A charmingly stupid screwball comedy, It’s Love I’m After thrives thanks to its wonderful cast, even as the screenplay is built on a series of idiotic contrivances (the old Idiot Plot, as Roger Ebert called it). The film concerns two stage actors: Basil (Leslie Howard) and Joyce (Bette Davis) with wonderful stage chemistry but antagonism in their off-stage romance, Basil with a history of breaking off their perpetual engagement. A mesmerized girl named Marcia (Olivia de Havilland) worships Basil, and eventually her fiancee Henry (Patric Knowles) comes to Basil with a proposition: come to their place and act like a cad to dissuade Marcia from her fandom. He, of course, deigns to tell Joyce about this, the same day he had once again promised to get married. Hijinks ensue from there, as you might have imagined, especially since Marcia takes Basil’s side in every situation. Howard is impressive in the lead, much more forceful than his famed Ashley Wilkes. Davis gets to be venomous in a fun way, and de Havilland is preposterously adorable as usual. The script is so unlikely that I ended up just seeing them as actors having a good time, and it eventually gained enough story momentum late to end up being fun enough to recommend as a little forgotten cheerio.
[Grade: 7.75/10 (B/B-) / #6 (of 10) of 1937]
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