promising that they don't have to eat spinach at his house. Little Natalie Wood is one of Sally and Jeff's children.

Diana Lynn plays an irritating Southern belle homewrecker; one of the film's flaws is that it's so obvious Jeff simply needs to tell her to go away and get out of his life. Patric Knowles is the dashing neighbor who wants to marry Stanwyck, and Willie Best plays Joe, the stable hand.

The film's director, Irving Pichel, was also an actor, and he has a nice role in the final minutes of the film as a steeplechase announcer. Pichel, in fact, discovered Natalie Wood; he cast her in a bit role in HAPPY LAND (1943), and he also gave her a great role as the German orphan adopted by Orson Welles in TOMORROW IS FOREVER (1946).

THE BRIDE WORE BOOTS is part of the six-film Barbara Stanwyck Collection in the excellent Universal Backlot Series. The DVD print is beautiful. I've previously reviewed two other films in the set, INTERNES CAN'T TAKE MONEY (1937) and ALL I DESIRE (1953).

It's curious that the DVD box includes a still of a wedding scene with Cummings and Stanwyck which was cut from the film; it might have been a flashback, or perhaps was dropped from the end of the movie.

THE BRIDE WORE BOOTS isn't a top-drawer comedy, but it provides attractive, undemanding viewing. Sometimes, especially at the end of a busy day, sitting down and unwinding with a movie like this seems exactly right.