User Reviews

Smoking hot cast list, they are sadly under-used. LOVE helen broderick. so fun. she got all the good, wisecracker lines in films. Monty Wooley is in it for five seconds, and that's an uncredited role. And of course, our star, a young thirty year old Fred MacMurrary. The script has weird timing. Lots of talking. Has the feel of a film based on a play. The first five minutes is a window washer gag, that doesn't really have anything to do with the story. The script kind of goes all over the place. Some fun, clever lines. Boy (MacMurray) finally meets girl (Madeleine Carroll), and spends the middle part of the film trying to find her again. Drama, intrigue. Directed by Edward Griffith. Griffith's specialty was making films about fun, exotic, far-away lands, which were probably really filmed in California, sometimes the Bahamas. There's a five minute bit where MacMurray plays piano and "sings" in a foreign language; pretty painful. Then Allen Jones sings for a couple minutes, also pretty painful, serious stuff. Should have left the musical numbers out. Such great actors in here... Script needed jazzing up. Fun to watch just for the actors in it. Story ain't no big thang.

Certainly in the 1930's, there were enough lady doctors, lawyers and businessmen, even film directors, and when the women go beyond being housewives, secretaries and chorus girls, the tides of the battle of the sexes certainly turn. Madeline Carroll is the vice president of a fashion company with her own independent ideas of about what a woman with a career should be like. She gets her fortune told, and tempting fate, takes that turn down the street she normally wouldn't go down, changing her life forever. Encountering macho Fred MacMurray in a ship shop (looking ship shape), she begins to learn a thing or two about what the average man really wants, and it isn't some hard-boiled career woman who works until 2:00 in the morning getting the advertising campaign right. Surrounded by like people hasn't moved her away from this way of thinking, so MacMurray's masculine attitudes are surprisingly refreshing to her.

"A woman carries around two things with her", old pal Helen Broderick says, adding "A first aide kit and a knife". Certainly, the acerbic Broderick knows her sex, being an old maid author who once looked for love but has ended up playing solitaire. When Carroll insults her single life at a dinner party attended by MacMurray and crooner Allan Jones, Broderick is truly hurt, storming out. But as comfortable as an old slipper, you know Broderick will be back, and apologies will be accepted. In the meantime, it is up to Carroll to learn about what she really wants, and this being pre-wartime Hollywood, it's pretty obvious that the macho man will win and the little wifey to be will give up her career and put on that apron before heading to where a woman of this era belongs: into the kitchen.

Starting off like many of the screwball comedies of this time, this moves slowly into a dramatic second half which truly changes the structure of the film and the impact it makes. MacMurray's character lives in Bali and pops up in New York every so often for thrills and a change of pace. He encounters an old admirer (Osa Massen), takes in a little girl (Carolyn Lee) and makes it clear that he's determined to bring Carroll down to earth. But it's not without struggles between both of them, with Jones willing to kow-tow to Carroll's whims to marry but live alone, and Massen making it clear that she's determined to land MacMurray any way it takes.

Massen's character becomes instantly unlikable, almost like her obnoxious, smug vixen from "A Woman's Face", showing a delight in her cruelty. As for Lee, perhaps it is her youth and inexperienced acting, but a lot of her dialog is very difficult to understand. By the time of the film "Virginia" (with almost the same cast) two years later, she was much more skilled and certainly less cloying. Her most touching moment here is when Carroll teaches her how to pray and is greatly touched by what Lee asks God for.

The two stars do their best to make the split personality structure work, but they are only fairly successful in doing so. Allan Jones gets to sing a few songs, showing a singing telegram delivery boy how to do it, and Akim Tamiroff is very funny in his opening and closing sequence as a window washer working in both rain and snow storms peaking in on the luscious Carroll. However, it is Helen Broderick who wins acting honors here, being both funny and human, and reminding the audience that she was dropping quips long before Eve Arden came along to steal her territory. For some reason, the film was re-titled "My Love For Yours" for a re-issue which is listed on T.V. and DVD prints, the original title card presumably lost.

Can't you see them on Bali when the war in the Pacific heats up? Does our hero join the US military and leave, or stay on Bali to help in the defense? Do his wife and little girl flee successfully or get captured? There would be the big reunion scene where he is injured but still the same fellow no matter what the war has done to him externally. I can hardly watch a Pacific island movie in that era without picturing gunships and islands soon to be overrun by soldiers.

I liked the little girl. Her not being able to sing the ditty right was a cute answer to Shirley Temple's extreme acumen. But kids in movies are a matter of taste.

The part about a woman without a husband and child being like someone missing an arm was grim and insulting to her friend who was single and childless. What the priest and the window washer said, though, was quite good. In the Forties the message would be much more in favor of strong independent women, but during the war, movies didn't want to discourage Rosie the Riveter from performing her duties.

On the whole I'd have to say some of it was good, some awful, and all of it predictable. The French woman and the window washer were the only characters I found interesting. What a plot device! Laying the movie out in the first few minutes with a psychic reading. Talk about a spoiler! And the little girl was just sort of thrown into the storyline without any preparation or foundation for her being there except as a way to show that a real woman is emotional and motherly. Of course women and men actually come in many variations. I think the movie tried to engage in a discussion of male and female roles in society and failed miserably because it was the same old story of a bossy repressed woman dominated by a strong unrepressed man who takes her from her career and turns her into a wife and mother, which is her happy ending. It makes me long for His Gal Friday, out the next year in 1940.

Also known as "My Love for Yours", this romantic comedy starts off promisingly, but the plot quickly runs out of ideas. Alas, even though new characters are introduced, nothing much is made of them. Although the movie was obviously produced on a sizable budget, plodding direction by Edward H. Griffith doesn't help. Fred MacMurray obviously thought little of both script and director. He does little more than stand around and say his lines. This habit seems to have irked photographer Ted Tetzlaff who not only gives MacMurray some very unflattering angles, but actually puts him in the dark in scenes that were otherwise overlit. Allan Jones has very little to do and seems to have been added to the cast as a last- minute afterthought. Of the main adult players, only Madeleine Carroll registers well. Young Carolyn Lee, in her first of only four movies, has a large part which she carries off very professionally. Obviously she has a rapport with director Edward H. Griffith which some of the other players, particularly MacMurray, did not enjoy. Incidentally the title is misleading, We see practically zilch of Bali and the honeymoon itself doesn't occur until all the film's 95 minutes have virtually expired. The DVD is (or was) available in "Comedy Classics", one of the "50 Movie Mega-Pack" series.

HONEYMOON IN BALI is a charming romantic comedy from the late 1930s that was produced by Paramount, when the studio was making other delightful farces like EASY LIVING and MIDNIGHT. It has slipped into the public domain, and can sometimes be found online under its reissue title, MY LOVE FOR YOURS. It was one of five films that paired the studio's leading man Fred MacMurray with British actress Madeleine Carroll.

The theme of the film is one which might have resonated with a growing number of women at the time it was made. Miss Carroll plays a single female executive at a big city department store. She begins to ask herself if a husband and a child are necessary for her to be happy. She turns to a window washer (Akim Tamiroff), a gal pal (Helen Broderick) and a fortune teller (Astrid Allywn) for answers. As the cheeky best friend, Helen Broderick has the funniest lines.

The dialogue exposes sexist attitudes, but it seems to reinforce them, too. Allan Jones plays a rival suitor, someone who supports wives that work. But of course, we know Carroll won't pick him. She will pick macho MacMurray who expects his wife to be the stay-at-home type. As a direct contrast to this, there's Osa Massen as a shallow debutante MacMurray knew back in Bali. She's followed him to New York City. But is she serious competition, especially when a child is involved?

Carroll does an excellent job playing an icy businesswoman. She begins to thaw when she meets an orphaned girl named Rosie (Carolyn Lee). There are pleasant diversions along the way- such as a musical scene performed by MacMurray; and an operatic selection by Jones. But the main focus is on the romance developing between the main characters, and how the little girl brings them closer together.

The film's story is bookended by two sequences involving Tamiroff's character, the window washer. You might say he serves as a Greek chorus of sorts. Near the end, Carroll has a heart-to-heart talk with him, and it causes her to make a life-altering decision. She does an honest-to-goodness reappraisal of her situation and realizes she has to go to Bali...for a honeymoon she doesn't want to miss.