CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)
By:
January 3, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… anti-fascist art! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON
It’s not my favourite Cary Grant movie; that would be North by Northwest (1959, with Eva Marie Saint). And it’s not my favourite Ginger Rogers movie; that would be Swing Time (1936, with Fred Astaire). But it is my favourite Cary-and-Ginger movie, so much better than Howard Hawks’s belaboured screwball retrofit Monkey Business of 1952.
The two stars are a perfect match in this 1942 romantic comedy shrouded as a wartime political thriller, a romp from start to finish. The film is a kind of double agent, veering in register from goofy (Cary’s extended tailor impersonation) to taut (the narrow Norwegian escape). It’s also one long chase scene, with the happenstance comrades Pat O’Toole (Grant) and Katie O’Hara (Rogers) haring across wartime Europe one step ahead of advancing German invaders.
Their meet-cute is elaborate. Katie is a down-on-her-luck burlesque performer trolling for a rich European husband by pretending to be a society lady. Her target is Obergruppenführer Baron Von Luber, a chubby Austrian arms dealer who seems to show up in places like Prague and Warsaw just before bombs begin to fall. Walter Slezak, in his first American film role, gives Von Luber the oleaginous menace he likewise brought to over a hundred film roles, often as pirates or other villains, including a campy turn as The Clock King versus Adam West’s 1960s Batman.
Grant plays a foreign correspondent, and like the stalwart Joel McCrea in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), he’s a straight-up newsguy overtaken by world-historical events, handsomely battling those slimy Nazis. Both films feature scenes of daring radio broadcasts executed under threat, and offer mid-Atlantic denouements meant to urge Americans deeper into the European fray.
O’Toole and O’Hara, meanwhile, are wisecracking avatars of democratic wholesomeness. The film is a paranoia parable, a warning about complacency. It takes its place with other great semi-propagandistic war efforts from the 1940s, including Casablanca (1943), Saboteur (1942), and All Through the Night (1942). These depict Nazism as a clear but ignored danger to American values, sometimes lurking as close as a swanky Manhattan cocktail party, East Side warehouse, or elegant California ranch. They are better political art — funnier, weirder, more subversive — than dream-factory product has any right to be.
For a few of these wonders, we can credit the directors: Hitchcock the oddball Brit, Michael Curtiz a Hungarian refugee. That director Leo McCarey, an LA boy and USC law grad, could make a movie as political and winning as Honeymoon is amazing. The screenwriter, Amherst grad Sheridan Gibney, later found himself McCarthy-blacklisted. But once upon a time in Hollywood, suave antifa films that were also rollicking entertainment were, briefly, the state of the art.
CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON | Lynn Peril on ZAZOUS | Judith Zissman on DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI | Annie Nocenti on MEDIUM COOL | Mike Watt on FASCIST | William Nericcio on LALO ALCARAZ | Josh Glenn on THE LADY VANISHES | Carlo Rotella on INQUIETUD | Heather Quinlan on CASABLANCA | Adam McGovern on HEART OF GLASS (Mad Jenny) | Matthew Battles on WOODY’S GUITAR | Carl Wilson on PALACES OF GOLD | Ramona Lyons on UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED | Lucy Sante on CAMOUFLAGE | Adelina Vaca on TBD | Tom Nealon on THE BARON IN THE TREES | Nikhil Singh on PARIS PEASANT | Mandy Keifetz on THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED | Gordon Dahlquist on THE CONFORMIST | Alex Brook Lynn on WHY WE FIGHT | Gabriela Pedranti on THE ETERNAUT | Heather Kapplow on ANTI-FASCIST PASTA | Marc Weidenbaum on (WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT) PEACE, LOVE, AND UNDERSTANDING | Peggy Nelson on PUPPETS | Sonia Marques on CARNATIONS AGITPROP.
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