McCarey has always been a favorite director of mine because of his ability to combine romantic passion with the pain and comedy that often goes with it, especially in The Awful Truth (1937) and An Affair to Remember (1957). Once Upon a Honeymoon adds the problematic element of international politics. The film is unusual for its time in even mentioning the plight of Jews under Hitler but when Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant are put briefly in a concentration camp the place seems more inconvenient than anything else, though Rogers had given her passport to a Jewish maid so that the maid could escape with her children. The film is at its best when Rogers and Grant are developing a romantic interest in each other, as Rogers gradually realizes that marrying an Austrian baron is not the best way to escape being a burlesque queen from Brooklyn, and McCarey allows the two actors to improvise spontaneously in Paris and on a boat to America.
It took the German émigré Ernst Lubitsch to make an effective comedy about the Nazis, To Be or Not to Be coming out the same year as Once Upon a Honeymoon. Though I give credit to McCarey for having the Nazis in Once Upon a Honeymoon speak German throughout (rather than an accented English) Lubitsch's film deals with actual Germans and Poles attempting to outwit the Nazis, not the Americans in McCarey's film who rely on the American embassy to free them from the Nazis because, after all, O'Toole and O'Hara are not really Jews.
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