The Ex-Mrs. Bradford is a whodunit detective-comedy starring William Powell and Jean Arthur in what I believe is the only work they did together. Trying to build on Powell’s success two years earlier in The Thin Man, RKO tweaked the Nick and Nora setup by making Powell’s rich and natty Dr. Bradford a reluctant detective, drawn into murder mysteries by his wife (Arthur), a daffy, glamorous mystery writer who thinks dangerous detective work is great fun. Tweak #2: they are divorced, because the Doc couldn’t take the stress any more. But she reappears on the scene (she’s been sojourning in China) to maneuver him back into marriage. Because — surprise! — they still love each other. The two become involved in a complicated plot having to do with horse racing. There are lots of suspects, and everything is sorted out at the very end with all the suspects in attendance as in a game of Clue.
I’m not a fan of mystery-comedies. The crime plots usually interfere with the comedy, and in The Ex-Mrs. Bradford this happens in a big way. Even for a straight-up crime film the plot would be too contrived and twisty. The script for it is dull, there’s an inordinate amount of talk, and the jokes aren’t very funny. I adore both William Powell and Jean Arthur, but they’re wasted in this film. The direction by Stephen Roberts is pedestrian. The visual design is also dull. I couldn’t find a single sequence to single out for a clip. Powell is basically phoning it in — maybe not surprisingly, since in the same year he made some demanding films, The Great Ziegfeld, Libeled Lady, and My Man Godfrey. Saving his energy, I presume. Arthur plays Mrs. Bradford like a glam Gracie Allen, but without the dada. She looks marvelous in expensive couture, almost always in soft focus with top lighting like Dietrich, but that’s not what I look for from a Jean Arthur performance. There are few comedies from the era that I don’t find at least mildly interesting. This is one of them. It should be easy on the eye, but for a film that has respectable reputation the available prints are pretty bad. And they thought making William Powell look like this is funny:
But there’s eye-candy.
