Dream Wife (Sidney Sheldon, 1953)

Betta St. John, Cary Grant, and Deborah Kerr in Dream Wife

Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Betta St. John, Walter Pidgeon, Eduard Franz, Buddy Baer. Screenplay: Sidney Sheldon, Herbert Baker, Alfred Lewis Lewitt. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: George White. Music: Conrad Salinger.

A romantic comedy so inane and inept that it seems to have driven Cary Grant into retirement for a couple of years, until Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to return in To Catch a Thief (1955). It's certainly a waste of the considerable talents of Grant and Deborah Kerr. Grant plays a businessman who gets tired of his fiancée's (Kerr) devotion to her career with the State Department and calls off the engagement when he falls for a Middle Eastern princess (Betta St. John) who has been raised to serve men. Because the princess comes from an oil-rich country, the State Department enlists Kerr's character in handling the negotiations leading to the princess's marriage to the businessman. The result is a queasy 1950s take on feminism and international relations in which no one behaves like the rational human beings they're supposed to be.