Lost Honeymoon (1947)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Absolutely Fantastic

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Imagine to return home after the war with little memory of your last days and all of a sudden find that you had a wife and child that you didn't know you had. That is the theme of this sweet, if preposterous comedy, where the wife dies and the child's nurse arrives with the kid and in order to make sure the child whom she has grown to love gets a home pretends to be the dead wife. Sound unbelievable beyond belief? My first thoughts exactly, and while the screenplay may slight on reality, it doesn't slight on entertainment. Franchot Tone is a bit long in the tooth to be believable as a World War II hero (after all, he was acting in glossy MGM soaps of the early '30's) but there you have it, and he runs with it in spite of that. He's engaged to the bitchy Frances Rafferty, and a friendly rival (Tom Conway) goes after the fake wife (Ann Richards) in attempts to create more of a romantic quadrangle which you know instantly what the outcome will be. Some great comic supporting players (Clarence Kolb and Una O'Connor) round out the cast, and Winston Severn is adorable as the young son. There's all sorts of comical confusion as Richards arrives at the hotel just as Tone is celebrating his upcoming wedding to the shrill Rafferty, and all sorts of chaos ensues as the press moves in for the kill. This is the type of film where you must suspend all disbelief and just accept it for what it is, post-war comic entertainment of a softer screwball nature. Considering that the post-war years of Hollywood had little to offer in the way of comedy (both on screen and behind the scenes), this is a nice little distraction in the historical sense. Joseph Fields, a very talented writer of some of the best comedies of the 1940's and 50's, came up with this sweet concoction, and if it ain't no "My Sister Eileen", its certainly better than a lot of the comic misfires Hollywood threw at audiences of the time.

In Great Britain, an American man fathers some children during World War II service. He seems to desert them, but may actually have amnesia. The mother goes to America where she finds the man does not remember having amnesia. He is going to marry another woman, which would give him two wives. However, the man begins to like the wife and children he doesn't remember. He must choose between the two women, but also please the new one's father who happens to be his boss. This movie originally seemed average, but a second viewing has made me forget some of the finer points.*** Lost Honeymoon (3/47) Leigh Jason ~ Franchot Tone, Ann Richards, Tom Conway, Frances Rafferty

Lost Honeymoon which was produced by the short lived Eagle-Lion studio is a somewhat silly comedy about a man who married while he was having a bout of amnesia. He went back to America where he is now a successful architect and set to marry the boss's daughter.But the wife he married in wartime Great Britain has died and her best friend has taken the two small mementos of the short lived marriage. And the friend has forged the passport in the name of the deceased wife. That can and does raise the eyebrows of immigration officials.Franchot Tone is the lucky man about to find out he's a proud father of twins and Ann Richards plays the woman pretending to be his wife. This sad to say is just plain bizarre. Why not just get a passport and take them over yourself? The premise of this comedy is just plain silly.Frances Rafferty is the boss's daughter and Clarence Kolb her choleric father. Tom Conway chips in with a rather droll performance as Tone's doctor and best friend who takes an interest in Richards himself.It strikes me but this whole plot premise was done in a most serious vein and much better in Random Harvest.Though Franchot Tone does not ever wear a tuxedo, he almost does but not quite, he does spend a great deal of the last 10 minutes of the film being chased by cops driving an automobile in his pajamas.A really fine group of players in roles type cast for them can't really raise Lost Honeymoon above the mediocre.

With a far-fetched and often silly story, "Lost Honeymoon" is only mildly entertaining, and that mainly because of some decent performances by a mostly good cast. The romantic comedy story itself doesn't work very well.Franchot Tone stars as a successful American architect who one day is confronted by an Englishwoman with two children, who claims to have married him when he served in England during World War II. The architect doesn't remember anything about it. Both the architect and the woman have secrets of their own, leading to an initially complicated, then rather silly, situation. While at times mildly entertaining, the story gets completely predictable very quickly, and is never very believable.The only thing that keeps the movie from being a total loss is that the cast does a mostly acceptable job with some ridiculous characters. They do make you care a little bit about the characters, even though they are not very credible. Tone, in particular, does as well as anyone could with his situation. But this movie would only be of any real interest to those who enjoy all romantic comedies regardless of quality.