Jan 24 movie: Without Reservations. Claudette Colbert plays the "authoress" of a wildly popular novel, apparently a ponderous tome about the ideal man who represents America's future. (hey, I wonder if she was supposed to be Ayn Rand?) On a cross-country train she meets two GIs, John Wayne and some other guy, and falls head over heels for Wayne. Problem is, he thinks her book is hooey, and so she hides her identity. Then they end up in a road movie having lots of wacky adventures.
I'm a huge fan of Colbert but Wayne does nothing for me. The two cancel each other out here, leaving the movie a big dose of "meh." Plus, a Claudette Colbert road movie is almost by definition going to look bad in comparison to It Happened One Night. They should never have tried to make that lightning strike twice. The one thing I really enjoyed in this movie was a cameo by Cary Grant, playing himself and refusing to play the main character in the movie version of Colbert's book. If I'd picked up on the Ayn Rand thing at the time that would have made me enjoy the movie more. She had to be Rand the way she kept droning on about the grand symbolic themes in her book.
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