I Met My Love Again (1938) User Reviews

Doesn't quite measure up

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 12 August 2013]

There was no way Henry Fonda was going to get top billing in I Met My Love Again, not playing opposite the boss's wife. Fonda was just getting his film career into high gear when he appeared with Joan Bennett who would soon marry producer Walter Wanger. And quite frankly this is what was euphemistically called back in the day, a woman's picture.

Truth be told I can see why Joan gave into temptation and ran off with charming, but dissipated writer Alan Marshal. Fonda quite frankly is something of a dolt back in their college days in courting Bennett. But after ten years when Marshal gets rather stupidly killed in an accident at a party, Bennett packs up their 10 year old daughter Genee Hall and heads back to Vermont to hook up with her old friend who is now a cynical and unhappy biology professor at their old alma mater.

In staid old Vermont Bennett's running off with Marshal was a town scandal and a lot of forces seem to be against them. Spoiled and rich coed Louise Platt and her jealous boyfriend Tim Holt and there's Fonda's mother Dorothy Stickney. And her daughter can't see anyone else in daddy's place.

I Met My Love Again didn't slow down the careers of either Bennett or Fonda, but it seems to have trouble making up its mind which genre it falls in comedy or drama. It never really lives up to the mark in either.

Life and details get in the way

[boblipton · 5/10 · 18 May 2013]

Joshua Logan was promoted from dialogue director to co-director for this clunky soap opera, probably on the basis of his connection with co-star Henry Fonda -- Logan had directed him when they were students at Princeton.

The story, about how Fonda and Joan Bennett had been lovers in college, then had separated for a decade, she to Europe and motherhood, he to academia, has some fine points, including the performances -- the actors are straightforward and believable. However, the details of the production overwhelm this winning simplicity, including distractions from the set design and an over-the-top score by Heinz Roemheld.

There's a fine supporting cast who are permitted to emote strongly; May Witty as Bennett's aunt, Alan Marshall as her wastrel husband, Louise Platt as the student who loves Fonda and Tim Holt as Louise's would-be boyfriend. However, they all seem a distraction from the central story and characters and render this watchable for the stars but little else.

A film that had potential had it been done by a big studio

[vincentlynch-moonoi · 6/10 · 19 May 2013]

This film was made by United Artists at a time (like most times) when that small studio was struggling...and it shows. Production values are low, and there are times that the script is weak. And, the quality of the negative clearly hasn't stood the test of time; the print being shown on TCM is very fuzzy.

Yet, there is something appealing about this film, despite all its problems. Perhaps it's the concept -- a woman tires of waiting for her intellectual fiancée to marry, has a fling of marriage and moves to Europe, her foolish husband dies in a rather bizarre way, and she returns to America and "meets her love, again". The question, of course, is what will happen when she meets that love again. And that is one strength of the film. Although I wouldn't exactly call them plot twists, the film meanders around a bit, so you're never quite sure where it's going. Sometimes the meanders are interesting, and sometimes they seem quite juvenile...as if the screenwriters were immature...they had decent ideas, but lacked the sophistication to make them seem reasonable.

I mentioned that sometimes the plot is weak, although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the dialogue is sometimes weak. A good example is in the college classroom scenes where the students are behaving like middle schoolers and the professor like a poor high school teacher...despite his having become so distinguished. Rather juvenile script writing. There were a number of times while watching this film that I thought how good it could have been if it had only been made by a big studio.

The cast had potential. Henry Fonda is the fiancée/professor, and I would have guessed that this was one of his very earliest films. I was wrong. This was his eleventh film, and the one he made just before "Jezebel" with Bette Davis. For Joan Bennett, this was her 37th film (!). While she doesn't do badly here, it is clear that Bennett was not a first tier actress. Alan Marshall was a second or third tier actor, and again, that shows; it's almost as if he's trying to play Laurence Olivier...poorly. It's always a pleasure to see Dame May Witty in any film.

The most interesting scene is the climax -- a sort of Soloman-esque bit that is rather clever.

Okay to watch once, but I doubt you'll put it on your DVD shelf.

Not a bad idea for a movie, but the last 15 minutes is insane....and not in a good way!

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 2 September 2013]

Have you ever watched a film that you were enjoying only to wonder, abruptly, if the writer went nuts? This is EXACTLY the way I felt with "I Met My Love Again". It's a dandy film through the first 80%--not perfect, but enjoyable. But then, in the finale, I almost wanted to scream because the film became a stupid and incomprehensible mess! So beware--the ending is just awful.

The film begins with Julie (Joan Bennett) and Ives (Henry Fonda) falling in love. However, he's in school and their engagement is quite prolonged. One day, Julie meets a very exciting author and he sweeps her off her feet--marrying her even though they barely know each other. Well, not surprisingly, he turns out to be a horrible husband and soon dies--leaving her without money but with a child (who is a real brat). With some money sent to her by her aunt, Julie returns home for the first time in a decade. Not surprisingly, when she sees Ives, their reunion is rather cold and she decides it's probably for the best to just leave town for good. However, when they see each other again, despite the years and hurt, he declares his love for her and they SHOULD have a happy ending, right? Well, perhaps eventually, but in the meantime all sorts of contrived monkey wrenches are tossed into the picture--and MANY folks try to prevent their marriage. To make it MUCH worse and utterly ridiculous, Julie decides to deal with one of the problems in one of the most insane and stupid manners you can imagine....no, I doubt if you can imagine just how nuts her behaviors are...yet, inexplicably, she's NOT placed in a psychiatric institution! What, exactly, happens in this ending? Well, see it for yourself...but don't say I didn't warn you. Overall, a decent film that becomes stupid very, very quickly.

Bennett and Fonda

[blanche-2 · 6/10 · 7 June 2013]

Henry Fonda and Joan Bennett star in "I Met My Love Again," a 1938 film featuring Dame May Witty, Alan Marshal, Louise Platt, and codirected by Josh Logan, Fonda's buddy from Princeton.

Julie and Ives (Bennett and Fonda) become engaged while in college, but Ives doesn't want to get married until he amounts to something. One day, Julie and a friend go to buy him a birthday gift; there's a tremendous rainstorm, and Julie, her car turned over, stops at the home of a writer (Marshal). He's impetuous and funny, and planning to move to Paris. They marry and do just that.

Ives becomes a local professor; Julie and her husband have a daughter, Michael, but basically she's unhappy. Her husband doesn't do much writing but a lot of partying, and he's constantly getting into fights. One night, he and another man have a pistol duel, and he's killed.

Julie eventually returns to her home town with her daughter and connects with Ives again, but a lot of people are against them, his mother for one. And a student of Ives (Louise Platt) has fallen in love with him and wants to marry him.

I saw a really bad print of this. It's a sweet film and the leads are very attractive; if I'd been Fonda's student, I'd have fallen for him too. He was pretty adorable. They made a good couple.

"I Met My Love Again" is just not much of a film. It's pleasant but not memorable. If you see it, see it for the leads and the always delightful Dame May Witty.

Good intentions, weak results.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 8 October 2015]

With lesser stars than Henry Fonda and Joan Bennett in the leads, I would have ranked this as a 3. This is an attempt to create star crossed lovers over two people who barely cross paths. Half the time, she's dealing with a bad marriage that ends in tragedy but results in a precocious daughter, and he's dealing with amorous students at the college he teaches at. Through the efforts of her delightfully interfering aunt (the always wonderful Dame May Witty), they end up being reunited, but a reconciliation doesn't come without a price.

The overly chatty script features mostly obnoxious characters and some psychological view of the reasons they've remained apart. She marries a troubled writer (Alan Marshal) and he becomes involved with the grasping Louise Platt. Bedridden Aunt Dame May insults various visitors, vowing not to get out of bed until the couple is reunited. Bennett's young daughter speaks like an adult (equally idiotically) and Platt fumes as Bennett makes her return.

Handsome looking but mostly empty, the stars aren't really right for each other. Bennett still hadn't discovered her niche, and Fonda barely cracks a smirk. Still, the setting is gorgeous and there are some great use of special effects to add to the emotional feelings that dull the senses rather than raise best. So this is an artistic misfire that just needed some tweaking on the script and perhaps stronger direction.

Overwrought Soap Opera

[JamesHitchcock · 4/10 · 3 October 2020]

In a small New England town in 1925, two young people named Ives Towner and Julie Weir fall in love and become engaged. They do not, however, get married straight away as Ives wants to wait until he is earning enough money to support Julie. He is the son of a distinguished scientist, now deceased, and wants to achieve similar distinction in the scientific field. Over Christmas a couple of years later, however, Julie gets lost in a blizzard and is forced to take refuge in a small cottage, where she meets a handsome young man named Michael Shaw. (Michael claims to be from New York, but speaks with a British accent and was played by an Australian-born actor).

Michael calls himself a novelist, but has never written anything other than pulp fiction penny dreadfuls. He claims to be writing the Great American Novel, but has not written a single word of this projected magnum opus. Nevertheless, he sweeps Julie off her feet and, abandoning her engagement to Ives, elopes with Michael to Paris.

Fast forward to 1937. Michael is now dead, and Julie returns to her home town. Ives's scientific career appears to have prospered and he has become a professor at a local university, but he has also become hard and cynical, embittered by the loss of Julie. He is still a bachelor, but Brenda, one of his students, has started to take a romantic interest in him. When Ives and Julie meet again, however, their love is rekindled, and they make plants to marry. "I Met My Love Again" is not really a romantic comedy, but it follows the standard rom-com formula, A+B-C=D, where A stands for "boy loves girl", B for "girl loves boy" and C for some obstacle to their love which has to be removed to achieve happy ending D.

In fact, there are three obstacles to the love of Julie and Ives, the first being the presence of Brenda, who turns out to be a hysterical drama queen who refuses to accept defeat lightly. The second is the attitude of Ives's family, who have not forgiven Julie for her elopement. The third is Julie's young daughter who continues to believe that the father she never knew- he died when she was a baby- was a great man, even though everyone else, Julie included, remembers him as a ne'er-do-well who talked a lot and achieved little. The girl, whose official name is Michelle but who prefers to be called Michael after her late father, would not welcome the presence of a stepfather in her life.

Of the three obstacles, the second and third are not so much removed as ignored; the desired happy ending is reached without reference to what had previously seemed like problems. The question of Brenda, however, is dealt with in a bizarre confrontation with Julie; without wanting to give away too much of the ending I can say that the way in which she deals with it seems likely to turn the film from a romantic drama into a tragedy. As I said, the film as a whole does not really qualify as a comedy, but one or two scenes do have something of the comic about them. I am thinking of some of Ives's exchanges with his students and of Michael's meeting with an eccentric modernist artist in Paris. If, however, this scene was intended as satirical humour at the expense of artistic modernism it is humour of a very black kind, out of keeping with the general tone of the film, because Michael's criticisms of the man's art lead to the duel in which Michael is killed.

The studio appear to have had high hopes for the film, as they allocated two big-name stars to it, Henry Fonda and the lovely Joan Bennett, but even when first released in 1938 it was not a box-office success. Today it is not a film which has dated well, coming across as little more than an overwrought soap opera with a curious mixture of seriousness, melodrama and inappropriate humour. 4/10

Weak

[evening1 · 2/10 · 7 February 2021]

It was consistently easy to see where this was going, except for a bizarre segment at the end that doesn't fit in at all.

Julie (Joan Bennett) thinks she's in love with bookish Ives (Henry Fonda), and chases him so assiduously we get why avoids her. Then she impulsively runs off to Paris to marry alcoholic intellectual snob Michael (Alan Marshal), without a word of explanation to Ives.

A decade later, after her husband has been fatally shot at a party -- "such a silly way to die" -- Julie returns to Vermont, with a daughter in whom she seems to have absolutely no interest. At first, Ives shuns her. Then he allows himself to be similarly stalked by an obnoxiously conniving student (you know, the type -- she calls her rich father dahling), only to decide that it's Julie he still wants to marry after all. He makes this transformation without ever bringing up the topic of her egregious betrayal.

Along the way we have to put up with sundry annoying characters from Ives's family, not one of whom has ever heard of a boundary.

Can't say really, why I watched this till the end. Fonda, I guess, for his usually intelligent screen presence. I've also been sick at home, so I was somewhat of a captive audience...

Messy Disappointment

[dougdoepke · 16 August 2021]

No need to recap the tangled plot.

No surprise to me that the clunky soap opera has generated so few reviews despite headliners like Bennett and Fonda. The various entanglements, both romantic and attitudinal, mount up without really developing, creating a crowded field for a comparatively short runtime. Likely, the jumbled storyline results from not one, but three directors, each likely with his own preferences. Certainly, someone liked big close-ups of the lovely Bennett who dolls up the otherwise drab proceedings. Unfortunately, Fonda's role as a stodgy professor doesn't help the lacklustre romantic appeal, and is a long way from his usual compelling charm. Then too, the cheap creek-side sets distanced me right away from their intended romantic setting. Clearly, it's an overall cheap and jumbled production that I expect both stars preferred to forget. Fortunately, both went on to bigger and much better things. No need for me to go on, except to say skip it unless you're a die-hard Bennett fan.