Coming Soon
ARISE, MY LOVE
1940
Director
Mitchell Leisen
Starring
Claudette Colbert
Ray Milland
Dennis O'Keefe
Runtime
110 minutes
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Anti-fascism wrapped in a screwball comedic romance!
Mitchell Leisen's ARISE, MY LOVE has an amazing set-up: Martin (Ray Milland), a partisan of the Spanish Civil War about to be executed by firing squad, is in the process of spending his final moments cracking wise with a worried priest when he’s notified that his wife has arranged his release and she’s arrived to claim him. Great news, except for the minor technicality that Martin doesn’t have a wife. Nevertheless, he takes the out courtesy of total-stranger Gusto (Claudette Colbert), a journalist so hungry for a great story that she’s risked her neck to save him. Soon enough the enemies figure out that they’ve been duped and the chase is on.
What follows, set in Hollywood's dreamy notion of springtime in Paris as the Nazi boot relentlessly crushes Europe, is romantic comedy at its most brilliant, scripted by the legendary team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder with a nice line in sexual innuendo and cynical irreverence. But as it goes on, the film transforms itself from a rascally cat-and-mouse romance into a courageously anti-fascist screed that feels urgently contemporary.
"From the bottom of Billy Wilder's typewriter heart, from the height of Mitchell Leisen's forget-me-not garden, a clockwork classical Hollywood triumph all about having great phone sex in Paris and fighting the Nazis before it was cool. It's a popular achievement in anti-isolationism—you just want a love story, but you can't get away." - Evelyn Rose
Mitchell Leisen's ARISE, MY LOVE has an amazing set-up: Martin (Ray Milland), a partisan of the Spanish Civil War about to be executed by firing squad, is in the process of spending his final moments cracking wise with a worried priest when he’s notified that his wife has arranged his release and she’s arrived to claim him. Great news, except for the minor technicality that Martin doesn’t have a wife. Nevertheless, he takes the out courtesy of total-stranger Gusto (Claudette Colbert), a journalist so hungry for a great story that she’s risked her neck to save him. Soon enough the enemies figure out that they’ve been duped and the chase is on.
What follows, set in Hollywood's dreamy notion of springtime in Paris as the Nazi boot relentlessly crushes Europe, is romantic comedy at its most brilliant, scripted by the legendary team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder with a nice line in sexual innuendo and cynical irreverence. But as it goes on, the film transforms itself from a rascally cat-and-mouse romance into a courageously anti-fascist screed that feels urgently contemporary.
"From the bottom of Billy Wilder's typewriter heart, from the height of Mitchell Leisen's forget-me-not garden, a clockwork classical Hollywood triumph all about having great phone sex in Paris and fighting the Nazis before it was cool. It's a popular achievement in anti-isolationism—you just want a love story, but you can't get away." - Evelyn Rose