"But Hattie, You Know You Can't Play Scrabble With Grown-up People!"
Written: Apr 12 '01 (Updated Apr 14 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Mrs. Sloucho claims she would never leave Cary Grant for Robert Mitchum.
Cons: Mr. Sloucho bears not even the slightest resemblance to Cary Grant.
The Bottom Line: The Grass Is Greener is a drawing room farce--not a comedy. It is far too witty for its message (concerning the sanctity of marriage) to become tiresome.
Victor and Hilary Rhyall (Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr) are a loving couple--an English Lord and Lady who live in the sort of poverty that isn't even genteel, since they have to allow tourists to traipse through their manor house at a half-crown a head. Their struggle to make ends meet partly explains Hilary's fascination with Charles Delacro (Robert Mitchum), an American oilman who sweeps her off her feet after claiming to have gotten lost while touring her house.
In order for the plot of this film to work, the viewer has to accept that an oilman who looks and acts like Robert Mitchum can steal the heart of a woman married to an English Lord who looks and acts like Cary Grant. That's a pretty tall order, particularly when we consider that Delacro manages to steal a rather impassioned kiss from Hilary only twenty minutes after making her acquaintance. But this is merely the film's way of telling us that we shouldn't allow ourselves to get hung up on the plot. Don't assume, based on Delacro's seduction of Lady Rhyall, that the film expects us to accept the idea of love at first sight. In reality, the clumsiness of that scene is the film's artful way of inviting us to interrogate such childish notions of love.
Like the stageplay on which it is based (also written by Hugh Williams), The Grass Is Greener takes an incredibly (perhaps even an offensively) intellectual approach toward love. Lord Rhyall does not once lose his temper during the film, not even when he learns that his wife has spent the past four days in London with a man who has bought her a mink coat--something Rhyall might have been able to do if he had scrimped and saved until "next Christmas."
Everything remains calm, even when Rhyall suggests that he and Delacro duel with pistols in one of the hallways of his mansion. But the calmness is productive of extraordinary comedy; this film absolutely sizzles with the kind of witty dialogue that we associate with Oscar Wilde. To illustrate his point about dueling, Lord Rhyall makes up a story about his grandfather:
Rhyall: One night he broke two men playing cards and woke up the next morning to shoot a third.
Delacro: He shot someone?
Rhyall: Killed him in a duel--an affair of the heart.
Delacro: So it was about a woman?
Rhyall: Gentlemen didn't fight over men in those days.
The film is chock-full of such wit. There's an extremely clever telephone call between Lord Rhyall and Delacro involving a split screen. Lady Rhyall and Hattie (Jean Simmons) do a marvellous job of synchronized eavesdropping on both sides of the conversation. The idea has been overdone (and was used by director Stanley Donen himself just two years earlier, in Indiscreet), but the execution is nothing short of breathtaking.
The Grass Is Greener is so incredibly witty, in fact, that I am inclined to give it five stars even though the production is redolent of staginess. And I would give it five stars if Lord Rhyall didn't hammer away so insistently at the importance of preserving marriages. It's not that I disagree with him about marriage; I think what he has to say is actually quite insightful. But the action of the drama makes the point of the film sufficiently clear; we really don't need to have the lesson spelled out for us quite so literally (or so frequently).
Check this one out for the dialogue. And if the staginess starts to grate on your nerves, pretend you're in a theater. Oh, and don't forget to laugh.
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