Double Wedding

Between 1934 and 1947, William Powell and Myrna Loy made 14 movies together, all but three of them more or less screwball comedies. Six of those were in the Thin Man series, which seems to have had very little relationship to the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name. This one is their seventh pairing, which doesn’t quite put them in a par with Laurel and Hardy, but might be a record for male-female duos. They were quite a team, with Loy’s cool, calm, patrician good looks playing well off the more flamboyant, wise-cracking Powell. This one takes good advantage of that, with Powell as a Bohemian artist living in a trailer and Loy the super-uptight, controlling elder sister of a poor girl whose life she has arranged in every detail. On the well-known principle that opposites attract (in Hollywood, anyway), they are destined to fall in love through a series of comic episodes that ends with a marriage ceremony inside a trailer that is almost as stuffed—though not quite as insanely—as the famous stateroom on the ship in A Night at the Opera. It’s not one of the greatest, but it’s fun.