Without Reservations (1946)

Directed by Mervyn LeRoy; produced by Jesse Lasky Jr

Kit Madden (Claudette Colbert), the authoress of an immensely popular and influential best-seller, is headed to Hollywood to collaborate in the adaptation of her novel to the big screen. As she is about to board her train, she learns that Cary Grant, intended for the lead role, cannot participate. Initially upset, she decides that the problem is a blessing in disguise when she meets U.S. marine officer Rusty Thomas (John Wayne), who bears a striking resemblance to her vision (and the dust-jacket image) of her book’s hero. Her plan to persuade him to star in the movie hits one bump after another when, first, she realises Rusty intensely dislikes her book, and second, their journey west is detoured time and again. What really derails her scheme, though, is the fact that she’s falling in love with her hero.

Before I discovered this film, I certainly would not have considered John Wayne and Claudette Colbert as a romantic couple; they seem to have inhabited two different movie-making worlds. Indeed, this may have been the thought behind the casting. After all, someone more urbane – such as Cary Grant – is who one might determine to be perfect for Colbert, who usually plays witty, sophisticated women. The fact is, however, that the two stars work very well together. Wayne handles light comedy easily if not expertly, and Colbert can pretty much succeed in any film-pairing.

The acting and the characters are strong points in Without Reservations. Aside from the leads, Don DeFore, as Wayne’s friend, gives good support: he is the common sense to Wayne’s mild hard-headedness, sees exactly what his pal is going through, and tries to prod things along. Other beneficial parts are given to Charles Arnt as a man bewailing his bad luck in automobiles and, especially, Frank Puglia, as a robust farmer and father to a large motherless brood. These are offset, however, by two particularly annoying characters (Anne Triola, Phil Brown).

The characters are well-written and fit into the movie. Colbert’s Kit is a passionate believer in the philosophy of her book, which seems part romance and part ideological treatise. Wayne, on the other hand, is a straightforward sort, who wants an uncomplicated relationship with a ‘helpless’ woman. Nonetheless, Wayne’s character is, perhaps, the more unusual: what one may view as a simple marine flyer has evidently made his way through four hundred pages of a book he dislikes, and has strong opinions on the subject and the writing, and reasons to back them up.

The story and the script are Without Reservation’s weakest bits, ironically, considering the movie centres on a book. The series of adventures that the trio have making their way to California are episodic, with each part unrelated to the others, with too much contrivance. Though the script allows for plenty of humour, most of it comes from spoken lines, and not from situations; the story could have taken place entirely on one train and been as good or better. As well, there is a missed opportunity, I feel: Kit is clearly in love with her book’s hero - she has ‘lived with him for two years’ – and, at first, sees Rusty as his embodiment. That his personality is so different than his fictional counterpart obviously causes her confusion, but the reasons her affection for him grows nonetheless are never really examined. As well, Rusty’s attraction to Kit was as superficial as hers for him but he falls in love with the woman even so. This involves the characters changing, and that aspect of the film could have been emphasized more.

Something that perhaps can be appreciated only at a distance from 1946 is the fact that the characters in the movie understand that they are at a crossroads of history, as pivotal as the arrival of colonists in North America that Rusty describes. It is difficult for us in the darker and more cynical twenty-first century to understand the light and hope people emerging from the evils of World War Two must have felt.

Not a failure by any means, Without Reservations is a good entry into the genre of ‘road’ movies, the couple falling in love as they travel, similar in some ways to Colbert’s earlier It Happened One Night. It benefits from the odd partnership of its leads. But, let down somewhat by the writing, it could have been more than it is.