One wouldn’t assume a guy being a Civil War buff would make him such a chick magnet, but Robert Cummings in 1946’s The Bride Wore Boots is nearly having to fight them off.  They’re always visiting the house he lives in with wife Barbara Stanwyck and their children.  They tend to leave bizarre gifts, such as the stuffed mount of one of the generals from that conflict.

What’s odd is he has an especially strong dislike of horses.  Stanwyck loves horses, and so they live on a vast estate with a stable containing several of them.  It seems to me this is the kind of thing people would discuss in their relationship early on, yet here they are after years of marriage, with him still unable to sit a horse and she exasperated by his ineptitude.  Still, he tries to make amends by buying her a decrepit horse he had been deceived into believing is potential racing material.

Admittedly, she tries to say kind words about this gift.  Patric Knowles, on the other hand, openly mocks Cummings.  I couldn’t figure out why Knowles is always hanging around, doing nothing except waiting for their marriage to finally break so he can pick her up on the rebound.  Diana Lyn is one of Cummings’s Civil War groupies, and it is her presence which will successfully drive a wedge between the spouses.

I don’t particularly care for films where people are always bickering, and this was no exception.  It didn’t help that I didn’t like any of the characters.  Of the leads, the person who comes out best is Stanwyck, though I chafed at her severe disdain for anybody who doesn’t love the horsies.  Cummings behaves like a complete idiot to the point where his ineptitude beggars belief.  If he was really determined not to be in any scenarios where he might be engaged in what appears to be compromising behavior with Lyn, he should taken a more active and direct approach to staying far away from her.  And Knowles is a one-dimensional asshole.

Typical of this kind of fare, those who fare best are the people on the margins.  Algonquin Roundtable alumnus and legendary wit Robert Benchley snags a great part as the jovial uncle who is forever spoiling the children.  Peggy Wood fares well as Stanwyck’s mother, who wryly observes the shenanigans from the sidelines.  And Natalie Wood, as one of the children of Stanwyck and Cummings, is possibly younger here than in anything I have seen her in before, yet she is already quite self-assured.

What I will remember most about The Bride Wore Boots is how desperately everybody in it seems to be in trying to sell the audience on this subpar material.  The actors flail too wildly and too frequently, which only casts into relief how unfunny the script really is.  Dialogue is shouted, as if to compensate for the lack of spark in the lines.  This is a curiously unsatisfying film which is as desperate to sell us a bill of goods as that horse trader doubtlessly was to unload that poor old creature onto Cummings.  But, unlike how that horse will stun the spectators at the big race in the climax, I can’t imagine this picture winning over any audiences in the end.

Dir: Irving Pichel

Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Cummings, Diana Lyn

Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray box set Barbara Stanwyck Collection