Mitch Leisen's Suddenly It's Spring (1947)

It should not be too difficult to respond to the glorious amalgam of sets, costume, lighting and female beauty in Leisen's work.
--David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (William Morrow, 1976).

Mitch Leisen is mostly remembered now as a director of superb scripts by Preston Sturges (Remember the Night, 1940 and Easy Living, 1937) and Billy Wilder (Hold Back the Dawn, 1941 and Midnight,1939).  One of the reasons both Sturges and Wilder became directors themselves is because they did not like the changes Leisen had made to their scripts and his preference of style over substance.  But I think also one thing that interested Leisen more than it interested Wilder and Sturges was gender roles and gender fluidity.  This subject may have had something to do with the fact that Leisen himself was gay, an open secret in Hollywood.

Leisen's Suddenly It's Spring starts off with a strange written title: "Remember way, way back in 1945?"  Leisen's film deals with Fred MacMurray trying to get Paulette Godard to sign divorce papers in 1945, a divorce they had agreed to in 1941, before she went off as a WAC to Europe and he was assigned to the Pacific.  When Goddard arrives home MacMurray has a new shackjob, played by Arleen Whelan, to whom he is now engaged, and spends the film chasing Goddard all over America trying to get her to sign the papers, before they realize that they still do love each other; at the point they are dividing assets the camera shoots from inside their closet, allowing them to privately discover the layette and briefly discuss what happened to their plans to have a child.

 MacMurray has help in the pursuit of Goddard's signature in the person of a client of his, played by Macdonald Carey.  The atmosphere is of changing gender roles, with MacMurray in civilian clothes and Goddard in uniform, though she is also constantly changing into a black negligee when she expects MacMurray to show up. Carey is not only attracted to Goddard, he also seems to be attracted to Whelan and even to MacMurray himself, as Macdonald and Fred end up at one point in bed together;  though nothing sexual is suggested between them there is no doubt that Leisen took some pleasure in showing two men together in bed when the production code would not even allow married couples to be shown in the same bed!

Another level of Leisen irony is that one of Goddard's job in the army had been to write an advice to the lovelorn column; she was known as Captain Lonely Hearts.  At one point on the train with MacMurray pursuing her to sign the divorce papers she takes time out to counsel a WAC and her husband in which the husband, played with a certain effeteness by Frank Faylen, suggests that his wife had been fooling around in Europe and MacMurray and Goddard are offended so much by this that it seems to have struck home, though MacMurray claims his own unfaithfulness was okay because they had agreed to a divorce before they were both shipped off (it is unclear how long MacMurray has been home from the war, though he had certainly used his time well).  Goddard insists on continuing to be called by the gender-neutral term "counselor" -- they were law partners as well as life partners -- and objects when MacMurray calls her "darling" when she gives him flamboyant pajamas she bought for him in Paris, which he ends up carrying with him as he chases Goddard.

Suddenly It's Spring, a title apparently intended to be ironic, reminds one of certain other films, including Howard Hawks's I Was a Male War Bride (1949) and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), but whether one finds it as funny as these films is subjective and somewhat irrelevant, as Suddenly It's Spring is ultimately about love triumphing over circumstances and the shifting roles of the sexes.