Once Upon a Honeymoon

The year is 1938, the setting a beleaguered Europe in which Cary Grant plays roving radio reporter to Ginger Rogers' Bronx-born gold-digger (with Viennese baron Slezak for a husband). A nonsense plot and bizarre soundtrack (continuous waltzes) can't disguise the fact that this is really three movies in one (love story, spy drama, anti-Nazi polemic), but the whole thing is saved by its irreverence, mixing the romance (and newsreel footage) with moments of outrageously tasteless kitsch: Rogers' Nazi husband cutting up a cake-map of Czechoslovakia, clocks with swastika hands. Splendid, eccentric tragi-comedy. And the erotic undertow of the Grant-Rogers partnership is just incredible.