I Love You Again (Blu-ray Review)
Director
W.S. Van DykeRelease Date(s)
1940 (November 25, 2025)Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B
Review
Preposterous but diverting, I Love You Again (1940) is an MGM screwball comedy directed by W.S. Van Dyke and starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, the ninth of 14 pairings of the not-quite-a-team stars of The Thin Man movies which, up to this point anyway, were all directed by Van Dyke as well.
Here Powell plays Larry Wilson, a respected if notoriously cheap businessman from Habersville, a Pennsylvania town, on a cruise ship taking a rare vacation. On deck he has an encounter with Ryan (Frank McHugh), a drunk passenger who falls overboard, and Wilson is hit on the head with an oar trying to rescue him.
When Wilson comes to, he returns to what had been his original identity, that of suave con man George Carey; he has no memory of becoming Wilson or any of the intervening years since he was first conked on the head, while trying to place a bet in 1931, some nine years before. After going through Wilson’s belongings, Carey and Ryan determine that Wilson is seemingly quite rich, and so working with Ryan, a minor league conman himself, Carey decides to continue presenting himself in his post-1931 identity, as Larry Wilson, rather than return to his former one as George Carey.
As Wilson, though, Carey has to wing it since he now as no memory of his current personal or professional life, and no memory of anyone is Habersville, including estranged wife Kay (Loy), who meets Wilson at the dock. He convinces a game Ryan to masquerade as Wilson’s physician during his “recovery.” They soon learn that Wilson’s money is tied up in trusts so instead hatch a city-wide swindle by having Carey’s old associate, Duke Sheldon (Edmund Lowe), plant oil in a river that’s on a lot Wilson owns.
Meantime, Kay wants nothing to do with her estranged husband, but as he’s undergone an extreme personality makeover, inexplicably acting far more suave, romantic, and financially generous, she reconsiders her impending second marriage to Herbert (Donald Douglas).
Although MGM was famously inept and even highly destructive managing the careers of established film comedians that had the misfortune to work for them (Buster Keaton, the Marx Bros., Laurel and Hardy, etc., as well as their takeover of Hal Roach’s Our Gang series), they had better luck in the screwball genre in films like Libeled Lady and Wife vs. Secretary. I Love You Again was based on a same-named novel by Octavus Roy Cohen, adapted by a gaggle of writers that included Leon Gordon and Maurine Watkins (story) and Charles Lederer, George Oppenheimer, and Harry Kurnitz (screenplay). These were all talented writers each with classic comedy credits under their belt, but the material here is still second-rate compared with their own best work, and class-wise, a notch or two below the better comedy writing found at rival Paramount Pictures, which had scribes like Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder under contract. In I Love You Again, for instance, the 99-minute film is padded with a subplot in which Carey-as-Wilson must lead of group of Boy Scout types through a series of tests for their merit badges. (Their numbers include Carl “Alfafa” Switzer and Robert “Bobby” Blake.) It’s the kind of wholesome, lowbrow, middle-American slapstick MGM head Louis B. Mayer loved and that fits right in with Disney’s later live-action comedies but material 1940 Paramount writers probably wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Still, it’s all reasonably amusing.
What really sells the picture, though, is William Powell, rarely less than delightful in anything. Powell, who’d mostly played villains in silent pictures, benefited greatly from the transition to talkies, his clipped, deep, and mellifluous voice was perfect for the new, if primitive, sound technology, and his first starring role, as Philo Vance in The Canary Murder Case (1929), was a big hit. He was a great Nick Charles in the Thin Man movies, he and Loy exhibiting seemingly effortless charm and wit throughout that series, though like MGM’s Tarzan, with the enforcement of the Production, the Thin Man series was sickeningly homogenized and quickly robbed of its edge. Powell’s charmed never slackened, however; he was terrific in his final films, How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Mister Roberts (1955; he was great, the movie wasn’t) before retiring to Palm Springs, where he died in 1984 at 91.
In I Love You Again, Powell creates two distinctively different characters, even though they are, essentially, the same man. He milks every conceivable laugh out of every moment – when the material is funny, Powell is hilarious, but even when the script does him a disservice, such as in the overlong outing with the boys, he still manages to wring out a couple of decent laughs. Myrna Loy, of course, likewise shines in all her scenes with Powell, amusingly bewildered, charmed, and annoyed by Wilson’s strange turnaround. Wall-eyed and high-key, Frank McHugh, presumably on loanout from Warner Bros. (where he made most of his pictures), is well-paired with Powell.
Presented in its original black-and-white, 1.37:1 standard frame, Warner Archive’s Blu-ray of I Love You Again predictably looks great, the film showing no signs of damage or wear, and the video transfer squeezing out as much resolution as possible, combined with good blacks and contrast. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also fine, and supported by optional English subtitles. The disc itself is Region-Free.
Extra features consist of a Lux Radio Theater adaptation with Myrna Loy and Cary Grant from June 30, 1941, one of many such radio adaptations through the years (usually with Powell and someone other than Loy); a trailer; and two short subjects: a Fitzpatrick TravelTalks entitled Cavalcade of San Francisco, profiling the International Exposition there, and the MGM cartoon The Milky Way, about three kittens in a helium balloon.
Not in the top tier of screwball comedies but enjoyable for William Powell particularly, I Love You Again is recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV