If you have any tolerance for soap opera, this is one of the classics, a film that does nothing more than what comes naturally to the genre (unlike, say, the melodramas of Borzage and Minnelli), but does it with such patience and responsibility that the cliches really come alive and become partly valid. It’s the vindication of George Stevens’s deliberate style, before it was infected by artsiness (A Place in the Sun) and mythic bombast (Shane). Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are the couple on the verge of divorce; with Beulah Bondi, Ann Doran, and Edgar Buchanan (1941). 118 min.
