First Thoughts on "In Name Only"

The first thing that makes you sit upright and take notice in John Cromwell’s In Name Only—the reason we’re there, really—is Carole Lombard and Cary Grant’s chemistry. She’s fishing, and he has a chuckle and tells her, “You won’t catch anything that way,” and she doesn’t skip a beat before sneering back, “Well, I might!” She says it so convincingly that you believe her, even after he tells her there have been no fish in that pond for twenty years. She seems like the kind of gal who’ll find a way.

Their chemistry is so potent (The way she looks at him! Jesus!) that it’s a little shocking to discover that this was, in fact, originally conceived as a vehicle for Grant and Katharine Hepburn. It would have been their fourth pairing, after Sylvia Scarlett in 1935 and both Holiday and Bringing Up Baby in 1938, but the financial failures of the latter duo put the kibosh on their pairing, at least for the time being. (Luckily, Hepburn’s savvy cultivation of The Philadelphia Story made that hiatus a short-lived one.)