Move Over, Darling (1963)

This movie is often compared to the one it remade: My Favorite Wife. Luckily I never saw the original (although now I want to) so I didn't made this comparison and could enjoy the movie on it's own. It is also interesting to know that this movie was supposed to be made with Marilyn Monroe but she died. I actually really liked Doris Day in it and can't really imagine Monroe in it.The movie is pretty good. I liked the hilarious story and it is full of big names. I haven't seen too many old movies but I could recognize most of them. I loved seeing John Astin, Don Knotts (both before their biggest hits), Fred Clark and Thelma Ritter in it. The actors were very talented and acted in that beautiful old movies style that gives this movie an extra charm.A lot of slapstick but I ended up laughing a lot, especially in the beginning of the movie where Ellen appears and the whole thing in the hotel goes on.By the way I looked up who was Maria and oh my god, Rosa Turich was incredibly beautiful when she was younger! This special 20's movie star look.

Move On Darling (1963) is a Comedy/Romance starring Doris Day as Ellen Wagstaff Arden and James Garner as Nicolas Arden. Nicholas Arden heads to the courthouse with his fiancé to be married, but before he does so he must get the judge to sign a petition pronouncing his old wife, Ellen Wagstaff Arden as dead. She was lost at sea but was eventually rescued and made her way home just in time for the honeymoon. She follows them to the hotel to ensure that they never consummate it.This flick has it all- great acting, a darling cast, hilarious scenes throughout that will have you rolling on the floor laughing and a superb plot. Doris Day is stunning and classy. I would recommend this film to all lovers of romantic comedies.

"Move Over, Darling", a remake of the 1940 screwball comedy "My Favorite Wife", had a long and difficult journey to the screen. It began life as a vehicle for Marilyn Monroe entitled "Something's Got to Give", to be directed by George Cukor. Before that film was completed, however, Monroe was fired for continually turning up late on set (or, on some occasions, not turning up at all). Lee Remick was provisionally cast as Monroe's replacement, but her co-star Dean Martin refused to work with any actress other than Monroe. Monroe was hired again, but died soon afterwards before production could restart. The studio, 20th Century Fox, had sunk too much money into the project to abandon it altogether, so went ahead with a new director (Michael Gordon), new stars (Doris Day and James Garner) and a new title. (The original title probably seemed inappropriately ironic after Monroe's tragic death).The plot is very similar to that of "My Favorite Wife", although the story is updated from the forties to the sixties. (Day's character makes a reference to having seen the earlier film as a child, although makes no reference to the strange coincidence that she and her husband have the same names as the characters in that film. The scriptwriter was probably playing games with the normal movie convention whereby remakes take place in a parallel universe in which any previous versions of the same film were never made.Like "My Favorite Wife", "Move Over, Darling" is loosely based upon Tennyson's "Enoch Arden" (hence the main character's surname). Tennyson's poem was a tragedy, but both films turn the story into a comedy. The film starts with Nick Arden about to get married for the second time. The problem is that he is legally still married to his first wife Ellen. It is presumed that she died in an air crash five years ago, but her body has never been found. The problem seems to have been solved when Nick persuades a Judge to declare Ellen legally dead, leaving him free to marry his new fiancée, Bianca. Ellen, however, is not dead at all, and has spent the last five years marooned on a desert island. Rescued by the Navy, she arrives back in America on the very day of Nick and Bianca's wedding. The film then explores the complications arising from this situation.One disadvantage of this plot line is that Nick ends up married to two different women at the same time, through no fault either on his part or on theirs. Now no film-maker in 1940 could get away with making a film openly condoning bigamy or a ménage-a-trois, and public attitudes in this respect had not shifted very much by 1963, so one of the women had to lose out. And that woman had to be Bianca; whatever the tangled legalities of the situation might be, the court of American public opinion was always going to rule in favour of Ellen who, as the mother of Nick's children, was going to be seen to have a stronger claim. So how do you make an all-ends-happily comedy when one of your main characters is a woman who, through no fault of her own, loses the love of her life? The solution found in "My Favorite Wife" is to concentrate on Ellen as much as possible and relegate Bianca to the sidelines. Here the solution is to hint subtly that Bianca is not a very nice person, a bit of a man-eater who will doubtless get over her disappointment by throwing herself at the next best man to come along.Despite its difficult birth, the movie turned out to be a box-office success, justifying Fox's decision to continue with the project after Monroe's death. It is (along with "The Sound of Music") one of the movies credited with keeping the studio afloat after the financial debacle of "Cleopatra". I would certainly prefer it to "My Favorite Wife", which I have always regarded as more cornball than screwball. The earlier film had its humorous moments, but these mostly concerned supporting characters such as the cantankerous old judge and the creepy hotel manager, obsessed with his establishment's respectability. Here the main characters join in the fun; the rivalry between Day's Ellen and Polly Bergen's Bianca has a lot more edge to it than that between the rather treacly Irene Dunne and the anonymous Gail Patrick. I particularly liked the scene where Ellen, posing as a Swedish masseuse, gives her rival an over-vigorous massage which turns into a catfight.Doris Day's "virginal" reputation was starting to slip a bit by the early sixties; in "Lover Come Back" from two years earlier she had played an unmarried mother. Even in her early forties, however, she still counted as one of America's sweethearts, and a lot of the success of the film owes something to this aspect of her character. She was the sort of actress who could sing a song (as she does in the title song to this movie) containing the line "Make love to me!" and still come across as sweet and wholesome. It would be interesting to speculate how Marilyn would have played the role had "Something's Got to Give" been completed. 7/10

This remake of "My Favorite Wife" follows the original fairly closely for the most part. It wisely changes the ending a little, as the last part was weak in the original. Day and Garner are well-cast in the Irene Dunne and Cary Grant roles, and there is a funny reference to the earlier film, but was this remake really necessary? Ritter is fine as Garner's frazzled mother, but Connors is not as good as Randolph Scott was in the original. This started out as a Marilyn Monroe vehicle, "Something's Gotta Give," but was abandoned after production problems and was left incomplete upon her death, replaced with this cast and crew. Interesting change from sex symbol Monroe to virginal Day!