In a small New England town in 1925, two young people named Ives Towner and Julie Weir fall in love and become engaged. They do not, however, get married straight away as Ives wants to wait until he is earning enough money to support Julie. He is the son of a distinguished scientist, now deceased, and wants to achieve similar distinction in the scientific field. Over Christmas a couple of years later, however, Julie gets lost in a blizzard and is forced to take refuge in a small cottage, where she meets a handsome young man named Michael Shaw. (Michael claims to be from New York, but speaks with a British accent and was played by an Australian-born actor).
Michael calls himself a novelist, but has never written anything other than pulp fiction penny dreadfuls. He claims to be writing the Great American Novel, but has not written a single word of this projected magnum opus. Nevertheless, he sweeps Julie off her feet and, abandoning her engagement to Ives, elopes with Michael to Paris.
Fast forward to 1937. Michael is now dead, and Julie returns to her home town. Ives's scientific career appears to have prospered and he has become a professor at a local university, but he has also become hard and cynical, embittered by the loss of Julie. He is still a bachelor, but Brenda, one of his students, has started to take a romantic interest in him. When Ives and Julie meet again, however, their love is rekindled, and they make plants to marry. "I Met My Love Again" is not really a romantic comedy, but it follows the standard rom-com formula, A+B-C=D, where A stands for "boy loves girl", B for "girl loves boy" and C for some obstacle to their love which has to be removed to achieve happy ending D.
In fact, there are three obstacles to the love of Julie and Ives, the first being the presence of Brenda, who turns out to be a hysterical drama queen who refuses to accept defeat lightly. The second is the attitude of Ives's family, who have not forgiven Julie for her elopement. The third is Julie's young daughter who continues to believe that the father she never knew- he died when she was a baby- was a great man, even though everyone else, Julie included, remembers him as a ne'er-do-well who talked a lot and achieved little. The girl, whose official name is Michelle but who prefers to be called Michael after her late father, would not welcome the presence of a stepfather in her life.
Of the three obstacles, the second and third are not so much removed as ignored; the desired happy ending is reached without reference to what had previously seemed like problems. The question of Brenda, however, is dealt with in a bizarre confrontation with Julie; without wanting to give away too much of the ending I can say that the way in which she deals with it seems likely to turn the film from a romantic drama into a tragedy. As I said, the film as a whole does not really qualify as a comedy, but one or two scenes do have something of the comic about them. I am thinking of some of Ives's exchanges with his students and of Michael's meeting with an eccentric modernist artist in Paris. If, however, this scene was intended as satirical humour at the expense of artistic modernism it is humour of a very black kind, out of keeping with the general tone of the film, because Michael's criticisms of the man's art lead to the duel in which Michael is killed.
The studio appear to have had high hopes for the film, as they allocated two big-name stars to it, Henry Fonda and the lovely Joan Bennett, but even when first released in 1938 it was not a box-office success. Today it is not a film which has dated well, coming across as little more than an overwrought soap opera with a curious mixture of seriousness, melodrama and inappropriate humour. 4/10
Michael calls himself a novelist, but has never written anything other than pulp fiction penny dreadfuls. He claims to be writing the Great American Novel, but has not written a single word of this projected magnum opus. Nevertheless, he sweeps Julie off her feet and, abandoning her engagement to Ives, elopes with Michael to Paris.
Fast forward to 1937. Michael is now dead, and Julie returns to her home town. Ives's scientific career appears to have prospered and he has become a professor at a local university, but he has also become hard and cynical, embittered by the loss of Julie. He is still a bachelor, but Brenda, one of his students, has started to take a romantic interest in him. When Ives and Julie meet again, however, their love is rekindled, and they make plants to marry. "I Met My Love Again" is not really a romantic comedy, but it follows the standard rom-com formula, A+B-C=D, where A stands for "boy loves girl", B for "girl loves boy" and C for some obstacle to their love which has to be removed to achieve happy ending D.
In fact, there are three obstacles to the love of Julie and Ives, the first being the presence of Brenda, who turns out to be a hysterical drama queen who refuses to accept defeat lightly. The second is the attitude of Ives's family, who have not forgiven Julie for her elopement. The third is Julie's young daughter who continues to believe that the father she never knew- he died when she was a baby- was a great man, even though everyone else, Julie included, remembers him as a ne'er-do-well who talked a lot and achieved little. The girl, whose official name is Michelle but who prefers to be called Michael after her late father, would not welcome the presence of a stepfather in her life.
Of the three obstacles, the second and third are not so much removed as ignored; the desired happy ending is reached without reference to what had previously seemed like problems. The question of Brenda, however, is dealt with in a bizarre confrontation with Julie; without wanting to give away too much of the ending I can say that the way in which she deals with it seems likely to turn the film from a romantic drama into a tragedy. As I said, the film as a whole does not really qualify as a comedy, but one or two scenes do have something of the comic about them. I am thinking of some of Ives's exchanges with his students and of Michael's meeting with an eccentric modernist artist in Paris. If, however, this scene was intended as satirical humour at the expense of artistic modernism it is humour of a very black kind, out of keeping with the general tone of the film, because Michael's criticisms of the man's art lead to the duel in which Michael is killed.
The studio appear to have had high hopes for the film, as they allocated two big-name stars to it, Henry Fonda and the lovely Joan Bennett, but even when first released in 1938 it was not a box-office success. Today it is not a film which has dated well, coming across as little more than an overwrought soap opera with a curious mixture of seriousness, melodrama and inappropriate humour. 4/10