Owen Waterbury, a successful novelist, hires an aspiring young writer named Steve Gaylord as his secretary. This being a romantic comedy, the two end up falling in love.
Yes, I know what you're thinking. And, of course, you're wrong. This was 1948, for God's sake. Homosexuality was still, in Hollywood as in most other parts of the Western world, the love that dared not speak its name. There is no way that the Breen Office would have given their seal of approval to a rom-com about a gay love affair. Steve is a girl, and a very pretty one too. (It's short for Stephanie).
Kirk Douglas is not an actor I normally associate with comedy. Virtually all of his best films- "Young Man with a Horn", "Champion", "The Weak and the Wicked", "Lust for Life", "Gunfight at the OK Corral", "Paths of Glory", "Spartacus", "Lonely are the Brave", and so on- are serious dramas, as are most of his lesser ones. "My Dear Secretary" is a rare example of a Douglas comedy. And, for its first half, it's a pretty good one. The main joke is the difference between Owen Waterbury the great writer, whom Stephanie admires so deeply, and Owen Waterbury the less-than-great man, who she soon discovers has feet of clay. He has a massive ego and is something of a playboy and womaniser. He is unable to manage his finances and is constantly in debt, despite the large amounts he earns from writing, largely because he wastes so much on gambling. He finds it difficult to work, not so much because he is suffering from writer's block but because he would rather spend every day enjoying himself, either on the beach of (given his gambling problem) in a casino or at the races. Stephanie soon discovers that she is merely the latest in a long line of secretaries; all her predecessors have left Owen when they could not tolerate him any longer.
Stephanie, of course, does not leave Owen. Instead, she does something far more inexplicable. She marries him, despite his many all-too-obvious flaws. This plot development might have been an acceptable denouement had it come at the end of the film after a reformed Owen had changed his ways. Instead, it comes about halfway through, at a time when Owen is still far from reformed, and he proves no more satisfactory as a husband than he did as an employer. He slips back into his old ways, hiring more attractive young women as his secretaries. An even greater threat to their marriage, however, is Owen's professional jealousy when Stephanie not only has a novel published but also starts to enjoy greater success as a writer than he does.
It is round about this half-way mark that the film starts to run out of steam. It is a lot more interesting with Owen and Stephanie as boss and secretary than as husband and wife. In the second half we are supposed to accept her as simultaneously impossibly naïve (for having married a selfish egomaniac like Owen in the first place) and as impossibly saintly (for continuing to tolerate his behaviour). Kirk Douglas, on this evidence, was probably wise not to concentrate on comedy in his future career, but Laraine Day, an actress I was not previously familiar with, does enough to suggest that she had a gift for comedy and that with a better script she could have given a better performance. The script itself seems to have been written according to all the standard Hollywood rules about happy endings; it might have been better if the scriptwriters had had more freedom to disregard those rules. 5/10
Yes, I know what you're thinking. And, of course, you're wrong. This was 1948, for God's sake. Homosexuality was still, in Hollywood as in most other parts of the Western world, the love that dared not speak its name. There is no way that the Breen Office would have given their seal of approval to a rom-com about a gay love affair. Steve is a girl, and a very pretty one too. (It's short for Stephanie).
Kirk Douglas is not an actor I normally associate with comedy. Virtually all of his best films- "Young Man with a Horn", "Champion", "The Weak and the Wicked", "Lust for Life", "Gunfight at the OK Corral", "Paths of Glory", "Spartacus", "Lonely are the Brave", and so on- are serious dramas, as are most of his lesser ones. "My Dear Secretary" is a rare example of a Douglas comedy. And, for its first half, it's a pretty good one. The main joke is the difference between Owen Waterbury the great writer, whom Stephanie admires so deeply, and Owen Waterbury the less-than-great man, who she soon discovers has feet of clay. He has a massive ego and is something of a playboy and womaniser. He is unable to manage his finances and is constantly in debt, despite the large amounts he earns from writing, largely because he wastes so much on gambling. He finds it difficult to work, not so much because he is suffering from writer's block but because he would rather spend every day enjoying himself, either on the beach of (given his gambling problem) in a casino or at the races. Stephanie soon discovers that she is merely the latest in a long line of secretaries; all her predecessors have left Owen when they could not tolerate him any longer.
Stephanie, of course, does not leave Owen. Instead, she does something far more inexplicable. She marries him, despite his many all-too-obvious flaws. This plot development might have been an acceptable denouement had it come at the end of the film after a reformed Owen had changed his ways. Instead, it comes about halfway through, at a time when Owen is still far from reformed, and he proves no more satisfactory as a husband than he did as an employer. He slips back into his old ways, hiring more attractive young women as his secretaries. An even greater threat to their marriage, however, is Owen's professional jealousy when Stephanie not only has a novel published but also starts to enjoy greater success as a writer than he does.
It is round about this half-way mark that the film starts to run out of steam. It is a lot more interesting with Owen and Stephanie as boss and secretary than as husband and wife. In the second half we are supposed to accept her as simultaneously impossibly naïve (for having married a selfish egomaniac like Owen in the first place) and as impossibly saintly (for continuing to tolerate his behaviour). Kirk Douglas, on this evidence, was probably wise not to concentrate on comedy in his future career, but Laraine Day, an actress I was not previously familiar with, does enough to suggest that she had a gift for comedy and that with a better script she could have given a better performance. The script itself seems to have been written according to all the standard Hollywood rules about happy endings; it might have been better if the scriptwriters had had more freedom to disregard those rules. 5/10