`Mrs. Winterbourne” is a shiny hybrid of a movie, a modern romantic comedy reworked from one of the ’40s Cornell Woolrich thrillers, “I Married a Dead Man.” At first, this mix of Cinderella story and film noir seems strange. (What’s next? A musical comedy version of “Double Indemnity?”) But sometimes bizarre updates work well, and I liked this show right from its melodramatic start to its sunny goofball finish.
“Mrs. Winterbourne” is enjoyable in the ways that many of the second-tier Hollywood studio classics were. It’s a movie we can’t take very seriously, but one which still manages to display enough wit, glamor, suspense and surprise to keep us amused.
And the movie has a classic ingredient of its own: Shirley MacLaine, still one of the great radiant movie comedians, and a delight in her role here as warm-hearted, savvy Massachusetts socialite Grace Winterbourne.
MacLaine spreads her grand dame glow even though Grace isn’t the star role. Instead, the romantic leads are Ricki Lake as the false Mrs. Winterbourne — a destitute unwed mother thrust by accident into Grace’s blue-blood New England household — and Brendan Fraser as Grace’s twin sons, Hugh and Bill Winterbourne. Lake and Fraser are an unusually winning, bright movie couple (or threesome if you count both of Fraser’s parts). But MacLaine’s presence is what gives this movie the right tone and sparkle, the comic lilt.
The plot, which comes from a 1948 novel already filmed twice as a straight thriller, is a prototypical Cornell Woolrich nightmare, calculated to give readers the night sweats. And even in this lightened-up version, there’s still a dark thread. Connie Doyle (Lake), a gullible young woman, arrives in Manhattan, is seduced by fast-talking grifter Steve DeCunzo (a fine, oily job by Loren Dean), then dumped on the street when she becomes pregnant.
Abandoned and homeless, Connie tries to catch a subway car at Grand Central Station and winds up on a Boston-bound passenger train. There, she’s rescued from the conductor by the dashing Hugh, and then whisked off to the compartment he shares with his buoyant new bride, Patricia (Susan Haskell). It’s while Patricia, improbably, has loaned Connie both a gown and her wedding ring that the train crashes, bringing on the movie’s fish-out-of-water gimmick.
The charming couple are killed. Connie, unconscious, is identified as Patricia. And, since nobody in the family has seen Hugh’s bride, whom he wooed and wed overseas, they all accept Connie as the young Mrs. Winterbourne and her baby as the new young Hugh.
Confused and scared, Connie goes along with the mistake — just like Sandra Bullock in “While You Were Sleeping.” (“Winterbourne” is no “Sleeping” copycat, though; Woolrich’s book came first.) The other Winterbourne twin, straight-arrow businessman Bill (Fraser again), eyes his “sister-in-law” suspiciously. And though Connie gets moral support from fairy godmother Grace, it seems just a matter of time before sleazy Steve and her past pop up again.
Would most of the old film noirs of the ’40s play better as comedies today? Woolrich, scariest of the ’30s-’40s pulp suspense writers — and the original author of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” Robert Siodmak’s “Phantom Lady” and Truffaut’s “The Bride Wore Black” — wrote “I Married a Dead Man” under his most famous pen name, William Irish. And there’s not a laugh in it, just as there’s not much fun in either of the previous movie adaptations: the 1950 “No Man of Her Own” with Barbara Stanwyck in the fake-wife role, or the 1982 French film “I Married a Shadow” with Nathalie Baye.
Still, despite the book’s tone of romantic despair and its bleak conclusion, the plot depends on so much contrivance and coincidence that it probably works better in its new guise. The screenwriters, Phoef Sutton and Lisa-Maria Radano, have done a very good job of rethinking and reconstructing the story, spinning the old characters in new comic directions, even creating a new part, the gay tango-dancing chauffeur, Paco, played with tart relish by Miguel Sandoval.
Richard Benjamin, whose last movie was the terrible suburban sex farce “Milk Money” (a glossy mix of smut and schmaltz), seems to have recovered the right instincts here.
Star Ricki Lake, once the Jolly Molly in John Waters’ comedies, is good, though she lacks real vulnerability, the quality this kind of story usually needs most. Her Connie is tough, mouthy, a survivor — and it’s hard to see why she is so argumentative at the Winterbournes’ table, why she doesn’t worry more about giving herself away. But Lake is such a likable actress and Fraser has such presence and comic finesse that Connie’s rough edges and ballsy attitude begin to fit right in.
As Grace, MacLaine works the same kind of movie magic she usually does. Since “Terms of Endearment,” she has begun to get elder stateswoman or eccentric parts; in the upcoming “West End Waltz,” she’s playing the role Katharine Hepburn originated on Broadway. But there’s still a rare sauciness and elan in her performances that makes them ravishing to watch.
Overall, I suppose, “Mrs. Winterbourne” doesn’t amount to much. But it’s such a professional job, done with such glow and verve — and the people making it seem to be having such an infectiously good time — that it’s hard to resist. Good comedies are easy to love anyway. So is the entire Winterbourne family.
”MRS. WINTERBOURNE”
(star) (star) (star)
Directed by Richard Benjamin; written by Phoef Sutton and Lisa-Maria Radano, based on the novel “I Married a Dead Man” by Cornell Woolrich; photographed by Alex Nepomniaschy; edited by Jacqueline Cambas, William Fletcher; production designed by Evelyn Sakash; music by Patrick Doyle; produced by Dale Pollock, Ross Canter, Oren Koules. A TriStar Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:44. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Grace Winterbourne………………Shirley MacLaine
Connie Doyle…………………………Ricki Lake
Bill/Hugh Winterbourne…………….Brendan Fraser
Paco……………………………Miguel Sandoval
Steve DeCunzo………………………..Loren Dean
Hospital Nurse……………………Paula Prentiss
