After the Second World War, Kirk Douglas really began to get noticed, and his first comedy was 1948’s My Dear Secretary. Also starring Laraine Day and Keenan Wynn, the film is a pale imitation of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s cinematic powerhouses, but we all have to start somewhere.
Owen Waterbury (Kirk Douglas) is a renowned novelist. Women swoon over him, and Stephanie Gaylord (Laraine Day), or “Steve,” as she’s known is no different. She wants to be a writer more than anything, and after sitting in on Owen’s appearance at a local college, she decides the best way to do that is to work for Owen as his secretary. It means leaving a good current job working for a publisher named Charles Harris (Rudy Valee), but it’s worth it.
Or is it? Problem is, Owen’s been through a lot of secretaries. In fact, he sees the local employment agency as more of a meet market, and his latest secretary is about to go off in a huff. She’s had enough of Owen’s shenanigans.
Steve is quick to fill the vacancy, at least at first, but she finds out very quickly that Owen is a champion procrastinator who’s constantly running through women, blowing all his money, and spending more time at the racetrack than at his typewriter. She goes off in her own huff when Owen pretends to dictate a passage for his new novel but is actually coming on to her, and she only comes back when Owen promises to be good and get his novel finished.
Long story short, Owen and Steve get married, and after a blissful honeymoon, Owen gets down to work again, as does Steve, who’s writing her own novel.
Heh. Owen may have finished his novel, but it’s a dud. Steve ends up taking her book and Owen’s to Charles to get his honest opinion, but in the meantime, Owen’s gone back to his old habit of hiring pretty secretaries. Steve has her own ideas about that, however. Her book is doing well. Owen’s not so much. Some changes will have to be made.
In the midst of all this is Ronnie Hastings (Keenan Wynn), who’s Owen’s best friend and sorta-assistant. He does a lot of cooking and is happy to tag along with Owen wherever he goes, but a lot of times he’s left to his own devices, such as playing the piano and coaxing Mary (Irene Ryan), the housekeeper to sing with him. While crooning a song about noses, they have such a good time that Ronnie barely notices the oven has caught fire.
OK. This film is funny. It’s got a great cast. However, something felt off the whole time, and about halfway through I figured out what it was: Keenan Wynn gets way more screentime than Kirk Douglas and Laraine Day, and consequently all the laughs. What kind of rom-com cuts out the romantic leads? And Rudy Valee, who had considerable comedic chops of his own, is totally wasted as Charles, who has almost as much screentime as Owen and Steve.
Plus, Laraine Day’s face is stiff and starched the whole time in this really unnatural grin, as if she’d rather be anywhere else, and Douglas looks as if he’s got daggers for her. Seriously, the chemistry between Steve and Owen was really weird. It wasn’t combative in a “Let’s up the romantic tension to its highest speed and then crash like freight trains,” kind of thing, but more on the line of, “I’d like to get away from you as soon as humanly possible.”
That’s why the ending of the film was a relief. The movie’s attempt to make a Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy kind of movie was so danged obvious, but it feels as if writer and director Charles Martin had never seen a Hepburn-Tracy movie. The banter, the face-offs, the subtleties, and the looks Hepburn and Tracy gave each other have never really been duplicated, not even by Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Kirk Douglas and Laraine Day sure didn’t get there, although they were both immensely talented in their own right. It all feels pretty cut-rate.
It also didn’t help that there were several parts of the movie where the screen just went dark for four or five seconds. I don’t know if those were spots where commercial breaks had been inserted for TV or if Prime’s version is bad, but it definitely doesn’t help in the immersion department. And the audio quality was all over the place, so anyone who watches this movie on Prime has a lot of factors working against them.
Then again, the film was a misfire anyway. It’s not a good sign when reviews say things like, “{The director} is to be credited for the film’s excellent pace,” or that Laraine Day’s short, bleached hair makes her look “sort of like Harpo Marx, but prettier.”
Independent Film Review didn’t mince words, either: “…{None} of the corny comedy and romantic business stemming from the central plot is half as entertaining as Keenan Wynn.”
Ouch for everyone but Keenan Wynn. Fortunately, great things were predicted for Kirk Douglas, Laraine Day got lots of compliments, and like a lot of B-movies, My Dear Secretary found new exposure on TV, but as Brian Cady wrote for TCM, the movie is “more for the Kirk Douglas completists than the average fan.”
Another post is on the way tomorrow. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you then…
My Dear Secretary is available on DVD from Amazon. It is also free to stream for Prime customers.
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