"No surprises are the easy ad-libbish styles of Stars Grant and Lombard..."
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| With Carole Lombard. |
In Name Only - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):
"In Name Only will puzzle cinemagoers who thought they knew just what high jinks to expect when Screwball Cary Grant falls in love with Screwball Carole Lombard. Far from high jinks is the somber situation of rich young Alec Walker when he falls in love with Julie Eden, a widowed commercial artist who has taken a summer cottage near his stately county seat. For, as rarely happens in a screwball comedy but is very likely to happen in life, Alec has a tenacious wife with an undeveloped sense of humor, parents who also thought infidelity no joke. Before Lovers Grant and Lombard fight through to the clear, they have traded more punches than puns, emerged with the realization that matrimony is more than the off-screen ending to a Grant-Lombard movie.
A mature, meaty picture, based on the novel Memory of Love, by veteran bucolic Bessie Brewer (wife of muralist Henry Varnum Poor), In Name Only has its many knowing touches deftly underscored by Director John Cromwell, brought out by a smoothly functioning cast. No surprises are the easy ad-libbish styles of Stars Grant and Lombard, the enameled professional finish of oldtime Actor Charles Coburn as Alec's conventional father. Surprising to many cinemaddicts, however, will be the effectively venomous performance, as Alec's mercenary wife, of Cinemactress Kay Francis. Having worked out a long-term contract with Warner Bros. which kept her in the top money (over $5,000 a week) but buried her as the suffering woman in a string of B pictures, sleek Cinemactress Francis in her first free-lance job shows that she still belongs in the A's, that, properly encouraged, she can pronounce the letter r without wobbling."
- Time
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| New Artwork by Rebekah Hawley at Studio36 - Number 34 - In Name Only (Lobby Card Style) |
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