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Wife vs. Secretary (1936)'s comments

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Siskoid

While I can't shrug off the feeling that Wife vs. Secretary was specifically designed to tell wives to implicitly trust their potentially-cheating husbands, it nevertheless comes across as a frankly subtle and adult comedy about the pitfalls of jealousy. Clark Gable is not my preferred match for Myrna Loy, but I really like their banter and chemistry as husband and wife here, and for most of the picture, the title seems misleading. It's not really about a romantic rivalry (in this case with super-competent secretary Jean Harlow, herself having romantic trouble with long-term fiancé Jimmy Stewart), but about Gable's terrible work-life balance. So while he and Loy are cute together, his flaw is that he's obsessed with his work. Loy isn't jealous until her mother-in-law puts those thoughts into her head, and then the movie is putting Gable and Harlow into easily misunderstood situations often just for our benefit (we're thinking, "if Myrna were to walk in right now"). It could easily end in screaming matches and doesn't, opting for ambiguity (at least, in the acting) at its climax.

2 years 6 months ago