an entertaining experiment

Film Hitch’s one and only romantic comedy, Mr & Mrs Smith is a bit of a misfire though it’s still an entertaining experiment. It’s a comedy of remarriage in which the couple discover that their original certificate was invalid and Mr Smith has to prove to his wife why they should continue to be together. The kind of story Billy Wilder or George Cukor would have treated with a light touch, under Hitchcock the material becomes rather leaden so that though the jokes are in there, Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery are sexy performances (Lombard in her next to last performance before her untimely death) and the viewer knows what’s supposed to be funny, you find yourself watching stony faced not entirely sure why it’s not working.

In their book on the master, Rhomer and Chabrol suggest that it’s because unlike other romantic comedies which are shot in an objective style, Hitch decided to shoot everything subjectively, we’re forced to identify with the characters which undercuts the laughter: “Generally speaking American comedy gets it effects from the assumption of objective observation: it is a report on madness. Here, we are accomplices of the characters. The laughter, when if does arise, abruptly shrivels up: the “gag” is not funny to the person at whose expense it is carried out.” In other words, because we’re identifying with both characters at the same time, we’re too sympathetic to the concerns of the both of them to laugh when there’s a gag at the expense of either of them.

I’d argue that it’s inherent in all romantic comedies that we have to identify with both parties, it’s just that in most cases it’s turned on and off depending on the needs of the story and more often than not we’re asked to identify with one character more than the other. Up until this point, all of Hitch’s romances have been from the male perspective. In Mr & Mrs Smith, Hitch attempts to balance our sympathies across the couple and because we can see why she thinks he’s a slop and why he thinks she’s being unreasonable we don’t really know where to look. You can’t blame the director for trying something new and it is still more entertaining watching his failure, clearly the work of someone who loves the medium, than sitting through yet another cynical exercise in high concept unhilarity directed by Andy Tennant and starring Sarah Jessica Parker.

Hitch doesn't have much to say about the film when talking to Truffaut. He says he was 'tricked' into it because he wanted to work with Lombard and just followed the script as it appeared on the page clearly unhappy himself with the results. Years before, annoyed with the attitude of some people in the profession, the director had described actors as being little more than cattle. This was Carole's chance at revenge for that. When he appeared on the stage the first day, Hitch found that she's had some corrals erected and inside three cows, each with name tags around their necks, one for her, one for Robert and one for Hitchcock!